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December 24, 2021
Dear Friends:
We know that you are a supporter of the Institute for Global Education and its work for peace and justice. We just celebrated IGE’s 40th anniversary and we’d like to tell you some things we have been doing this past year.
IGE partnered with St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in downtown Grand Rapids for Essentials for Smiles  ! With this program, each month our volunteers hand out about 100 bags of personal care items to those in our homeless community.
The new Library Committee, Jeanette Hayes and Charles Brown, has been developing a special selection of some 75 books, organized by subject. The library should be ready for use early in the new year.
With our new, large, smart TV and our Zoom equipment, we have been able to communicate with more of our members. We use the TV to present films such as “Salt of the Earth,” a movie about feminism, union struggle, and minority workers, that stars one of our former members. We also showed and discussed the film “Crip Camp” about disability rights. IGE Talks, our cable TV show, holds discussions regularly, including one for Earth Day.
This summer, we developed a small herb and vegetable garden in the back yard to share with our neighbors. We participated in rallies for Palestinian rights. We held our annual picnic at Riverside Park for Hiroshima/Nagasaki Day featuring Professor Naoki Kanaboshi from Grand Valley State University. We celebrated United Nations International Day of Peace with an inspiring interfaith service at the Catholic Information Center. Our Secretary Ajla Alisic created a Peace Education powerpoint for use in the public schools.
We held our annual meeting in November to elect the current IGE board. This year’s theme was “Peace through Equity,” and Barb Howard spoke about the housing crisis. We are proud that our new board is multi-generational.
Check out our media! Our tech volunteers, Dan Hesse and Chuck Neller, refurbished our website www.igegr.org; our literary volunteers have been writing and posting articles there and on our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ InstituteforGlobalEducation
In the upcoming year, we will be hosting a online introduction to socialism. We will continue our Essentials for Smiles and vegetable garden programs, and collaborate with the newly-formed statewide Michigan Peace Alliance.
Other like-minded organizations are welcomed to use our office space to hold meetings and host events.
Please consider donating volunteer time, resources, and/or money. IGE is an official
501(c)(3) nonprofit organization; we rely heavily on monetary donations for our everyday operations. Your help is greatly appreciated.
Even your grocery receipts from Spartan Nash stores will help us earn $1000 in Direct your Dollars. Make sure you save and send us your whole receipts.
If you have any questions about our programs or would like to get involved, don’t hesitate to contact us at email hidden; JavaScript is required. The IGE Board looks forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your support.
Institute for Global Education
1118 Wealthy St SE
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49506
www.igegr.org
(616) 454-1642
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