The next day after I met Rachel and Emily in Greensburg, Indiana in the morning, and talked to Brittany in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Christina in Atlanta, Georgia in the afternoon, I somehow ran across the date for the FAB meeting in Anderson, Indiana for the next month. FAB stands for Females Active in Business. I’ve been invited to attend FAB many times and I know lots of the ladies that participate, but it has never worked out with my busy schedule to attend. But for April, it would. So I signed up for the luncheon and reserved my vendor table so that I could share my business, too.
On the day of April meeting, I got there early and grabbed the first table by the door. The lunch meeting was well attended and I was very busy sharing with everyone that came through the door. One of the featured businesses that day was a lady named Gloria who is starting her event planning business. She’s planned events for years as a volunteer, but decided that this was the time in her life to retire herself from her full-time job and put her organizations skills to use managing her own time. She got up and talked about how event planners can be helpful and she gave some nice tips. I jotted down her name and grabbed one of her cards off the table.
At the end of the meeting, I continued to go around and network, talking to people as they left. When I was finally packing and cleaning up my table, I noticed for the first time in two hours that Gloria had a table right next to mine. By this point, we were the only two people left in the big banquet room. They were folding up the chairs and moving the tables around us. Gloria is very personable and right away we hit it off. We talked and talked.
A few weeks later after we came back from the conference in Nashville, I called Gloria and asked her if we could talk about having her help me with a fundraiser. She came over to our house and was very excited to hear about our plans. She shared with me that her brother has four adopted children and that they have a sponsored girl in Haiti that they feel very close to - like a daughter or granddaughter. She asked me if I would like to share sometime at her church and said that she would talk to her other brother about speaking at the church that he pastors, as well.
Several days after meeting with Gloria, we had finalized the date and place of our first big fundraiser - a 5k set for August 24. I had the application and check in my hand to take to the park department in Anderson to reserve our date when a message came through on my phone. It was from my friend, Emily.
Emily said that she has recently taken up running and was going to run her first race in July. She had been thinking about how to get the youth of her church involved in helping missions and wanted to plan a fundraiser for us to help with our project in Jamaica. She thought maybe a 5k in her area would be a fun idea!
Wow. My jaw hit the floor! Emily had absolutely no idea that I had talked to Gloria about doing a 5k fundraiser, and she certainly had no idea that I was on my way out the door to drop off the park application and secure the date for the very same thing that she was thinking about. Amazing.
Oh, and when I shared with Emily what we were planning, I asked her to come sing and play in the afternoon at our fundraiser in August.
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