As reported in the Expresslast April, the Clean Water Crew youth group at Calvary Baptist Church in Hopewell is raising $12,000 to support a clean water and sanitation project for a hill tribe village in northern Thailand managed by the Integrated Tribal Development Program, a nongovernmental organization in Chiang Mai dedicated to providing and improving village drinking water, irrigation and sanitation systems.
Setting a fiscal target of $12,000 wasn’t the only goal. The small youth group also wants to raise awareness about the current global water crisis. So they made a rule: no one can contribute more than $12 to their project, so that the six members of the Clean Water Crew can be sure of reaching at least 1,000 people.
Through December, the Clean Water Crew had reached about a quarter of their goal. But when Calvary Baptist Church pastor Dennis O’Neill noticed that crew members’ were starting to hit a bit of a wall — 1,000 people and $12,000 is a tall order after all — he took matters into his own hands. Or, you could say, his feet: O’Neill, 61, pledged to enter the Philadelphia Marathon, scheduled for November 2019, with the aim of raising more awareness for the Clean Water Crew and thus finding enough sponsors to fulfill the crew’s goal.
O’Neill is no runner. He ran his first 5K last year helping to raise funds for an organization that supports families with kids who need transplants. “So doing a marathon seems a daunting task right now, but I’m determined to do it because I think the global water crisis is something that needs to be addressed,” he says.
O’Neill says the kids chose their focus after he did an exercise with them in which he asked them what they would do if they could do anything to change the world. on dollars and they could use it to change the world? The most passionate answer was I want to give peopel clean water.
With a year to train, O’Neill is running 5K’s twice a week with increasingly long runs on weekends—fairly typical regimen for a prospective marathon runner. “I’m hoping to avoid injuries and just finish next November,” he says. “It is very hard to raise $12,000 [when] allowing each person to give no more than $12,” O’Neill says. “Probably as hard as running a marathon for the first time at 61.”
O’Neill says the crew chose the project in Thailand because they have been assured that all the money raised will go directly to the project, in which a water piping system will be constructed to carry water several miles from its source to the village. The $12,000 is to be spent entirely on supplies; villagers will do all the labor.
“These people use the water for everything—drinking, cooking, watering crops. They also use it for their latrine, so it’s often a problem with disease.”
O’Neill joined Calvary Baptist Church 12 years ago. He was supposed to be there for six months, but he says, “I fell in love with the folks and they asked me to stay, which was great.” He grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended seminary.
“Every 90 seconds around the world, another kid dies from a water related disease,” O’Neill says. “That haunts me. I feel like I need to do something.”
Dennis O’Neill,
