News & Events
INMED Partnerships for Children, Dominion Woman’s Club Partner to Bring Health, Hope and Opportunity to Local, Global Communities
Club will sponsor INMED’s children’s and women’s health and education projects in Northern Virginia and Latin America. First joint project will improve health, nutrition and academic performance of children in impoverished Brazilian communities.
Sterling, VA, October 18, 2007 –Two local organizations with a global reach have joined forces to improve the health, lives and opportunities of women and children in Northern Virginia and Latin America.
INMED Partnerships for Children (INMED), an international nonprofit development organization headquartered in Loudoun County, and the Dominion Woman’s Club (DWC), a local chapter of a national service organization, this week announced their new partnership, through which DWC will contribute financial and volunteer support to INMED’s community-based projects.
Through its school garden projects, INMED is working to dramatically reduce hunger and poor nutrition among vulnerable children and their families in communities across Brazil through a combination of vegetable gardening, school lunch improvement, clean water systems, and a participatory health and nutrition education strategy that recognizes children as agents of positive, lasting change.
“Dominion Woman’s Club is extremely excited about becoming a partner with INMED Partnerships for Children,” said club President Nanette McKeel Petrella. “Our organization encourages women to improve their skills, expand their rights and apply their abilities and special sensitivity to the problems of our community, our nation and our world. As our International Affairs Department began its search for an organization with which to partner, we wanted to find one whose focus was on helping children and empowering women.”
The first joint venture will be INMED’s “Garden Brazil” project, which is improving the health and nutritional status of more than 40,000 poor children across Brazil. Through this innovative initiative, schools cultivate vegetable gardens and use the harvests to improve the nutritional quality of school lunches—which for many students may be their only meal of the day. The Garden Brazil project also creates long-lasting impact through health and nutrition education for children, parents and cafeteria workers, development of clean water systems, and gardening training and starter kits for mothers to develop their own home gardens.
“Improving nutrition has such a profound impact on these vulnerable children,” said INMED President Dr. Linda Pfeiffer. “Children who are hungry cannot concentrate on their schoolwork, but more importantly, poor nutrition in childhood can compromise their ability to learn and succeed over their lifetimes.
“Still, as important as it is, a nutritious daily meal is not enough—that’s why the Garden Brazil project focuses on the multiplier effect through which our health, nutrition and gardening education is shared with students’ family members, teachers and cafeteria workers in other schools, and with the community as a whole through civic engagement and volunteer service,” Dr. Pfeiffer said.
For these students, their bountiful harvests represent more than just the day’s meal—they are also a symbol of a healthier future and the end of hunger.
This type of community-wide impact is what DWC wants to achieve through its sponsorship of INMED’s programs. “We were searching for an organization that had a strong record of stewardship and fiscal responsibility and was focused on results,” McKeel Petrella said. “We felt it was important for our membership to see specifically how we were making a difference with the resources we could provide.”
In addition to their work together on the Garden Brazil project, INMED and DWC also plan to collaborate on women and children’s health initiatives in Peru and in Northern Virginia.
“By working together not only internationally but in our own back yard, INMED and the Dominion Woman’s Club are building an exciting new model of partnership between nonprofits and service organizations,” Dr. Pfeiffer said. “We’ll be able to leverage our respective skills to create a greater impact on the lives of the women, children, families and communities we serve than either of our organizations could achieve on our own.”
About the Dominion Woman’s Club
GFWC Dominion Woman’s Club is an organization whose mission is to improve its community by enhancing the lives of others through volunteer service. It works locally in Northern Virginia, and also reaches out to our state, national and international communities. Dominion Woman’s Club is a member of the GFWC Virginia State Federation, which in turn is a member of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), an international volunteer organization with members in every state in the United States and 20 countries.
About INMED Partnerships for Children
INMED Partnerships for Children is an international nonprofit development organization working to creating positive generational change in the U.S. and around the world by building partnerships that strengthen community capacity to support the development of healthy, educated children who have increased opportunities for the future. To learn more about INMED Partnerships for Children and its programs, visit www.inmed.org.
Contact Info:
INMED Partnerships for Children
Mary-Lynne Lasco, Director of Development
281-465-4693, or contact@inmed.org