20,000km in 20 Days Love Mercy Challenge a Huge Success

For 20 days across February/March 2016, 135 fabulous people joined Team Rachel’s Runners to run, swim, cycle, walk and row their way towards a big 20,000km goal for the Love Mercy Foundation. Did we get there? You betcha, and some!!

The idea behind this challenge was to raise awareness of Love Mercy’s  Cents for Seeds program. Cents for Seeds is a fully sustainable agricultural program that sees women in Northern Uganda receive 30kg of seeds to cultivate, grow and harvest. Not only do the women grow the crops for their own family use and to sell at market, but at the end of the season they give back the initial loan of 30kg of seeds. This then enables another woman and her family an entry into the program. Such a fantastic and innovative idea!

I am very proud to announce that not only did we reach our collective 20,000km in the 20 days, we surpassed it! The final amount of kilometres logged by all of the challenge participants was a massive 21,660km between us! Unbelievable!! The determination, drive and support displayed by the super-people doing the challenge was amazing and very motivating and inspiring to be a part of. There were people hitting the gym at 1:30am after they’d finished their work shift, others who set personal goals to achieve including covering 100km in the 20 days and a very special mention must go out to one man, Phil Lucas, who pledged to cover 300km in the time frame and raised an extra $630 for the cause in doing so. Champions – every single one.

The other fantastic news is, we helped to raise awareness of Love Mercy in many communities online and on the ground in almost all states and territories of Australia AND we raised $7265 dollars for the Cents for Seeds program! That is just over 240 more women and their families that will see the benefits of this fantastic initiative, not to mention the ripple effect that will flow on from them once their initial 30kg loan of seeds is delivered to even more women in the future. Simply phenomenal.

As the team at Love Mercy have set themselves a goal to see 20,000 Ugandan women involved by the year 2020, we will continue to help out in any way we can to support. Please take the time to view the video below and see how our efforts are helping the people of Uganda. From war and poverty to flourishing, happy faces. We can all be a part of this change.