Current mood:	cheerful
Entry tags:	african well fund, care, one

thoughts on what i did last night...or how i met Hanson...
last night brian and i volunteered our time to help out at the care and One "take a stand against poverty" fundraiser here in atlanta.

it's really the first time i've done such a thing - always been too timid in the past for some reason - well shyness issue, confidence issues etc.
it was a great experience for many reasons.

we feel like we hardly did anything, but we just helped where ever they needed help - making boutonniere's for the vip guests, setting up the market table and selling the market stuff (all things handmade by women from around the world) and then cleaning up afterward.

some notable thoughts i wanted to jot down before they became too faded by time because the more i think about them the more incredible, special and significant the night turned out to be!

even though i should be thinking in terms of helping causes on a grander scale, there were some personal successes i really want to write about because even though i feel a little selfish about doing so, i think it'll make me a more effective and better networker in the future.



- the biggest success for me personally was getting up the guts to talk to David Lane who is the President and CEO of One. To me, for some reason, he is like this person i could never imagine mixing company with. Which i know is stupid, and as brian put it, "he shits like we do", he's just such a MAJOR player in Washington DC as well as this international advocacy group, One, that has blown to the proportions i only dream of AWF growing to (it helps to have Bono as it's megaphone though :D )

To get face time seemed like a gift, cause i can't imagine how much time he would have otherwise for someone like me! Anyway, after nearly being dragged by brian (literally!!!!) and discussing how to approach him for 5 minutes with diane on the phone (yes i called her at 10:30 at night!) i waited nonchalantly for him to finish his conversation with a small group of people to walk up to him, extend my hand and say, "hello mr. lane, my name is lara wineman and i work with the african well fund." and he was super approachable, gracious, friendly and amicable and amazingly down to earth.

Apparently we talked for about 5 minutes about:

-grassroots organizing (he said it was really easy for him to get caught up in the washington dc lobbying culture and his board of directors and forget about all the important grassroots work),

-africare dinners (how long and boring they tend to be and that he thanked me for reminding him that the next dinner was quickly approaching and that he would be there if he wasn't going to be in Tanzania which he wasn't sure about - ummm imagine not knowing whether in two weeks you would be going to africa or not?!) and bush vs clinton as a speaker at the dinner (bush being formal and like clockwork and clinton being laidback and more humorous),

- visiting africa (i told him about awf visiting Ghana and Uganda and planning more trips in the near future and how hopefully next time we go i can get the vaccinations),

- wearing big boy clothes to events (apparently he was not comfortable in the tie he was told he had to wear since he was a guest of honor which soooooo reminded me of my friend rob who is our current awf chairman)

- and then he said he needed to check AWF out and that's when we traded business cards :)
So ... cool.

In retrospect, I guess i was mostly terrified at being the face of AWF and representing us correctly. Brian who was observing said i came off calm but animated in an enthusiastic way (when he asked me where AWF was based I waved my hands in a big circle over my head and said "everywhere! we're all volunteers that started in 2003 over the internet - i decided to leave out the part about Bono consciously) and also brian said i didn't sound like i was promoting the AWF as a brand but talking about it in a partnership kind of way where we're all working for the same end so why don't we work together? I mentioned how i thought AWF could be so much bigger if we had some sort of significant backing or partnership and i believe that's when he said he would check us out and i gave him my card.

Ummm ... i think that is all?

- another less stressful situation but personal success for me, for some reason, was i saw Zach Hanson off to the side talking with an older woman and decided to wait it out and see if i can talk to him about AWF. Yes, i was on a mission!

Hanson, the band, definitely is not on my radar, however they were also guests of honors and given a philanthropy award by care for their work in extreme poverty issues. over the course of the evening, through a video and their own "storyteller" type acoustic music set, i learned they have done some crazy amazing stuff to help bring the extreme poverty and health issues of africa to light and given tons of money and time to it.

they're promoting their new book and cd "take the walk" with these "journey's to action, awareness and hope" walks across the world where they ask people to remove their shoes and walk one mile. zach said it's amazing how many people are hesitant to remove their shoes for fear of getting hurt or even just getting dirty - while in africa many people can't afford shoes and thus are unable to go to school or work and many people get diseases and infections fetching water or going to the bathroom even in bare feet. I was like "wow, another thing that we take for granted."

i told him how AWF has a fundraiser we designed that schools and churches have picked up called "a mile in her shoes" which educates people about the distances women have to walk to find clean water sources and i kind of hinted at how we could get the two fundraisers together but we were interrupted twice by people wanting to take photos with him (people = women) and it was so interesting that he was exactly like matthew bellamy when i'd be talking to him and people would interrupt us to have photos taken - stop almost mid-thought, smile and pose, then continue the rest of the thought like nothing had happened.

then we talked about that i was really happy that him and his brothers were using all their success and fortune to really help those in extreme poverty, not just talk about it, but do things about it and he started going OFF on celebrities who pretend to help but don't - he's like "it's great that the One campaign got so many celebrities in their ads which i'm sure raised their profile but i have to tell you kanye west really doesn't give a shit" and i had to hold myself back from giggling at the thought that this cute kid just said "shit" to me. i told him i didnt know much about kanye west so i couldn't truly say whether i thought he cared or whether his publiscist told him to do it and zach looked me right in the eyes like he had an important point to make and said "he doesn't care" and he actually seemed really pissed off about it!!!! he even then stepped back and apologized! weird....

then he asked me if i was familiar with henry david thoreou and then he paraphrased an idea that corporations don't care about the little folks who need help but the people who work for the corporations do and how they run their own record label and he said that's probably the hardest part about his job as a musician and activist because corporations need to make money any which way to stay afloat but it's the people who work for them who can make the real difference. I was like, very interesting and actually honest point!

We also talked about how the world has gotten so small because of the internet and he said that Hanson were lucky to get popular right at the start of the bubble and i asked him how old he was then and he said 12 and i laughed and apologized about not knowing all of these things and he was totally gracious saying no problem and i touched his arm and said "i'm 38 so i wasn't really your demographic when mmmbop came out" and he laughed again.

i can't remember what else we talked about - i'm actually impressed in retrospect we talked about that much! but then his handler came over and kind of rudely grabbed his arm and pulled him away. but we shook hands, i gave him my business card and thanked him for his time.

this morning i looked up his website and saw the their charity does donate money to clean water issues with Blood:Water (which is a Jars of Clay water charity) and then it occurred to me "i should've friggin asked for something to auction for the AWF auction next month!" crap i am soooooo kicking myself about that!

sooooooo .... however there is an alternate plan i'm trying to devise in my head now - they're playing a concert here on Oct 28 and my friend susanna, who i used to work with but now she actually works at care, mentioned last night she may be able to meet them before the show, or i'm going to email the woman who organized this event and is the southeastern region co-chair for the One campaign and ask her if there's a way to meet them or have her get something from them for us. Stay tuned for all of that...

speaking of this woman, she was the one who gave me the 1% chance of meeting bono oct 6. i had traded a couple of emails with her before the show and told her bono knew of awf and really all i was hoping for was to have him sign a book for us to auction and she said that she usually sees him when he's in town and she'd let me know. well, she never let me know, so obviously i did not meet him.

i ran into her in the ladies room yesterday and she said "sorry we never got to see bono, he was supposed to record a psa for care before the show but he canceled at the last minute" and she shrugged like she was kind of disappointed but not surprised. I was like all chill about it and said "he's a very busy man, i know." then i said "he did a pretty amazing shout out to care during the show" and she said "ya, i know i was there, probably because there was a group of us in the front row all wearing care shirts" and i said "i was in the front row wearing an african well fund tshirt!" and she said they were standing in front of The Edge and where was i standing and i said "in front of edge too!!!" and we laughed cause we were probably within a couple of feet of each other!

ok - so that's a bit about why i'm kind of proud of myself today.
I've been pretty modest and shy about speaking about awf to non-friends and family (or at least in comparison to other AWF Board members) because i'm not good at remembering facts and figures and specifics, but i feel like i've actually finally broken out of my shell and can talk about AWF on a personal level telling stories we've heard from recipients, communicating what having clean water means to people who don't have it and how it transforms lives (i guess i retain the more emotional part of it rather than the statistical and i've finally figured out that's just as important).

i intend to email some of the care and one people about volunteering at future events (i know they're planning something for Word AIDS Day Dec 1) and hopefully somehow i can also represent AWF at these on a more notable or public level.

i also talked to a couple of women who said they would be interested in volunteering for AWF and got their emails. AND there was another woman there who runs a music consulting company here in atlanta whose sister lives in Kenya and helps build wells there and she has a charity called Water is Life - Kenya" and we talked a bit about grassroots fundraising and i gave her some tips on things AWF does to "cut costs" and she said her and her sister are planning a music album to fundraise and that we'd have to discuss the project and how AWF might get involved in the future but she's going to Kenya for a couple of weeks so she'd email me when she returns.

So, we'll see....
future is bright.
feeling pretty effing optimistic right now.
cool!