Champlain Students Help Local Business Collect Crutches for Africa

A Champlain College service learning team will be collecting "Crutches 4 Africa" as part of a class assignment. The students helped organize and promote the charity drive designed to collect mobility devices such as crutches, canes, wheelchairs and walkers for distribution in Africa.

On Sunday, Dec. 9 from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. items can be dropped off at the Edible Arrangements store on Dorset Street (next to Barnes & Noble). Donors will receive a box of dipped fruit as a thank-you from Edible Arrangements and its owner, Alison Estey, who also teaches at Champlain College.

The Champlain Business students are working with Estey and her business as a part of the College's service leaning program and using their business skills to organize, promote and run the event to raise awareness in the community.

Crutches 4 Africa was founded by David Talbot, a polio survivor himself who encountered African community members terribly afflicted by similar disabilities, organizers say. Talbot realized that many people in the United States had crutches or other devices that were lightly used and could be recycled for re-use. His initial goal is to collect one million mobility devices and distribute them to those in need in Africa.

To date, thousands of crutches, canes, walkers and wheelchairs have been distributed to Africans in need. The project is gaining momentum throughout North America with collection sites spreading awareness. Operating through its website and collection locations, Crutches 4 Africa aims to distribute as many devices as inexpensively as possible.

For more information:
Contact: Jonathan Weed, (585) 301-8246
E-mail: jonathan.weed@mymail.champlain.edu
Websites: http://www.ediblearrangements.com/Stores.aspx http://www.crutches4africa.org/


Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small, not-for-profit, private college in Burlington, Vermont, with additional campuses in Montreal, Canada, and Dublin, Ireland. Champlain offers a traditional undergraduate experience from its beautiful campus overlooking Lake Champlain and over 90 residential undergraduate and online undergraduate and graduate degree programs and certificates. Champlain's distinctive career-driven approach to higher education embodies the notion that true learning occurs when information and experience come together to create knowledge. Champlain College is included in the Princeton Review's The Best 384 Colleges: 2019 Edition. For the fourth year in a row, Champlain was named a "Most Innovative School" in the North by U.S. News & World Report's 2019 "America's Best Colleges,” and a “Best Value School” and is ranked in the top 100 “Regional Universities of the North” and in the top 25 for “Best Undergraduate Teaching.” Champlain is also featured in the Fiske Guide to Colleges for 2019 as one of the "best and most interesting schools" in the United States, Canada and Great Britain and is a 2019 College of Distinction. For more information, visit champlain.edu.