As shipments of relief-supply kits continue to move out of depots to the United Methodist Committee on Relief’s (UMCOR) 85 active disaster sites around the world, replenishing depot shelves is a concern for meeting future emergency needs. 

According to Kathy Kraiza, UMCOR's executive director of Relief Supplies, “We are very low on health, school, layette, sewing and bedding kits.”

Messiah United Methodist Church, in Springfield, VA, has challenged all United Methodist churches. We’ve been challenged and, as a Conference, we can respond together! Learn more about the challenge.

Let’s see how many thousands of kits the New England Conference churches can assemble and bring to Annual Conference. John Blackadar will have a trailer available in the Radisson Hotel employee parking lot to load your donations for delivery to one of our HUBS.  They will then be certified and shipped to an UMCOR depot.

Assembly instructions for various kits

2014 numbers

On his last trip in November 2014, Blackadar picked up and delivered more than 2,000 kits and cleaning buckets for UMCOR – 125 cleaning buckets, 1,361 health kits, 53 layette kits, 484 school kits, 45 birthing kits, 39 sewing kits and eight  bedding kits.

Blackadar has been making these trips for us for about eight years.  He also travels around the conference to our 13 collection sites picking up donated kits. See the list of drop-off locations.

UMCOR operates two supply depots: UMCOR Sager Brown in Baldwin, LA, and UMCOR West in Salt Lake City, Utah. They also coordinate with a network of United Methodist relief-supply depots across the United States, including Mission Central (the mission warehouse of the Susquehanna Annual Conference) in Mechanicsburg, PA (the closest to the New England Conference).

Contact

If you have any questions about assembling kits or bringing them to Annual Conference, please contact Barbara Burnside, Conference Disaster ERT & Mission Coordinator, at (978) 682-8055 ext. 135 or at baburnside@neumc.org.