Come Get "Hands-On" for a Good Cause

May 26, 2008   Comments (1)

Hey all,

I'm so excited! I just got done meeting with Emily Campbell, Director of Corporate Relations at COSI, about selecting one of COSI's many educational venues to be our charity at the Charity Speed Networking Event on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008. We've known for a while now that we wanted to host the event at COSI, inside their Gadgets exhibit, but we hadn't decided on who was going be the charity to receive the funds raised from the night. We talked about a couple different places like Second Harvest Food Bank and Project Compassion (a local AIDS ministry), but also really like the idea of choosing a COSI program because of the educational aspects. Being that Search Engine Guide is a free educational site, you can see the crossover.

Emily and I met at Caribou Coffee early one morning to mull things over and educate ME on where our donation might best fit. Two hours and way too much caffeine later, I not only felt passionate about what charity we should use but I also made a new friend. Thank you Emily for wonderful conversation and all your help! :)

So, without further ado, I'm officially announcing COSI's Community Access Programs as the charity for our event. The programs are funded by COSI's Community Impact Fund and are an offshoot of their Community Outreach department. Programs such as Community Open House, Family Friday Nights, Community Access Discount Admission, and Family Access Memberships all fall into this category and are designed to help lower-income, in-need families and schools to have access to ALL that COSI has to offer at a more affordable price. Emily helped put it into perspective for me when she said, "So, for every $60 raised, you will provide three families with year-long memberships to COSI." Now that's cool!

For those of you who have never been to COSI, it's AMAZING! A hands-on, science learning center to keep both little and big kids occupied for hours. Hello, why do you think we want to have the event there? But like any other large nonprofit organization, they struggle to maintain their facility and programs within budget, so we decided to help out, and hopefully you will too! ;) We're very excited about hosting the next Unleashed in our own backyard and really like the idea of giving back to the community. COSI is such an integral part of Columbus and gives so much back to the surrounding area, it's the perfect fit for SBMU's second Charity Speed Networking Event.

Please, come play with us! And thanks to everyone who made the first event such a success that we decided to do it again.

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