100 Women Who Care Albany held our quarterly meeting on November 14, 2024 with a large turnout of members in person and also joining the meeting live via Zoom.

During this meeting, we heard from our August recipient, Bethlehem Community Fund‘s president, Paul Gutman. He explained how since 1942 this organization has been quietly, quickly and confidentially helping neighbors with requests of typically $20-$800. Our collective contribution will be funding the 2024-2025 Bethlehem schools backpack program. A.G. Irons, coach at Bethlehem Central High School, spoke to us about how he started the program 8 years ago to quietly help students with food on the weekends and vacations when school lunches weren’t available to them. During Covid, the program expanded from 20 to 85-90 bags per week. It continues today to provide much needed help to students. This year the program lost support when Hannaford chose to send their donations directly to the Regional Food Bank instead of this program. The 100WWC Albany collective giving will allow this backpack program to continue by buying provisions needed for the backpacks during this school year.

We had three worthy charities present at out November 2024 meeting:

• Caring Together Inc
• Interfaith Partnership for the Homeless
• Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Capital Region

This quarter we collectively selected Caring Together Inc for our charitable giving. Founded in 1996, this organization provides support for ovarian cancer patients and their families with focus on support, education, awareness and funding research and development. Our charitable giving will be used to fund R&D at Albany Med focused on to finding an early detection test for ovarian cancer and more effective treatments.

The collection 100 Women Who Care donations were presented at Albany Medical Center to Dong Joo (Ellen) Cheon, PhD, for her ongoing research on ovarian cancer. Caring Together has been support Dr. Cheon’s research since 2019.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday February 13, 2025. You can learn more about our meetings here. We hope you will join us!