October and November are busy months for us, as we are preparing for graduation, compiling reports for grants we’ve received, and we are buckling down to make those big grant applications that require multiple pages, multiple wrtiers, and multiple proof-readers.
At the same time, we need to be thinking of End-of-Year giving, from all of our individuals supporters.
Thank goodness for #GivingTuesday! We may be launching on this late, but at least we’ll be in the mix.
In order to encourage all of our friends and supporters to consider us on #GivingTuesday, we’ve got two, interwoven stories we’re going to be tackling. Every Friday up until Tuesday, November 28th, we’ll add a picture and a story from one of our class of 2016/17. I hope you’ll be as inspired as I am by these stories .
And every Monday (like today), we’ll be following a new project that we’ve entitled “Give a Fish”
#GIVEAFISH #GIVINGTUESDAY
#TENDERLOVEABQ
As part of our capital campaign, and in conjunction with giving Tuesday, TenderLove Community Center is launching a “Give A Fish” program to raise awareness and raise funds.
We’re asking people (and children) to design and cut out a fish or a starfish (no larger than an 8/12” piece of paper). We have an anonymous donor who will give $1 for each fish.
We’re also looking for other donors to step forward and increase the amount we will receive for each fish.
There are two stories that closely reflect what we do at TenderLove Community Center: the first is short, it is the aphorism “Give a man (or a woman) a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man (or a woman) to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The other is the story about the child and the starfish: A woman walking on the beach was horrified by a number of starfish that had apparently been washed up on shore, then were stranded there by the tide. As she walked, she encountered a little girl throwing the starfish back in the sea one at a time. There were so many starfish that the woman knew the child wouldn’t be able to get them all back in the sea before they died, and she asked, “why are you doing that? It can hardly make any difference.” The child replied, “it made a difference to that one.”
We can’t put out large impressive numbers that show how much we’ve accomplished, because we are working with women one at a time. We’re not a big shelter letting hundreds of homeless people sleep on the floor in one large room, or feeding hundreds of people at a time. We want to help get people off the floor and into housing, away from soup kitchens and into their own kitchens. We want to teach homeless and low-income women the skills they need to achieve stable self- supporting lives. We are teaching women to fish. One woman at a time.
Help us help them. Design, color and cut out a fish or a starfish, and drop it off at TenderLove Community Center, 3600 4th St., NW 87106, or mail it to: PO Box 65156
Albuquerque, NM 87193. Get your friends, your students, your scout troop or other organization together and make lots of fish and starfish. (you could even mail a donation with your fish!) We can prove that one at a time can make a difference.
For more information: call Karen Meizner, 505-349-1795, or email giving@tenderlovecommunitycenter.org. Check out our website: www.tenderlovecommunitycenter.org, and our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/tenderlove.communitycenter