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Date: 6/23/2021
WILBRAHAM – Over the weekend of June 19 and 20, best friends and high school students Tatum Nelson and Olivia Long hosted a Father’s Day cookie fundraiser, baking Swig cookies for Father's Day gifts to support clean water in Ghana.
“For as long as we’ve been friends, we’ve done a lot of baking together for fun like birthdays or just because we like to bake,” said Long. “When Tatum told me she was doing this fundraiser, she asked me if I wanted to do it. I thought it was a great idea and it's a great cause so I jumped at the chance to do it.”
She went on to say, “This specific fundraiser for Ghana, brings light to a critical issue for these women and children that don’t have access to clean water. Cookies aren’t an easy thing to sell, yet it brings people in and let them know about what they’re giving their money to.”
Swig cookies are cold, crispy-edged sugar cookies topped with creamy frosting. For their fundraiser, Tatum and Olivia put blue frosting on their Swig cookies to represent water and made tags with quotes on the importance of fatherhood.
When Nelson was in the eighth grade, she and her mother founded a non-profit with some of their friends called Compassion Takes Action where they do a lot of work in Bangladesh, Cox’s Bazar and the Rohingya Refugee Camps as well as in the capital city. They go once a year to bring supplies, teach in schools and help out in orphanages.
Though most of their work is done in Bangladesh, Nelson said an organization they had previously worked with mentioned a project in Ghana that consists of building a borewell, which is a well that goes deep underground so the water is cleaner and more effective. The borewell is significantly more expensive than a regular well. Tatum didn’t want to mix this with the money they raise for their causes for Bangladesh so she and her friends decided to hold a separate fundraiser for the well that’s being built in Ghana.
“We just really want to be able to get this well off the checklist because it’s something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time, just haven’t had the separate funds to do it,” Nelson said. “It’s going to affect this entire village of people and allow the women to focus on other things rather than walking miles to the well they currently go to.”
She continued, “That’s one of our main goals to provide women the opportunity to focus on other things such as their family, possibly on their careers if they have this closer access to water.”
Their other focus is education and keeping children in school. They decided one way to do that is provide them with this clean water so they can be healthy and sanitary. The girls said all of these steps they’re taking are steps to push for these young children to stay in school.
“If this fundraiser is successful, we’re definitely going to try to do more things like this that’s run by the kids in our organization,” Nelson stated. “We want to be involved as much as possible. This is a way for us to be involved and directly contribute to this change that we're trying to achieve.”
For more information on Compassion Takes Action, visit compassiontakesaction.org.