North Mayo school honoured for fundraising initiative
Staff and pupils of Templemary National School, Killala, with Katie Martin and Joe Murray from Afri.
Representatives of Afri, Action From Ireland travelled to Templemary National School in Killala to meet with students who are raising money for the charity.
Templemary NS has been supporting Afri's St Brigid's Peace Cross campaign where schools make St Brigid's Crosses. Afri supplies cardboard backs for the crosses, explaining the story of St Brigid and elastic bands with which to hold the cross. The schoolchildren sell them and send the money off to Afri. The initiative has been ongoing for a long number of years.
Templemary National School's involvement is one of the longest in the country and Afri presented the school with a painting by American First Nation's Artist, Gary White Deer, a member of the Choctaw Nation and former leader of the annual Afri Famine Walk in Louisburgh/Delphi. The Choctaws raised money for Irish Famine Relief in the 1800s.
Afri was founded on September 1975 when Sean McFarren SDB called a meeting of a group of friends and initiated the organisation under the name Aid from the Republic of Ireland. Today, Afri’s goal is the promotion of global justice and peace and the reduction of poverty; this includes, but is not limited to, the progressive reduction of global militarisation, and responding to the threat of climate change, corporate control of resources and water, and interference with food sovereignty.
