Buy this shirt!

Sitting in Joliet, it’s both easy and hard to think about the war in Ukraine. Easy, because pictures of the devastation are plastered all over traditional and non-traditional media. Hard, because we all want to do something to help the Ukrainians but haven’t a clue about what. I’m too old to fight and, more likely, too chicken. So we’re left with grinning and bearing the high gas prices – they were going up even before the war started –  and donating money to legitimate organizations sending food and medicine into the war zone. And here’s another option: Buy this T-shirt.

In one of the only good things to ever come out of a recent “Chairs” meeting (a monthly face-punching for all chairs of departments in the College of Arts and Sciences)  Laura Honegger, chair of the Social Work department, said that members of the Social Work Club, here on campus, were trying to think up a fund-raiser for Ukraine. The invasion by Russia had begun about a week before our meeting. “Perhaps a T-Shirt”, Laura said. At which point, Paul Erschen, chair of the Art & Design department said that he was teaching a class in screen-printing this semester and he could probably get his students to produce the shirts.

Then, as often happens, the gears started turning in my head as I thought “Hey, what can I/We do in the CMMA department to help this along. So I asked Jessica Scroppo and Sarah Vandermolen of the Encounter Newsmagazine, to come up with a few different designs that we could show to Laura. They did and the design to the right was selected. (We first had to contact someone who spoke Ukranian to make sure our Google-translation actually said “No to War.” It does.

So now, Paul and his crew are busy printing up the shirts. Laura and her crew are finalizing the destination for any money raised and me and my Encounter, WCSF and TV club crews are getting ready to promote the snot out of this.

Donations raised from the Social Work Club's UkraineT-shirt sales will be used in the following not-for-profit ways:

• To provide direct support to Ukranian and Russian International Students at the University of St. Francis who are directly impacted by the war and who may not be able to return home or are restricted due to financial barriers or sanctions.
• To provide funding to the University of St. Francis Emergency Fund with specific instructions that money should be used to supplement needs of Ukrainian and Russian International students who are impacted by the Ukranian and Russian War. Funding may also so used to supplement needs of African, Chinese, Polish, or other International students or refugee populations living in or fleeing from Ukraine.
• Funding which is not exhausted by the University of St. Francis (bullet-point above) may be donated to the following funds:
  • Humanitarian Aid for Children in Crisis | UNICEF USA: https://www.unicefusa.org/
  • Catholic Relief Services: https://www.crs.org/
  • University of St. Francis Black Saints Matter or DACA scholarship funds.

So buy this shirt. And say “No to War.”