Faith & Values: Latin America's Minnesota Rose

Faith & Values: Latin America's Minnesota Rose: "Faith & Values: Latin America's Minnesota Rose
Susan M. Barbieri, Star Tribune
October 9, 2004 AWARD1009


Never underestimate the power of a bad spaghetti dinner.
About 25 years ago, Rose Schaffhausen got a letter from her sister, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and spending time at a rural orphanage run by an American Catholic priest. The letter said the kids needed, among other things, cooking oil to fry tortillas and beans. Schaffhausen yearned to know more and flew to Mexico to see for herself.
She came home inspired.
'She had a big spaghetti dinner and charged three couples $25 apiece for horrible spaghetti,' recalled Ann Arnold, 82, Schaffhausen's sister. 'She's terribly, terribly good at fundraising. She twists people around her little finger. I mean, she could go out at noon and have lunch with somebody, and she'll come back with $50,000 or $10,000.'
The small amount that Schaffhausen raised from that long-ago dinner launched Minnesota Friends of the Orphans, a Little Canada-based nonprofit that today generates about $1.5 million a year for disadvantaged children in Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador. An orphanage also is planned for Peru.
All told, the nonprofit has raised about $20 million over the past 25 years."