JUNE 2020 PRESIDENT’S REPORT
Dear NFWFWF friends,
President Chris P’Simer
Happy Pride Month! As we celebrate this month, I am proud to be a member of North Fork Women and I’m very proud of the work the Board of our organization has done. Although we have not been able to hold our annual events, we keep working on ways to help our members get through this difficult and stressful time. So far this year we have awarded over $13,000 in grants, provided LifeLines for 10 members and contributed $7,000 to the North Fork Community in support of Covid19 workers.
On June 5th we held a virtual First Friday Friends. In attendance was comic Poppy Champlin who entertained us with the lighter side of life and Covid-19. Poppy was pretty funny and I thank our past president, Bernie Hoban, for arranging her appearance. Afterwards we broke into smaller Zoom groups for more personal conversations. It was great to have the opportunity to see and talk to over 60 members of our organization.
Our rebranding committee completed its work and last Saturday the board approved our dba name, new logo and a tagline: North Fork Women, Building a Safe, Healthy & Active Community.
At our June board meeting, we discussed the two large gatherings we traditionally hold during the summer months: the Pride Party and our Labor Day Benefit. We decided to go forward with these two fundraising events with some changes that will allow us to stay safe, raise some money, celebrate and have fun.
To commemorate Pride, we are asking you to help us in a variety of ways. We are gathering photos of our members celebrating Pride for our Facebook page. We are also asking our local businesses to support us by putting a cling label with our new logo that celebrates Pride in their window. If you have photos (old or new) that you would like to share, please email them to us at barb@nfwfwf.org so that we can post them. When you see our North Fork Women labels in local business windows, please stop in and thank them for everything they’ve done to help North Fork Women. We will end our celebration by holding a virtual Pride Party on Sunday, June 28. You will hear more about that in the days to come.
For the Labor Day Benefit, we are running the silent auction and the $10,000 raffle as virtual events. Our silent auction will be posted online and raffle sales will begin this week. On Saturday, September 5 at 6 p.m. we will have a virtual event to announce our auction winners and to draw the winning numbers for the raffle.
North Fork Women continues to provide grants and LifeLines for our members. We also have the cost of our regular monthly expenses. So, we need your help. With no ‘live’ events on top of current expenditures, our budget is taking a beating. We are thankful to our past leaders who established a Founders’ Fund, invested your money and determined that we could withdraw 5% each year to apply to services needed by our members. We will most likely need to take out more than our allotted 5% to continue our work, but your participation in the silent auction and the raffle will help us limit the amount we need to withdraw. So please buy a raffle ticket, or two, and participate in our silent auction by donating an item or service, or bidding on an item you see up for auction. You can find information about the raffle at northforkwomen.org/raffle2020
We appreciate your help and look forward to seeing you at our Pride celebration at the end of the month.
Take care and stay safe!
Sincerely,
Chris P’Simer
NFWFWF President
president@nfwfwf.org