Cy Sherman examined the rows of pews at South Congregational Church one Sunday morning in early October and made a simple appeal.
Asking for money is never easy — from the pulpit, in a letter or at all — but she’d done it many times before and had never been unsuccessful. She figured the honest message of the Concord Crop Hunger Walk could do more to move hearts and minds toward generosity than any shrewd fundraising strategy she could devise.
“I had the people who were walking with me stand up, and I told the congregation how they could donate to any of the ones standing, that we’re doing this to raise money for the poor, the hungry especially,” she said, nodding in matter-of-fact agreement with herself.
Concord’s Crop Walk, which marked its 41st year on October 11, raises money for Church World Services, an organization that works toward refugee resettlement and offers hunger, poverty and disaster assistance. Each year, a majority of the funds that walkers raise is sent abroad, while 25% of donations are returned to the Interfaith Council, which allocates funds to local food pantries.
The walk raised over $14,000 this year in online donations. Sherman raised about half those funds herself, and she is still counting on two checks from regular supporters to arrive in the mail.
“It just makes me feel good,” she said.
At 87, Sherman is consistently one of the biggest individual fundraisers for the Crop Walk, according to coordinator Chris Paull.
“She’s an amazing lady. She’s one of those people you wish you could clone,” said Paull, who organizes the walk each year for the Greater Concord Interfaith Council. “We’re almost daily communicating about, ‘How do I raise my goal online? I’ve already exceeded it.’”
A descendant of John Scudder, the first American medical missionary to India, Sherman had an upbringing flush with stories of faithful service in response to great adversity and suffering. Her great aunt, Dr. Ida Scudder, founded Vellore Christian Medical College in South India, and Sherman volunteered on three separate trips to support medical students in their English education.
Sherman clings steadfastly to her memories of India.
In her classroom there as a missionary teacher, nursery rhymes and American hymns became language learning devices, and outside the hospital, visits to students’ family homes in neighboring villages provided exposure to a different cultural reality. She remembers fondly struggling to eat curry with her hands and drinking water constantly to “survive the wonderful food.”
The degree of want she witnessed has also remained indelible after all these years.
“I would see so many people begging for food, it just seemed to be the way it was, and malnourished young people and all. I think that’s part of what took me towards the crop walk, because seeing these children and adults just starving was hard to see,” she said.
Sherman chose secretarial work as her professional path. For 21 years, she worked in the main office at ConVal High School in Peterborough, having moved to Francestown from Deering in 1988 after the United Church of Christ closed a conference center she operated there with her late husband, Gordon.
In 2003, following their retirement, the couple moved to Havenwood Heritage Heights, where Sherman still lives, livening the halls with art installations and recruiting fellow residents for a pen pal program.
Every Wednesday afternoon, she steps into her Hyundai Sonata and drives herself to the Mill Brook School, where she reads to a class of second-graders. Students sit with her in the hallway, each one bringing a different title, and listen as she reads to them ten minutes at a time.
Sherman has read to students at Mill Brook since 2004.
“I read once about, if you can’t be a missionary going overseas, you can be a missionary at home. And I thought, okay, I can do that,” Sherman said.
When Sherman walked her 14th annual crop walk earlier this month, she did not do so alone. She’s used to tackling the 2.5 route as the only member from her church, but this year, four other walkers from the congregation joined her on the path.
“At Havenwood, there’s a saying, ‘Bloom where you are planted,’” she said. “This has been just that for me.”
