In 2022, our church started a program called Apples for Teachers after seeing so many of our teachers sharing their wishlists. I said in the church staff meeting, "Hey it would be cool if we could do something." Then my wonderful intern, Isabella Tomboli said, "What if we do apples like angel tree for teachers?" We then both ran for it and Apples for Teachers was born with us serving the teachers in our church. They were so grateful for this program and this year we wanted to expand it district-wide. We then reached out to churches around us and now we have ten local churches serving in this ministry. We had 85 teachers sign up for this program in the White Hall School District with over 250 apples with teachers' names and wishlists linked to them. Want to know how we did this? Here is what we did so you can implement it in your community:
Get approval from the school district. They can even send a mass email to teachers in the district.
Make a Google form to get the info you need about the teacher including name, address, ways to contact them, and most importantly their Amazon wishlist.
Make the apples. You can use a website like Bitly to make the QR and Canva to make your apples. Here is an example of ours:
4. We then called up churches to see if they were interested in being involved. This may take a lot because some churches may not have someone there to answer the phone but I found that sending messages to their Facebook accounts or emails. Here is the info that I sent to churches to tell them about the program:
5. Gather all the info you have from the teachers and distribute it to churches in your area who are interested in serving. One thing I love about this program is that we gave teacher's apples to where they go to church so that their churches could support them. We tell everyone to keep their apples and use them as a reminder to pray for that teacher and their students all year. I still have mine from last year to remind me to pray for the teacher I picked.
6. Pick a way to display apples in an area that is appealing. We ended up hanging them like the pictures below, but you can totally just have them handed out in Small groups, or on a table for people to come by and grab.
Have any questions or want to do this in your community? Give me an email at Jennifer@fbcwhitehall.com and I can get you started if you need help.
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