The best kind of community projects are completed by the community, for the community. When each person contributes what they can, no matter how small, it creates something more than the sum of its parts. In that spirit of collaboration, Regional Representative for Argentina Macarena Acosta donated five faucets to help build a locker room for a local female hockey team in Buenos Aires.
Arché Foundation
For this project, Mac partnered with the Arché Foundation, an organization that works with underprivileged children and adults. Mac was impressed with the amount of programs that the Arché Foundation runs, like “a vegetable plot where they teach people about sustainability and how to work the land, and a cooking workshop where they use what they get from the vegetable plot. (They also have an oven they built themselves!) They teach the kids different trades such as sewing, baking, and metal work. They have safe spaces for women in the company of a psychologist, and they have sports for boys and girls.” The project that needed the most immediate help was the hockey court and the girls’s locker room. Mac explained that “the court was in disrepair” and that the girls’s hockey team did not have a locker room at all. The team had to line up single-file to use a neighbor’s small bathroom to change. With funding provided by our generous Random Acts donors, Mac was able to purchase five faucets for the new locker room!
Kindness, Face To Face
Not only did Mac buy faucets for the locker room project, but they also went to visit the Arché Foundation in person. She visited with a friend who used to volunteer with Arché but had not been back in years. After gently teasing his former students for forgetting who he was, he spent the day getting reacquainted with them. One of the girls “followed him around all day showing him what she’d been doing these five years. It was really heartwarming,” said Mac. Being there in person had a profound impact on Mac. They said they felt “overall very humbled, and happy to help. There is, though, a tinge of sadness, because the stories you hear are sad, unfair, and never-ending. I also felt very inspired, because the space they have is actually a lot smaller than I imagined. It’s just that it’s very well designed and thought out, so they can make the most of it. It made me think of all the things we can achieve with a little imagination.”
