Shop With a Purpose at Wilson Memorial Church

Shoppers in the Watchung community will have an opportunity to make their holiday gift-giving doubly effective, as Mary E. Wilson Memorial Church holds a sale of items from Ten Thousand Villages. The sale will be held in the church’s Stockton Fisher Fellowship Hall on Saturday, December 6 from 10 AM to 2 PM.
According to Rev, Barbara Peters, “Shopping with a purpose enables individuals to feel like they are making a difference in the lives of people who have to face desperate economic circumstance.”
A variety of gift and craft items will be available for purchase. The sale of these handcrafted products, made by artisans from developing nations, help pay for food, education, healthcare and housing for craftspersons who would otherwise be unemployed or underemployed. As one of the world’s oldest and largest fair trade organizations, Ten Thousand Villages has spent more than 60 years cultivating long-term buying relationships in which artisans receive a fair price for their work and consumers have access to unique gifts, accessories and home decor from around the world. These long-term relationships give the artisan groups a sustainable source of income that enables them to plan for the future-investing in technology and skills training in order to reach their full business potential.
Although this will be the first year the Wilson Church has worked with Ten Thousand Villages, the church has had a long-standing tradition of holding similar sales of handcrafted items during the Advent season for its members. It was decided this year to hold the sale on a Saturday and to open it to the local community both as a community outreach and as a way to provide even more assistance to the producers of the sale items.
Wilson Memorial Church is located at 7 Valley Road in Watchung, just off the Watchung Circle. For further information about the church, please call (908) 755-5020 or visit www.wilsonmemorialchurch.com