At 93, this South Jersey resident is still adding to her legacy of advocacy and sowing love

The Friends Enrichment Program began in the late 1990s with an in-line skating class for kids in a Moorestown parking lot.

But the program’s roots were grown in 1940s Montreal, where a wealthy French Canadian girl and some of her Catholic school classmates collected donations from tavern patrons to buy winter coal for needy families.

“Sow love, reap love” is FEP’s slogan.

“After the war I saw legless [veterans] sitting on mats on the ground in downtown Montreal,” said Monique Begg, 93. “I awoke to some of the things you don’t see in the suburbs.“

A member of the Moorestown Friends Meeting, Begg and her nonprofit have raised about $400,000 over the last 30 years, mostly in small donations — although a $2,000 grant from St. Matthew Lutheran Church helped start the program.

FEP has provided 1,100 summer camp and art education scholarships to more than 500 children in the township and surrounding communities.

“A person can be a talker or a doer, and I am someone who really likes to talk,” Begg said. “But that’s not enough.”

A longtime freelance journalist, environmental activist, and social justice advocate, Begg moved with her husband, Edwin, from upstate New York to South Jersey in 1969.

After nine years in Medford, where they led grassroots efforts to clean up Birchwood Lake, the Beggs moved to Moorestown with their son, Daniel, in the late ’70s.

As they had done in Medford, Begg said, she and her husband became regular attendees at local government meetings.

By the mid-1990s, they were hearing some of their fellow residents complain to elected officials that young people who lived in Moorestown affordable housing developments “were guilty of crimes” by walking on private property.

“They were doing nuisance things,” Begg said. “They weren’t juvenile delinquents.”

Working informally with a Moorestown police detective, Begg reached out to the families and established the in-line skating lessons.

The Friends meeting “let us use the parking lot, and we were covered by their insurance,” she said.

Meanwhile, Begg listened closely as kids in the program told her about economic and other challenges at home and bullying of students of color in school.

It reminded her of her own childhood.

“When I was growing up, some of the [English-speaking] people, not all of them, but some of them, didn’t like us because we were French,” she said.

To raise money for FEP, a committee was established in early 1997 to gather family recipes into what became known as the Moorestown Friends Heritage Cookbook.

“We sold out all 1,000 copies for $15 each,” Begg said. “By the spring, we had enough money to send 10 kids to summer camps” or other programs at the Perkins Center for the Arts and the Moorestown Community House.

The collaboration with the Perkins Summer Camp has become a major FEP focus.

“During the summer, my kids have had a chance to attend Perkins programs we would not be able to afford,” said Ruth Maina, 40, a Moorestown mother of five.

Begg, she said, “really cares about people in general. But her heart is for the children.”

Kahra Buss, executive director at Perkins, said FEP generally will split the $1,000 cost for a two-week camping session.

The Beggs also contribute to the “monarch cultivation project,” which helps children learn about the butterflies through observation and instruction from Begg.

That sort of hands-on involvement suits Begg just fine.

“My mission in life wasn’t to run a program,” she said. “I always wanted to go back to writing, but I love working with the kids.”

Daniel Begg, a photographer, said his mother knew what she wanted FEP to do from the very beginning: “reach out to financially disadvantaged children in Moorestown — children who were being left behind because of race and economics.”

Last year, the Moorestown Service Club Council honored Monique Begg as its Citizen of the Year.

The honoree continues to be active in the organization.

“I’ve been told that I’m borderline legally blind,“ Monique Begg said. ”But I don’t let that stop me."