East Village Garden Party
From the minute I set foot in New York after returning from Morocco – actually, from the bus in Morocco when we started full-fledged event planning via Joya's blackberry – all free time has been spent planning our Nest spring event. Joya had the brilliant idea to become a member of a beautiful garden in the East Village so she could rent out the space to hold our event. With weeks of planning, numerous pleas to the rest of the board to donate anything they could, securing food sponsors, sourcing opaque cups per the garden's requirements, finding tables, and even sourcing electricity from the bar next door, it was quite a feat. Exhausting, but on the evening of May 25th, it all came together beautifully. I left work early to set up, and with the help of my parents who drove in from Long Island with folding tables to place product, food and drinks on, we were up and running by the start time of 6:30 p.m.
The weather was amazing – temps in the 70's, not a cloud in the sky. My amazingly generous friend Matt brought his band Yellowcake, who came up with a Latin/Funk set which set the atmosphere for this wonderful summer evening. It was great to see some of the other NYC board members who I hadn't seen in months, and it was wonderful to finally meet some of our enthusiastic volunteers in person after emailing back and forth for so long. I may have even hooked one girl up with a job and another up with a potential love connection. Talk about the benefits of networking.
The next morning, I woke up to an email from Rebecca about the success of the event. Because of the money raised at this one event, we were able to fund a new community of artists in Kenya who were on our waiting list – as well as an overall business curriculum that had been in the works for a long time now. As she put it, "One fun night here (albeit with hard work) = a clear first step towards sustainability for women halfway around this sphere we live on."
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