WMFHA Gives Back Target Audience
At DAWN, our Chili Cook-Off event “is the number one event that everyone talks about,” says Cheryl Kilodavis, Executive Director. Their team loves that the event is inclusive of their staff, domestic abuse survivors, and the greater community. In 2018, the event attracted over 500 attendees, 34 sponsors and competitors, 49 in-kind donations and 25 volunteers. DAWN’s impact on the community yearly provides almost 4,500 women and children with emergency shelter and ongoing support services, almost 14,000 shelter nights to over 50 families, and almost 5,000 calls from their 24-hour Advocacy and Support Line.
“The impact is direct service,” says Rhonda Smith, Childhaven’s Campaign & Major Gifts Director. Our Holiday Giving Gala in 2018 was sold out with 180 attendees, five sponsors, 69 auction items, and ten volunteers. We target Supplier Partner engagement by including “Lunch with Leaders” auction items donated by our property management members. Our members also donated eight huge boxes of gifts to the Toys For Tots toy drive at the event. Thanks to our support last year, Childhaven served about 260 children at their branches and about 480 others in the community.
The target audience for our efforts with Move For Hunger is two-fold. Before getting involved with WMFHA in 2017, Move For Hunger used to focus their outreach on moving and relocation companies. Together we piloted the program within the rental housing industry, and now over 850 properties across 33 states are participating. In Washington, more than 872,000 residents are food insecure. Nationwide, over 40% of all the food produced ends up in the landfill. Helping Move For Hunger increase their audience locally and nationally is having a huge impact on fighting hunger and food waste.
With Rebuilding Together, our audience is small and intimate. We take on a comprehensive scope to affect positive change in a couple of individual’s homes. In Seattle, we utilized the passion and skill of 13 of our members to fix up two houses. Five of our Supplier Partners donated in-kind goods and services, bringing a wealth of support and expertise to the project. Rebuilding Together was also able to form partnerships with our members for future project support, external from WMFHA.
Our association amounts to 225,532 units. Therefore, our work directly impacts at least half a million individuals in our state. Our residents may have suffered from domestic violence at one point in their life or another, struggled with finding therapeutic daycare or services for their children, gone to bed hungry more than once in their lives, or been affected by an unsafe or unhealthy living environment.
Because we choose to partner with organizations that improve individual lives drives home our commitment to making our communities a better place to live, raise children, and do business. We are honored to serve our members, our charitable partners, and all the individuals in our state in making it the best place it can be.