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Pamela Miller tells us how her church raised enough for an African Farmyard:

"Our church is on the outskirts of Birmingham. We tithe our annual income and encourage members of the congregation to suggest charities we can support. A couple of years ago, Send a Cow was suggested by a family which had heard about them at Spring Harvest. An Ambassador from Send a Cow accepted our invitation to come and talk to us.

His challenging talk made an impact on the church and a suggestion was subsequently made to use Lent as an opportunity to do something for others and to try to raise £2000 for a farmyard. Realising that six weeks would not give us a lot of time we decided to run the project until harvest and we invited the Ambassador back to receive the cheque.

Initially we suggested that people gave something up for Lent and gave the money saved to the Farmyard Project, as we called it. We produced labels to stick on collecting containers - honey jars, plastic milk bottles, butter tubs (i.e. things with a farmyard theme!) - and gave these out at church. In fact, people came up with their own ideas: one Homegroup saved all their loose change and brought it to their weekly meeting to put in the jar; children saved their pocket money and husbands the change in their trouser pockets; two friends decided to weigh each other every week instead of going to WeightWatchers and put the ‘fee’ towards the farmyard. One family gave money in memory of a loved one, we had a bread and cheese lunch and asked for donations, and one of the young people was sponsored to have his long hair cut.

When it came to harvest it looked as if we would be short of our target, so rather than dwell on the failure we decided to match all the donations with gifts from the catalogue. However, as people gathered they presented us with more money, so my total was rapidly out of date. We finally exceeded £2,000 and had a great feeling of achievement as well as a recognition of God’s faithfulness to us. We are not a large church and many of our congregation are pensioners on a low income, but we were fired up by the Ambassador’s initial challenge and the knowledge that we could do something really practical to help others."