Meet our volunteers: Mary Ann McCammon
Mary Ann McCammon teaches quilting to women in three countries.
She’s taught in the CCQ Thursday class for the past eleven years. Her impressive quilting skills and gentle humor have empowered dozens of women incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.
Mary Ann also makes an annual trip to Yelapa, Mexico where she teaches local women to make small landscape art quilts that they sell to tourists. One student, Evelia, has been so successful that she’s sending her kids to college with the proceeds of her quilting business. Her daughter will start college this fall and her son will complete his senior year in engineering.
Last year Mary Ann began teaching quilting to women recovering from obstetric fistula surgery in Eldoret, Kenya. She works with a small non-profit, Beyond Fistula that supports women after surgery to reintegrate with their families and gain financial independence. The goal is for women to earn an income with their quilting. Mary Ann’s own art quilts and quilts made by her students in Kenya are featured in an on-line art show about obstetric fistula.
Eleven longarm quilters support the Coffee Creek Quilters program by quilting our students’ third quilts. Some of them are professionals while others are hobbyists.
Students in the Coffee Creek Quilters prison quilting program made 136 quilts for donation in 2015. We polled our students and learned that they were particularly interested that the quilts should go to children’s bereavement programs and foster kids programs. Here’s the breakdown showing how many quilts each organization on our list received last year.