Celebrating Success!
We’re celebrating the success of our first live fund-raising event held last month. This event was a collaboration between World Vision’s Strong Women Strong World and our Water team and co-hosted by myself and Debbie Quesada, Board Member of Strong Women Strong World and CEO of Golf Fore Africa. Our initial goal for this event was to raise new funds of $1 million in order to provide clean water to 20,000 people. To build confidence that we’d be able to raise the funds needed to reach everyone, everywhere we work with clean water in the entire country of Zambia, we asked Chris and Lorraine Wilson, Doug and Genni Garrison, Water Africa’s John Lautze and Golf Fore Africa’s Betsy King and Debbie Quesada to announce the pledges that they’ve already made to Zambia.
As we were planning the event, Tom and Mary Vande Gutche offered to match new donations up to $1 million! This incredible generosity gave us a tremendous lift. In addition, our long-term supporters Cindy DiBiasi, Pati Frey, Chris Gaddini, and Jay Welker agreed to join the event and announce their new commitments to Zambia. We also asked Brendon Noonan to participate and represent the Dornsife family that has been foundational to even dreaming about getting the job done.
We were blown away by the generosity of not only these partners but so many others that stepped up during our live event. We raised nearly $3 million that evening! We now have a total of $13 million in gifts received or multi-year pledges towards the total of $50 million needed to finish the job in Zambia. In a single evening, we raised enough to provide clean water to nearly 60,000 people!
During the event, we not only received the pledges, but we shared details of our plans and heard from our Zambian staff. You can view the 1-hour event here. Please contact your donor representative if you’d like to be part of the Finish the Job Zambia effort.