The Mother of All Baby Bottle Campaigns

Jan. 1, 2023

Knights in Pennsylvania unite to raise funds to purchase a mobile ultrasound unit

By Cecilia Hadley

Jan. 1, 2023

From left, Dave Spacht, Phil Legler and Greg Penco stand with just a few of the thousands of baby bottles that Knights in the area used to collect $109,000 for a mobile ultrasound unit. (Photo by Robyn Wiggers)

One day last July, a group of Knights arrived bright and early at the local credit union, lugging tubs of change from a baby bottle campaign conducted by K of C councils across northwestern Pennsylvania. It was time to tally the haul from the thousands of bottles they had distributed at dozens of churches across two counties.

The Knights began rattling coins into the credit union’s sorting machine at 8 a.m. They didn’t finish until 4 p.m., by which point the machine had counted about $24,000 in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies — weighing nearly a ton.

Combine that with $85,000 collected in bills and checks, and the Pennsylvania Knights’ baby bottle campaign raised a total of $109,000 for the Women’s Care Center of Erie County. It is among the largest single donations to the Knights of Columbus Ultrasound Initiative in the program’s history, covering almost half the price of a new mobile ultrasound unit for the pregnancy resource center. In response, the Order’s Culture of Life Fund has covered the full cost of the unit’s ultrasound machine.

The level of support from the Knights and their fellow Catholic parishioners astonished and gratified Women’s Care Center executive director Randy Newport.

“I’ve never heard of anything this large being done by a single fundraising effort with baby bottles,” Newport said. “I went to a national conference a couple of weeks ago, and I talked to people about this, and they had never heard of anything like it either.”

The Women’s Care Center of Erie County provides a huge range of services to pregnant women and mothers, from counseling and parenting classes to material assistance. The recipient of three ultrasound machines from the Knights of Columbus over the years, the center offers ultrasounds twice a week at three locations. It even has its own in-house adoption agency.

The completed mobile ultrasound unit, outfitted by Mission Mobile Medical in North Carolina, stands ready for delivery to the Women’s Care Center of Erie County. (Courtesy of Mission Mobile Medical)

However, Newport wanted to do more to reach women who need help.

“With the abortion pill, our timeline for reaching women who are considering abortion has shortened dramatically,” he said. “We need to start reaching these women sooner; we need to get to them and not rely on them getting to us.”

A mobile ultrasound unit would expand the center’s impact, Newport said, adding, “It was really God’s prompting to get into the community, to be more visible in their neighborhoods.”

He brought the idea to Dave Spacht, who was serving as life director of the Pennsylvania State Council, and Spacht brought the idea to the local chapter meeting. The Knights considered different fundraising strategies, but ultimately settled on the humble baby bottle campaign, a staple of pro-life fundraising for decades.

“With the abortion pill, our timeline for reaching women who are considering abortion has shortened dramatically. We need to start reaching these women sooner; we need to get to them and not rely on them getting to us.”

At first, Spacht was somewhat dubious. Baby bottle campaigns are a reliable way to bring in a few thousand dollars, but the center needed nearly a quarter of a million dollars for its rolling ultrasound clinic.

“I’m thinking, ‘We’re not going to get very far,’” he recalled – unless Knights throughout the region helped. What was needed, he decided, was the “Mother of All Baby Bottle Campaigns.”

Phil Legler, life director of Our Lady of Mercy Council 11144 in Harborcreek, and Greg Penco of Jesus, Mary and Joseph Council 4071 in Erie stepped up to manage the project, and they began contacting K of C councils throughout Erie and Crawford counties.

The Knights responded with a true group effort. Twenty-six councils participated, holding the fundraiser in 41 churches. Dozens of members and other volunteers got involved, promoting the campaign and distributing and collecting the bottles.

“Part of my goal was for this to be a joint project as much as possible,” Spacht explained. “Everybody worked, everybody pushing everybody else.”

The team got an early morale boost from an unexpected source. A teacher at Seton Catholic School in Meadville called Legler out of the blue in May. Annette Egan-Kidd had heard about the fundraiser at Sunday Mass in her parish and taken some of the bottles to her kindergarten classroom.

“We talked about the importance of helping others who are in a situation that might not be easy, and what they could do to make it easier,” Egan-Kidd explained. “The Knights gave us an opportunity to instill the importance of life, for the kids to understand that life is precious.”

She encouraged her students to donate by sacrificing some of their snack money or doing extra chores at home to earn money. Some kindergartners emptied their piggy banks. The other grades filled bottles, too, and the student council donated an additional $400. At a school assembly last May, the students presented Legler with more than $1,800. A parishioner wrote a check on the spot to make it an even $2,000.

“I sent the photos from that day to all of the volunteers and coordinators at the councils and parishes, and I think it motivated a lot of the Knights,” Legler said. “It was really something.”

The campaign ran from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day, though donations continued to trickle in afterward. With an additional $10,000 from a previous fundraiser, the Knights were able to present Women’s Care Center with a check for $119,000, approximately half of the cost of the 24-foot mobile unit; two private donors contributed the rest. The new unit was scheduled to be delivered in mid-December, and it should be fully operational by the spring.

Meanwhile, Newport plans to drive the mobile unit to some of the 41 participating parishes to let the Knights, the students at Seton Catholic and others see what they made possible. And Spacht, Legler and the other Knights are already looking to next year’s campaign, which will likely go toward supporting the unit’s operating costs.

It was eye-opening to see what councils can accomplish by working together, noted Spacht, who now serves as the Pennsylvania state warden.

“This project involved all the tenets that we as Knights espouse,” he said. “Of course, it was a fantastic charitable project; it was something we needed to do for our people. And there was fraternity — a lot of planning meetings where a beer was hoisted. But unity was the deciding factor. Unity really led the way.”

*****

CECILIA HADLEY is senior editor of Columbia.

Chana Gaskins and her three children enjoy some time playing outside.

The Mother of All Baby Bottle Campaigns

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