$100 from 100 women in 100 days…

We pretty much decided that A Woman’s Work was going to happen and we would give ourselves 100 days to raise $10,000. Julie offered her beautiful home for the party and we invited all of our friends of which 40 or so showed up for wine and good food and great company. BUT – within 13 days we had gotten $100 from 100 women! This was a sure sign to us that AWW was going to be a success.

We continued to meet weekly and usually in the evenings as we prepared to let people (at this point our non-profit partners) know that we had money available. We adopted what we knew then to be “best practices” and only had a handful of criteria and guidelines.

One - the recipients must be women. After this was women helping women and we knew they had men and boys in their lives who would benefit as well.

Two- the recipient had to live or work in the St. Vrain Valley School District for at least 90 days.  This was to try to avoid con artists who would find a charity in the metro area and show up for money. Back then we were more concerned about being “conned” than we are now because now it is accepted that now and again – it is going to happen.

Three – Recipients must be referred by a donor, non-profit, church or school. This was a good place to start and there would be fine tuning along the way.

Four -All funds, wheter in the form of acutal funds, voucher, etc. will be issued to the recipient through a qualified 501 c3 nonprofit, church or school. This was a requirment as part of our non-profit agreement with the Longmont Community Foundation.

Five - Matters NOT funded by AWW include but are not limited to: Matters that an be funded elsewhere, bail, legal fees for those charged with criinat acts and credit card bills.

Of course we added a disclaimer that said all grants are made at the discretion of the AWW Advisory Board.