Our SevenDays Make a Ripple, Change the World event marked its second year this past April, continuing the goal of remembering those we’ve lost, and creating a wave of positive change. For seven days, we celebrated love, faith, kindness and our community while encouraging education about religious similarities and how even a single act of kindness can have a ripple effect to help change the world.
Our world is broken in many ways. Acts of violence and deaths are so common that sometimes we become numb to them in order to function. I am not any different. Prior to losing my father and 14-year-old son to a violent shooting, I was not stepping into the spotlight to stop anyone from such acts. Now, SevenDays Make a Ripple, Change the World is my spotlight. Evil can be overcome with good when we shine light on it. The light we shine during SevenDays is full of love and kindness…to one’s self, to others and to strangers.
Our seven-day event incorporates daily themes to help participants focus on specific needs: LOVE, DISCOVER, OTHERS, CONNECT, GO, YOU and ONWARD.
This year’s event played host to many inspirational speakers, including:
- Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, founder of the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem
- Professor Allan Katz, former Ambassador to Portugal
- Malcolm Graham, former NC Senator
- Sonia Warshawski, a dynamic ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor
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One of the most well-received and impactful sessions featured discussion and education of the Muslim religion. A four-person panel of Muslim Americans from our local community graciously shared their stories and answered questions about practicing their faith within their families, community, workplace and school.
We partnered with local restaurants and retail businesses who made significant donations to our foundation Faith Always Wins Foundation with the help of participating patrons. We partnered with the T.A.K.E. Defense Foundation to host a self-defense workshop for over 100 young women ages 12 and up. We partnered with youth organizations to host an interfaith youth workshop providing guidance on conducting dialogue with others of another faith. We also partnered with St. Luke’s College of Health Sciences for a blood drive on April 15, our CONNECT day. One local bakery supported our efforts with our very own themed cupcakes each day of the week!
This year we provided resources on our SevenDays website to help families, teachers and co-workers with specific actions they could take to embrace and encourage these themes.
ONWARD is our theme for the final day of the week-long event. As personal struggles bombard understand that it is not only okay, but necessary, to move onward in order to survive. Moving onward does not mean forgetting. Moving onward is the permission to remember and yet live at the same time.
To celebrate ONWARD, over 1,800 people – both young and old – walked 3.5 miles from the Overland Park Jewish Community Center to our family’s church, The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. We celebrated local charities, awarded three song writing competition winners and five kindness scholarship winners (view the winners here). Over $13,500 in scholarships was awarded to the winners, all under the age of 21.
I receive messages from our local, national and world-wide community about how far these ripples of kindness are reaching. I am thankful for the opportunity to share my spirit of life, my love of others and how to live life to the fullest without giving up through SevenDays Make a Ripple, Change the World!
Please join us for SevenDays Make a Ripple, Change the World 2017
April 18th – 24th, 2017
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