I, admittedly, spend a lot of time with my head in the sand. I don’t want to know about the bad things in this world. For instance, I don’t want to know about poverty. I don’t want to know that there are hungry people, starving children, homeless families. This bad habit of mine might be changing though…

Last year at a wrestling tournament I talked to the mother of another wrestler who told me about a volunteer organization she was president of, called The Angels Network. She sent me an invitation to their next reception. I glanced at the invitation, but didn’t bother to really read it or carefully read the website the invitation referenced.  I wanted to continue to play at being an ostrich and hiding from anything uncomfortable.

This same mother emailed me a few months ago and asked if I’d be interested in helping with the website.  She liked what I’d done with the wrestling team’s site. I replied that I’d be happy to help, but didn’t hear back from the woman until last week when she called and we chatted about the organization and the website. She forwarded me the invitation and I had a chance to really look at the site to see 1) what I’d gotten myself into and 2) what the organization was all about.

The Angels Network is an all-volunteer organization of women in the DC Metro area whose tag-line is “helping women help others”. The organization, according to the invitation, “helps support local community based programs that provide safe, supervised living arrangements for homeless women and children; helping them build self-reliant futures to move forward in their lives and careers”. From what I understand, the organization hosts a few networking dinner receptions for members each year. Each reception honors a specific charity organization. There are no membership dues and everything for the dinner is donated by various patrons. The receptions also include an auction, with funds going to the charity honored that evening. In addition members make contributions that go directly to the charity.

Tonight The Angels Network is honoring N Street Village, an organization for women that empowers homeless and low-income women to claim their highest quality of life.

It seems as if there is very little, if any, overhead and a huge portion of the donations actually go to the charities. In addition, the members are able to “network” with each other during the reception, so it is a “win-win” situation on all sides.  Charities get money — businesswomen get to network and have a nice dinner.

I look forward to learning more about The Angels Network, and helping them, at the very least, with their website.

Got to go clean some of this sand from my ears.

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