Support of Farm Families
In 1998, Margaret Bruce, a Pastoral Associate at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in North Dakota, sought a way to support farm families and came up with the idea of a green ribbon and a card that read "We care through prayer." Around the same time, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) began receiving emergency calls from farm families in stress and saw that the situation was getting worse across the country. In November 1998, NCRLC launched the Green Ribbon Campaign at their 75th anniversary meeting. They developed and began to disseminate rural crisis packets to help parishes deal with the growing rural crisis.
In the UK, in November 2008, a Manchester-based support group for people living with or being affected by the HIV-virus; launched a campaign called Body Positive North West, using a green ribbon as their symbol. The aim is to raise awareness of 60 second HIV testing and encourage more people to get themselves screened for HIV, as research suggests that over a third of all HIV-infected people in Britain, are themselves unaware of this.
Green Ribbons are also used in the US to show support for medical marijuana, as well as many other medical drugs in the country.
Read more about this topic: Green Ribbon
Famous quotes containing the words support, farm and/or families:
“The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Affection, indulgence, and humor alike are powerless against the instinct of children to rebel. It is essential to their minds and their wills as exercise is to their bodies. If they have no reasons, they will invent them, like nations bound on war. It is hard to imagine families limp enough always to be at peace. Wherever there is character there will be conflict. The best that children and parents can hope for is that the wounds of their conflict may not be too deep or too lasting.”
—New York State Division of Youth Newsletter (20th century)