Christina Lessard and her friends want to change the world, or at least a little part of Kent County, one month at a time.
By Jeff Brown, The Dover Post
Kent County, Del.
Christina Lessard and her friends want to change the world, or at least a little part of Kent County, one month at a time.
Lessard, Kim Willson, Stephanie Preece, Erin Barrett and Catrina Sharp make up Gals That Give, a Dover-based nonprofit whose mission is to raise cash for local charities.
They’ve done that by hosting a dinner each month for the past year. Dubbed Girls Night Out, it’s exactly that: a gathering of local women who dine together with the opportunity to learn more about assistance groups and contribute to those groups in a meaningful way.
“We all met through different nonprofits or young professional groups,” said Lessard, who first met Willson and Preece at a meeting of Next Generation Delaware South, a philanthropic group based in Georgetown. Sharp, who works with Lessard at Lessard Builders in Camden, came aboard to contribute her marketing skills, and the four became five with the addition of Barrett, whose family owns Dover’s Duncan Center, where each of the Gals That Give dinners are held.
Why is a group like Gals that Give needed today?
Our goal is to support and to bring money back to Kent County and to help out nonprofits here. We do that through the dinners, where leaders of some of those groups can get up and talk about what they do. We have raffles and auctions, and the money goes directly to the nonprofits. What’s rewarding for us is that we try to pick organizations that need the money, but who don’t have a lot of outreach or the opportunity to put on fund raising events each year. Their representatives get up and talk about their groups and that time, spent in front of these women, can really help them spread the word about what they do.
You’ve raised more than $40,000 in less than a year. Are you surprised by your success?
This is our first anniversary and I can’t believe how far we’ve come in just a year. The support we’ve gotten is just incredible. We know every month we’ll have at least 120 women here because they always support us. And the support we’ve gotten from businesses, who contribute a lot of the [door] prizes, has been unbelievable. We’ve got at least 25 who contribute to everything we do.