Great Causes
North County’s Edible Garden Project
LET’S HELP THEIR GARDENS GROW! Since 2006, North County Community Services has installed numerous small vegetable gardens at their child development facilities throughout Northern San Diego County. These gardens have become teachable moments — where children participate in planting, watering, and harvesting vegetables from the gardens that then are incorporated into the meals they consume at the centers. This hands-on experience has evolved into what NCCS calls their Edible Garden Project, which has been a labor of love for NCCS, a community of volunteers and corporate partners, and now you too can be a part. Please click here to read more about the Edible Garden Project and to support them in their ground-breaking efforts.
Taste of Africa Cooking Classes
In honor of the fifth anniversary of the WE Center for STAR Women, Women’s Empowerment International is pleased to introduce the first STAR Center cooking classes. STAR Center clients and chefs Olivia Laryea, of Ghana, and Hasno Ali, of Somalia, will be teaching classes in the foods of their home countries. Classes will be held in July and October 2011. Class participants will each receive printed recipes, samples of all the food prepared and light refreshments. All proceeds benefit the STAR Center, WE’s one-stop business incubator for refugee women in City Heights. The STAR Center is a partnership between WE and the International Rescue Committee.
Women’s Empowerment International (WE) has a simple and direct mission. It provides microcredit loans as small as $50 to very poor women so they can start businesses and create new and better lives. In partnership with nonprofit “banks for the poor,” WE works with indigenous women in Mexico and Honduras and with women farmers in Africa. In San Diego, our home, we help refugee women, many of whom have spent a decade or more in refugee camps, become self-sufficient entrepreneurs. How is WE different? WE applies 100 percent of your donation to the program of your choice. And, of course, all donations are completely tax deductible. Our goal is to help the 3 billion people in our world who live on $2 a day or less. We also hope to transform lives. Our own have been changed by on-going communication with our loan recipients, hundreds of whom have taken $50 and built an entirely new life. With profits from their businesses, they’ve put waterproof roofs on their houses. Sent their children to school. And when their children got sick, they were able to purchase life-saving medicines. At WE, we’ve made it as simple as possible for good people everywhere to come together to fund small loans and truly change the face of poverty.WE is an independent 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation. All donations are tax deductible. For more information, call (858) 486-6466 or go online to www.womenempowerment.org.
