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One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS)
Each year during Lent, we make the biggest of our special offerings, One Great Hour of Sharing. We receive the offerings for four Sundays, concluding with their dedication in our Easter Service. The children in our Sunday Church School also fill coin boxes for OGHS, which we dedicate with the rest of our offerings on Easter Sunday.
OGHS supports three missions:
The Presbyterian Hunger fund provides food directly to people in danger of starvation or malnutrition because of famine, warfare, or sustained poverty. It also helps develop programs to attack the root causes of hunger and so change the conditions that keep people in long-term need. A related need of many people in our world is clean water, and the Hunger Fund supports programs to meet that need.
Presbyterian World Service works with other organizations to help refugees and displaced persons, victims of warfare and civil strife, and victims of natural disasters.
The Fund for the Self-Development of People provides seed money for minority groups that have developed plans to help themselves economically and socially. The national SDOP makes one-time grants up to $50,000 to groups that meet the criteria. Lesser grants are made through the presbyteries to people striving to become financially independent with plans that meet the SDOP criteria.