Canadian Mennonite
Volume 13, No. 15
Jul. 27, 2009


Raising money for MCC, saving the environment

By Evelyn Rempel Petkau

Manitoba Correspondent

WINNIPEG, Man.

Ruth Schroeder and Dorothy Friesen sewing bags in the Craft Room at Lindenwood Estates.

When Ruth Schroeder spots a piece of fabric in the Selkirk Avenue Mennonite Central Committee Thrift Shop where she volunteers, she immediately pictures a bag. When MCC Resource Centre volunteer, Dorothy Friesen, looks at the bolts of rip-stop nylon on the Centre’s shelves she knows they would make perfect grocery bags. Schroeder and Friesen are residents at Lindenwood Estates, a Life Lease retirement community, and together they came up with a plan to have fellow residents make bags to sell at the 2008 MCC Relief Sale in Winnipeg. In three weeks last year they made 140 bags and by Saturday morning of the sale they were sold out.

“This year nobody was doing bags again,” said Schroeder and so a group of 16 women at Lindenwood Estates took up the task and in assembly-line fashion made 360 bags in time for the June 12-13, 2009 Winnipeg MCC Relief Sale. For 14 Mondays this spring the women reclaimed the craft room that had become a storage place for golf clubs and home to a scroll saw business. The men happily pitched in, building shelves and cleaning up the room. It became a community effort.

Some of the bags didn’t make it to the Relief Sale as they sold about $600 worth of bags beforehand.

Most of the bags sold for $3. “Just about as much work goes into making a big bag as a little bag,” said Schroeder. Depending on the type and design of the fabric, they sewed gift bags, grocery bags and tote bags.

In total the bags raised $1140 for MCC. Visitors from Germany, India and the U.S.A. took bags home with them.

“We’ll certainly continue to make bags,” said Schroeder, who has been sewing and giving away bags since the early 1970s out of a concern for the environment, “hoping to reduce some of the plastic bags around.”

“Some of the women have already asked about next year.” In the meantime fabric continues to come in and be set aside in the Thrift Shop where she volunteers. “More Safeway mesh bags should be worn out by next year,” Schroeder laughs.


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