#BringBackOurGirls

Welcome to the new Teen Edition of ChAngels!

Hello Readers!

We are excited to welcome you to the new Teen Edition of ChAngels! As we have been growing up, we have chosen to run chAngels primarily by us teen girls now. Not just are we a Mother-Daughter philanthropy group anymore, but a girls-in-leadership charity group. We have invited new members to our group, to foster more ideas and to expand our potential to make changes for the better in our world! Last month we held a Membership Meeting, where we introduced our guests to the mission, values and history of  ChAngels.  Of course, every girl received her own jar for collecting spare change-this is a ChAngels staple!

The Membership Circle now has 20 members; every Girl Making A Change in this big, fun sorority-style philanthropy group. We have girls with great ambitions with ideas like ending childhood cancer, curing type 1 diabetes, ending gender bias and poverty, animal extinction and much more! We have girls who can change the world with amazing skills: being calm presences, persevering, being great at managing things, learning and connecting with people, using photographic memories and being outgoing and friendly. 

The six ChAngels who were part of the original mother-daughter group have become the 
 Leadership Circle:

• Nicole-Secretary
• Kate-(forever our founder) is now President
• Alison-Social Media
• Lily-Vice-President
• Sara-Membership 
• Lisa-Treasurer

Our five moms have become the first members of the Advisory Board, and will help, support and guide us. We are also excited to find more members for our Advisory Board, people who can inspire us and give us great ideas as well as share their special expertise. 

               

Thank you for keeping up with us! We are all so excited for this year for ChAngels, and we can't wait to keep changing the world! -Sara and the ChAngels

Just Days Away: Arts with A Heart

Arts with a Heart is a student-produced show at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, combining dance, music and multimedia to raise awareness of important issues and funds for a non-profit organizations.  ChAngel Nicole is serving as an Associate  Producer of the 2014 production: Café Casti: Proudly Serving Girl Power benefiting The Mariposa DR Foundation. 

Founded in 2009, The Mariposa DR Foundation, located in the Dominican Republic, seeks to educate and empower women and young girls in order to achieve their goals of ending the cycle of poverty. Each Mariposa Girl participate in a variety of programs from academic enrichment and experiential leaning to health and wellness and also serves her community 15-20 hours per year.  The Mariposa DR Foundation is an official Girl Effect organization, a world-wide collaboration seeking to change the future for the over 250 million adolescent girls today living in poverty around the globe. The Girl Effect believes "Girls are the most powerful force for change on the planet." You know we ChAngels agree and we hope you'll read more about the work these amazing organizations are doing!

How can you help?  Come support, celebrate and enjoy the show this weekend and bring a friend.  The performances are Friday, February 7th at 7:30pm, Saturday, Febuary 8th at 7:30pm and Sunday, Febuary 9th at 2pm at Castilleja Theatre. For more details, to order tickets or to make a donation visit  Arts with a Heart

2013 in Review + Changes Ahead for ChAngels

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The ChAngels team had a year with fewer projects but we were especially honored to support ChAngel Lily with her Digital Dreams project.  

Lily hosted a luncheon to introduce other mothers and daughters to Myanmar (Burma) where her family built a clinic a few years ago.  It was through their involvement at the clinic that she discovered a new way to help the people there and Digital Dreams was born: a project to provide schools in Myanmar with laptops to improve the quality of education for children. 

At the lunch, Lily shared how privileged she feels to attend a school where technology is so readily available and taken somewhat for granted. Her goal for this year is to provide 10 laptops, and each year thereafter, so that by the end of her high school career she will have helped supply laptops for an entire school. She fielded questions, shared an inspiring power point she created and introduced a representative from Partners Asia, the agency she is working with to ensure the laptops reach their intended destination.  

By the end of lunch, Lily's goal was met and funds for 10 laptops were donated, included one from ChAngels. Next month, Lily will travel with her family to Myanmar to deliver the laptops.  We can't wait to share photos of this important global work and are so proud of Lily for her hard work. 

We were also proud to put on our pink (one of us is wearing a tutu) and participate in the Hike for Health on a beautiful sunny California morning!  This annual event hosted by our friends at Poised raised funds to buy scarves for women who have lost their hair during treatment for breast cancer.  It was an inspiring morning and the hike provided ChAngels time to brainstorm about the future.



After learning that there are an estimated 30 million enslaved individuals in the world, many of them women and children, ChAngels Sara and Lisa were inspired to action. They hosted a hot chocolate stand at school to raise funds and awareness for the Bay Area non-profit Not For Sale, which fights modern-day slavery around the globe. The sisters worked with friends to raise $500, the cost to free one slave.  Through their sales and support from ChAngels they were able to reach their important goal.     They also were able to increase awareness about this tremendous problem by arranging a speaker to present to the students in their school.  We hope to continue our partnership with Not For Sale in 2014.

CHANGES AHEAD

Although we had fewer projects this past year, we had a lot of long-term strategy meetings and we can tell you, there are great changes ahead for ChAngels in 2014! When we began in 2007, we were a group of girls, aged 8-11 working with our amazing moms. Now that we are in middle + high school, we are looking for ways for ChAngels to grow up too. 

WE WILL BE UNVEILING A NEW TEENAGE EDITION OF CHANGELS 

IN THE COMING WEEKS AND WE CAN'T WAIT TO SHARE OUR NEW LOOK AND OUR FUTURE PROJECTS.  WE ARE INSPIRED!

A Sweet Thank You for SAFAR!

It's the holiday season and we love to bake and decorate cookies!  We wanted to deliver something sweet to the team at SAFAR, the Stanford Alliance for Food Allergy Research to say "Thank you!" for all their important work.  This program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford is currently running clinical trials to desensitize people from their food allergies.  SAFAR is a cause that is important to ChAngels because two ChAngels,  Nicole & Lisa, had life-threatening peanut allergies.

Over the course of the trial, Lisa & Nicole ate a prescribed number of peanuts, which increased gradually over time, until they were reaction free and both tested negative for peanut allergies.  They  have to  eat a certain amount of whatever their food allergen is (in this case peanuts) every day to keep up their tolerance. It is new, life-saving technology and is currently the closest thing to a cure that there is for food allergies. We can now do so many more things and no longer have to constantly worry about what they are eating.  (We also rolled coins and were surprised, again, at how those coins can add up so quickly.  In this case, $200 for SAFAR!)

Halloween at the BOO-tiful Fisher House

ChAngels loves the work at Fisher House a "home away from home" for the families of patients  receiving medical care at military and VA medical centers.    There are currently 58 Fisher Houses all around the country, where more than 160,000 families have stayed free of charge since 1900, and many more under construction. We love the Fisher House motto, "Because a Family's Love is Good Medicine," and we wanted to help the kids celebrate Halloween by providing goodie bags for them and their visiting friends.

We were proud to co-host the grand opening ceremony for the "Fisher House Market,"a playhouse in the Fisher House playground.  We provided market items (plastic fruits and foods) for the kids to play with and  baked cookies and provided drinks for the dedication.  



We smile every time we drive by the VA Hospital & Fischer House in Palo Alto, and were happy to learn about the care available to those who have so bravely served our country.

We Turned Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness

About 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer over the course of her lifetime, and over 85% of those women have no family history.  We were so pleased to raise awareness for the 2.8 million women in the US with a history of breast cancer, by wearing our pink and hiking the popular "Dish" in the hills near Stanford University.  Our walk was inspired by our friends at Poised who organize the walk annually, but this year our calendar was full on their hike date, October 27th.  So, in true ChAngels style, we walked on our own so we could still participate.  We were able to donate $200 for the Sisterhood of the Traveling Scarves, to purchase scarves for cancer patients who have lost their hair during treatment.