Buying and mailing seeds will cost about $5/pack.

The church would be better off selling you seeds for $5/pack and buying a bag of black oil sunflower seeds for $20 and 4000 envelopes for $288 at Staples. Then they would have $20,000 to put to better use.

our church is sending labourers in association with Samaritan's purse to High River.

No doubt correct.  However, if one factors in relationship building the kids of High Rover UC got it close enough to 'right'.  Our family has already donated to the recovery work there.  Our grandchildren will relate to sending sunflower seeds with greater interest.  No doubt they will look more carefully when they go there this summer (providing it isn't flooded again!) - trying to spot sunflowers.

The Samaritans Purse volunteers have been doing some great work - several people have told me so.

Great idea - thanks for sharing it Kay!  I have forwarded it to my church, with a suggestion that our church kids might like to work at collecting seed packets & send them on in bulk.  Kids helping Kids helping People helping Environment. 

I am sure the High River Sunday School kids and congregation would love to receive sunflower seeds from your congregation's kids.  There is so much healing for them from small acts of thoughtfulness - the entire community is still in recovery.  If your church kids want to send a letter to the High River kids with their seeds I bet they would be delighted.  So many heartwrenching stories in that town. 

The sunflowers are not the most important -- concrete connections with others is what really matters here.  It is being passed on to the leader of our children's program for consideration here.

Nice to know that I'm not the only person who saw it that way - connection is the name of the game.   

That was my thinking too Jim Kenney - and helping kids see that simple things can make a difference - they can contribute & connect with people in other parts of our country to make a difference - important lessons.

Kay, I posted it on United Church Group on Facebook, They seemed very interested.

Hi Kay - just thought I'd let you know that our church collected lots of packets of sunflower seeds today to be sent out to High River.   I did a google search to find the link back to this thread (faster than WC search!) and it looks like lots of other churches also took interest in the project.  So thanks for letting us know about it here. 

Also - I found an interesting connection.  At our church we have an interim children's church coordinator - I mentioned the project to her a while back & she told me that she had seen this done in New Orleans when she was there doing post-Katrina hurricane clean up.  She also was at the Greenbelt conference this past summer in Britain - and met a minister from High River.  She was telling that person about the New Orleans project & it grew from that seed of conversation into the current project it seems!  So that was delightful to hear her story, and see my church pitch in to help.  Small world isn't it?   We never know when bits that we share might spark bigger actions. 

Awesome on multiple levels.

Thank you to all the WC folk who have, or plan to, send seeds to High  River.  I hear there is anxiety about the spring thaw - reminding people of the devastation last year, causing concern for nely renovated homes, or homes still waiting for money to do renovations.  This town has done so much sharing and supporting and is ready to do more as needed.