Both members of Cabrini and supporters from off campus attended the Swaziland Children Photo Gallery event, to benefit the children in Swaziland.
On the evening of Thursday, March 20, the class, ECG 200: People, Planet and Profit, presented a photo gallery in the Cabrini Mansion’s dining room, where the for-sale photos were to raise money for the children who were both in pictures and, in some cases, took the pictures themselves.
The event, which hosted over 60 people, raised nearly $650, on the evening alone, not counting the orders placed to be paid on a future date.
The class, which is co-taught by Prof. Anne Servey and Dr. Erin McLaughlin, divided the ECG class into four different groups, one of them being Swazi Crafts for Care, the group that orchestrated the event.
The four person group, which included Drew Krewson, sophomore communication major, Rachel Rossi, junior accounting major, Katie Kelly, sophomore accounting major, Valeri DiCarlo, sophomore social work major, and Jasmine Rivera, sophomore social work major, has been working on the photo gallery since the beginning of the spring 2014 semester.
“We worked really hard to put the event together,” DiCarlo said. “I’m really impressed and proud about the turn out of the night.”
Swazi Crafts for Care is not just the name of the ECG 200 group, but also a business, which was born out of Dr. McLaughlin’s first visit to Swaziland, nearly four years ago. It has been merged with the class for three years now and has both changed and grown tremendously over the years, according to McLaughlin.
A major change occurred last year, when children from Swaziland visited Cabrini and asked for some of the funding to be funneled towards the kids who were “aging out” of the orphanages to help them create business and education opportunities for themselves.
While it is only the first year of having this event, the photo gallery will not have sophomore occurrence. “In the future we will be incorporating the photos into a book, which will include poems that have been written by the children,” McLaughlin said. “We are going to continue the evolution of the cause.”
