A #MIGHTYLOVE UPDATE

i'm so excited to announce that our #gomighty charity project was a huge success, and that go mighty has completed the donation of $500 to sanctuary for families, the leading nonprofit in new york state dedicated exclusively to serving domestic violence victims, sex trafficking victims, and their children. thank you so much for your help!

when the girls at go mighty and i cooked up this idea for an online fundraiser, we had no idea what a wonderful response we'd get. it completely blew us away and made me feel all sorts of crazy emotions. we hit our target by the end of the first day and went on to more than double it by the end of the week! immediately that first evening we started to scramble for another backer so that we could make a donation worthy of all the women participating. it was a frustrating experience. these are sort of tricky, these public fundraisers. someone has to come up with the money, and the kinds of corporations that are able to make those kinds of donations want a lot of time to make decisions, so we weren't able to find anybody who could pump up the volume in such short time. i felt awful we couldn't do more. it important to me that this not be an if/then type of deal, too (you know, if you do something, then something will happen). i wanted it to be a group effort, where everyone involved could make a difference. every compliment and everyone participating had to matter. and this is tricky too because i don't want this to seem like a tacky announcement, but after a lot of discussion brandon and i decided that each participant should count. so we dug in ourselves and made sure that every compliment did. 

so to every one of you that pitched in with a tweet or an instagram or a blog post, thank you. it helped. thank you for making a very real difference in the lives of abuse victims here in new york.

new york state domestic abuse victims were first brought to my attention last christmas, when our relief society did a volunteer project for mentally ill abuse victims at a federally funded hospital in the bronx. unlike the women at sanctuary for families, these were women with little to no hope of ever recovering. most would never get be cleared to leave the hospital. because it is a limited-funding hospital and these women had come with literally nothing, most of the women there still had nothing while in treatment. many had no shoes, most didn't have a change of clothing, and there was very little available in the way of personal hygiene. we held a clothing and toiletries drive that month, and a woman who worked with the group as part of her psychiatry phD program made the deliveries for us. she shared a few of their stories with us that evening and i realized then how very real this is, how what is really little can actually make an enormous difference. i'm terribly honored and grateful for you for championing a cause i feel so passionately about. thank you for making this possible. 

xoxo!

natalie