Soroptimist: Charity of Choice

WHAT DO YOU MEAN MAKE SOROPTIMIST OUR CHARITY OF CHOICE?

By: Governor-Elect Gail Dekreon

          Every year when I gather up my documents for “tax time” I love summarizing my list of donations on the  “Tables” function on my computer (it does the addition for me!).

          I am proud of the fact that every year I donate to fourteen charities and Soroptimist is one of them!

          With my monthly donations of $50.00 to the Laurel Society I am donating a total of $600.00 a year. That is about 15% of my total donations to Soroptimist!

          But wait a minute, what am I doing? I could be giving more to Soroptimist and less to other charities and still pay out the same amount of money to charities.

          In 2012 I spent a month raising $1000.00 for a walk for Breast Cancer in the name of my Soroptimist club! That money could have gone a long way to helping one of our Live Your Dream  runner-up  recipients pay off her late traffic fines  so she could get her driving license back and continue driving for Uber.  She needed that income to pay for her school expenses and support her Mom, her sister and her three nieces and nephews.

          I raised money for the Komen Foundation; they are big and they are good at raising money. But who needed that $1000.00 more? Komen Foundation? Or the runner-up recipient for the Live Your Dream grant who is living hand to mouth?

          Doesn’t this put the idea of “make Soroptimist your charity of choice” in perspective? It makes sense.

          I am just one person….but in comparison, my club paid out $6,400 to non-Soroptimist charities last year. In prior years we gave out close to $10,000.00 to non-Soroptimist charities.

          The differences between my club’s past years of giving to our current year of giving? Our Club gives additional Live Your Dream grants and additional college scholarships to local high school girls. We will be giving away the same amount of money, if not a little more, but we will be giving it to Soroptimist programs.

          Our club figured it out; we finally saw the light! All the charities that I support all year and that my club previously supported are very important, but when I can give money to a woman who needs to either pay her electric bill or buy a text book…why would I give more to the Komen Foundation? Or the San Francisco Opera? Or the Martin Luther King Scholarship fund?

          Think about it…as Soroptimists, who should be our charity of choice?