Mission Statement

To provide a place for parents and family members to meet and share experience, strength, give hope and awareness, to other families who have similar experiences raising children with ADD/ADHD, SPD, Anxiety, ASD, mental health diagnosis, developmental and behavioral challenges. Through sharing in this experience of raising these hard to raise kids, we grow stronger and more resilient.

Easy to Love is a 501 (C) (3) Non-Profit Organization

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Fundraisers, Giveaways, Groups, Oh My!



What started out  as Starbucks chats about our kids and the need to find a support group to join, led Jen & I to laughing at that same Starbucks a few months later after several people told us we should "just start one" of these non existent groups...and now, here we are! We are finishing up the Non-profit paperwork process with the goal of having all the loose ends tied up by October. We are already growing and reaching more families, we have hosted a retreat to celebrate our 1 year mark, managed to do a sewing class/community service project (with another in the works!) and are now putting together a fundraiser dinner for the end of September. I really am still flabbergasted at how much we have managed to accomplish! Our Starbucks giggles are still there, but now it is giggling about the fact we did it, I think we still both have some disbelief at how far our group has come! We are so grateful to all the support we have received from the community, our families and friends, and most important the support from our group members! We started tiny, but you have stuck it out.

Fall is here! So we thought we would post some reminders and changes!
One big change is a little adjustment on our name. Due to logistical issues when getting set up as non profit, we have changed from Easy to Love, Hard to Raise, to Utah Easy to Love.

For our Salt Lake Group everything as far as scheduling and location are the same. Groups start up again September 12th.
The Sharing Place
1695 East 3300 South SLC
2nd Wednesday  the month 7-8(ish)pm

Davis County Group starts again September 19th. There are a few changes, I think we have already announced them but here's a reminder.
New Location- Learning Solutions
347 West Gordon Ave #2 Layton
Same schedule- 3rd Wednesday of the month 7-8(ish)pm
Chrissy Young will be helping out a lot with this group. Jen & I will still be making an effort to attend, this will just help us be a little more flexible.

*Changes you will see at both groups
We now have to start out the meetings reading our group guidelines, these guidelines will help us get the most out of our groups. Also, we will make sure there is a copy of our Bylaws available for anyone interested to look over. They will be set out with handouts or other information from our group. We will not provide everyone their own copy (it's many many pages) but if after you look it over you feel like you would like to have one, let us know and we can get it to you.
If you have questions about these after the group, please let us know.

Giveaways & Advertising
Many of you may have noticed that we have been working to incorporate giveaways into our group. We feel like it is a fun little bonus and are excited that we are able to do it. Most of our giveaways will be coming from donations, this means we offer advertisement space on the blog to help compensate. We feel like it is totally worth it, but want to make sure everyone is in on the recent blog changes! I know I did a blog post in the summer touching on it as well, but because it has become more of a reality since then I thought I would put it out there. On a side note, a HUGE thanks to Chrissy! She has been a rockstar and working hard reaching out to our community to get a lot of exciting things in place!
Stay tuned for more giveaways, we have some fun things in store!

Fundraising
We have been posting a lot on our upcoming fundraiser. We are super excited about this event and how much it will contribute to our group and what we are able to do! If anyone is interested, the dates are Friday September 28th and Saturday September 29th. Dinner is $45 per plate which includes a 3 course meal, including dessert and wine, prepared by two recent graduates of The Culinary Institute of America. You can contact Jen with any questions or to reserve tickets @ 801-532-1412.
We are also coordinating and putting the finishing touches on another event. I am not going to spoil the fun, but I am going to say is Pampering, Mamas night out & a crazy good deal!
Stay Tuned...
One last thing, we would love some feedback on an idea we have been throwing around. We are thinking of putting together an Easy to Love call tree. People could list their numbers, emails and what their child struggles with. We would put together a contact sheet for everyone, that way there are people to reach out to that totally get it. There are two reasons we are thinking about this, The most important is that our goal is to build a network of parents who can support each other. The second is that it has gotten a little hard to manage the calls coming in. We LOVE LOVE LOVE chatting with you, it's just getting hard to juggle it all. Let us know what you think!
We are super excited about all we have coming up! As always, if you have any questions, concerns or ideas, feel free to shoot us an email! Utaheasy2love@gmail.com

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