Generous children become generous adults. You know this — and you want to teach your kids the importance of giving. But how do you get them excited about it when all they have to give is the spare change in their piggy banks?
The answer? Show them that even their handful of pennies can make a tremendous impact!
Whether your kids decide to do extra chores around the house or save what’s left from their lunch money, they can make a difference in the world with just $1.
Thanks to grants and generous corporate donations, we have critical aid like nonperishable food, medical equipment, medicines, hygiene kits, clothes, and more sitting in our warehouse waiting to be sent to people living in poverty. But they still need to be shipped.
And every $1 you and your children donate ships $33 worth of these lifesaving supplies. That means your kids’ pile of change multiplies 33X!
If your family saves up just $30 to give, you can send an incredible $990 worth of help to people on the other side of the world!
Talk about spare coins making a huge change in someone’s life.
While items like food, medical equipment, clothing, and more are ready to be sent, they won’t get anywhere unless someone helps cover shipping fees.
And it’s easy to get these gifts off the ground and into the hands of people who could die without them. All it takes is a little leftover change.
Here are three ways to get your kids excited about saving their coins and helping save lives:
1. Work together as a family to save up
To get your children involved in changing lives through saving money for shipping, designate a container to be your spare change keeper. Whether it’s a mason jar or an old coffee can, make sure it’s out in the open where your children will see it and remember it.
Bring it up to them often. And make sure they see you sharing your spare pocket change, as well. If they know it’s important to you, it’ll be important to them, too.
At the end of each month, count up how much money you’ve saved together. If it’s $10, tell your kids that amount translates into $330 worth of emergency supplies for people in need.
2. Add in a little competition
Penny wars are a fun way to get your entire family or your children’s group at church involved in the fun.
Not familiar with a penny war? The rules are simple. Split into two teams and give each team a bucket to collect their money in. Every penny a team adds to their bucket equals one point. But any coin or bill other than a penny equals negative points. So if Team A wants to get ahead of Team B, they could drop a quarter into Team B’s bucket, which equals -25 points.
The teams battle back and forth by dropping pennies into their own bucket and other coins into the opposing team’s bucket until the competition is over. (No cheating by taking out or swapping other coins for pennies in your own bucket!)
A little healthy competition in your home or church will be fun, exciting, and a great chance to bond as a family, all while helping save lives. In the end, everyone really wins because the money from both buckets is added together to help ship food, medicine, clothes, and more to people in need.
3. Teach some math along the way
Have you ever heard of someone collecting a mile of pennies? This is a great way to teach your kids about distance and length all while raising money.
Here’s how it works: if you laid down a line of pennies to equal the length of a mile, it would take 84,440 pennies. That equates to $844.40 — enough to ship nearly $28,000 worth of lifesaving aid!
Obviously, this is a much more ambitious goal, so you may need to recruit some extra help from grandparents, neighborhood friends, or your child’s Sunday School class. Or you could set a goal for your family to raise a quarter of a mile’s worth of pennies by the end of the year.
As you collect your pennies, this is a great time to talk about percentages and decimals with your kids. Go for a mile walk after school to show them the distance their coins could stretch.
And then, explain their mile of pennies can literally travel miles and miles away in the form of a shipping container headed to where children are hungry and suffering.
Lessons learned
This is the perfect opportunity to teach your children what it means to care about others and to be thankful for all the blessings they have.
Right now, there are kids your child’s age who are starving to death, in desperate need of medical care, or lacking daily essentials. And they’re waiting on the arrival of a shipment you can help send right now.
Your child’s gift, no matter how small, can literally help save lives.
It only takes $1 to ship $33 worth of aid — enough to impact one person.
Ready to get involved? Organize your penny drive or spare change challenge today — either in your own home, in your classroom, or at your church.
When you get your kids excited about the impact their generosity can make today, you help them grow into generous people for life.