I arrived at the location of our service project a few moments ago and immediately saw a giant display of pennies - formed in the shape of an AIDS ribbon. The pennies are a project by the non-profit Got Cents?

Todd, one of the group’s founders, told me that they started collecting the pennies after they heard a speech by the president of World Vision. Four years later they now have 6.1 million - the same as the number of people who have died of AIDS since the last presidential election.

To give a sense of the # of pennies 6.1 mllion is, Todd told me that if you stacked them on on top of each other, they’d stretch 6 miles.

He also told me that they usually use local banks to help supply the pennies when they go on location (out of the organization’s bank account) but that there aren’t 6.1 million pennies in the whole St. Paul/Minneapolis area - so they’ll have to drive these pennies to Minnesota for when they do this service project all over again at the RNCC next week

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under HIV/AIDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.