Dining for Women and Lotus Outreach

By Ed Malley, Treasurer

Simple ideas seems to be the best, don’t they? The wheel. Binary coding. The ice cream cone. Simple, clean (ok, not the ice cream cone), and replicable.

Raising money for a charity is rarely simple; however, Marsha Wallace had a stroke of brilliance in 2002 when she called some friends and said, “Hey, instead of going out to dinner together next week, let’s have a potluck at my house, and we’ll give all the money we would have spent at the restaurant to charity.”

Simple, clean (unless they had ice cream, of course), and so replicable that there are now some 215 chapters of Dining for Women across the U.S. And over $1 million donated to charities which “…empower women and girls living in extreme poverty by funding programs that foster good health, education, and economic self-sufficiency.”

In a challenging and thorough process, Dining for Women selects one charity to be the beneficiary of their chapters’ gatherings each month. This April, Lotus Outreach (LO) is that charity. With the monies provided by this wonderful organization, LO will fund the program “Trauma Counseling and Reintegration Assistance for Shelter-based Victims of Human Trafficking, Rape and Domestic Violence” in the town of Sisophon, province of Banteay Meanchey, Cambodia.

To help raise awareness, Dining for Women created an event that was held at the Town & Country Shopping Center in Palo Alto on March 26th. I was there to represent LO. Sponsored by the newly launched magazine “Made in Palo Alto” and by the shopping center, and hosted by the retailer Brim, there was music, wine, food, and art to entice shoppers.

Ultimately, however, the focus was on the mission of Dining for Women and how organizations, and in particular LO, were delivering. We heard from:

• Palo Alto’s mayor, Sid Espinosa


• Jeff Chow, Founder, Collaborate for Africa


• Susan Negrin, Bead for Life, DFW Grant Recipient


• Keynote speaker: Bhatupe Mhango, formerly with UNPlus, United Nations HIV/AIDS advocacy group

I also offered some thoughts about how LO and Dining for Women are together going to accomplish a tremendous amount of good very efficiently.

Sometimes these events don’t accomplish much, with folks standing around telling each other what good work they do. But that day there were lots of people coming and going, ideas exchanged, raffle tickets sold, eyes opened and minds enlightened. Lots of energy and a raucous raffle. And lots of fun!

So there’s another simple idea...raise money and awareness while having fun. Alas, there were no ice cream cones; but the cupcakes were scrumptious!!!

To learn more about Dining for Women and our project being featured in April, please visit http://diningforwomen.org/.