Thursday, December 18, 2014

Latest and Greatest

Greetings friends! Happy one week until Christmas! It's getting close to my favorite time of the year. So what's new? Well, last week we did another donation of items to the Dept. of Children and Families and we also dropped off stuffed animals, books and coloring books to Milford Police and Revere Police. Here is a photo from our Revere donation. They were happy to have our items- the lady texted me the next day and she'd already given out some of our stuffed animals.
Tomorrow, we're off to the Entre Familia homeless shelter in Mattapan for their annual Christmas party. I am so excited for the event. Yesterday, a local financial services company Shepherd & Goldstein hosted a wrapping party for us again.  I brought all the gifts over, we sorted them and we all wrapped them all. Every child will get a lovely Christmas gift bag. The company donated $250 and all the wrapping paper and gift bags. It was so nice of them. I really appreciate their help. It was a lot of fun wrapping the gifts.  Here is a photo.

I'll post photos next week from tomorrow's party. Santa is making a visit, thanks to 2 Southboro firefighters. I think the children are going to have a great time and I'm so glad that we're able to help.

In other good news, last week we received a $4,000 grant from the Brown Charitable Foundation. They have been supporting us for many years. They even increased the grant amount by an extra $500 which was a lovely surprise. Ongoing grants like this one is our financial base, so it is so important to have that funding every year. We also received an unsolicited $500 donation from the Milford National Bank's Charitable Foundation which was another very nice surprise. The local banks have been some of the best and most reliable support we've had. I am a huge fan of community banks and wish there were more of them.

On that note, I'm off to eat my grapefruit, I've been buying some lately from Market Basket that have been perfectly delicious! Until next time friends...

Monday, December 8, 2014

Welcome December

Greetings friends! Well, we are more than a week into December, so I'm rather behind with my blog title! So what's new? Well, things have been busy here. In happy news, we received a $3,000 grant from the DCU for Kids Foundation. The foundation has been supporting us for the past few years and I'm really happy about that. Having that ongoing annual support is absolutely critical for us. In order to keep growing, you need to have a strong base to build on. I got a little nervous before I opened the envelope because it seemed really thin. I always feel the envelopes from grantors before I open them- trying to guess whether it will bring good news or not. If it feels thin, I brace myself for bad news. Thankfully, this time I was needlessly bracing myself for bad news!

In other news, I'm working on getting the gifts together for our annual holiday party at the Boston Public Health Commission's Entre Familia homeless shelter in Mattapan. Some friends and board members have very generously donated gifts and I will buy gifts this week. I'm so happy that we have a Santa Claus coming to visit the children. One of our fire fighter supporters dresses up as a Santa- he's been to some of our events before and he is on board to come to our holiday party and greet the children. The kids are going to love it! Shepherd and Goldstein, a local accounting business is going to be wrapping all the gifts for us and they're donating $250 as well. I'm really looking forward to shopping for the kids. It is so much fun to buy toys!

Women's Success Network, the womens networking group that I am a member of, chose Project Smile as one of the two charities for their December holiday dinner- they asked members to bring in new items for us. The members were very generous and donated a lot of coloring books, crayons and some toys and art items. I really appreciated all the effort they made to donate such nice items.

Well, that's the latest for tonight. I'm off to eat my grapefruit, then spend at least a few minutes tidying up my office. Until tomorrow friends...