#GiveOhGive

I was pretty excited to be invited to an LDS bloggers powwow last week. You hear about them and you suspect they exist but you never know. The suits rounded us up and fed us a boxed lunch. I was ready to do anything they asked. Plug Swiffer? You bet. Talk about the Fictionists? ANYTHING!

Just kidding. It wasn't like that at all, except for the suits rounding us up and feeding us a boxed lunch. After that we met Megan (see her on my sidebar) and had a genuine brainstorming session where LDS Philanthropies asked us bloggers if and how we could support a scholarship program for single parents at LDS Business College. (If you are suspicious of LDS Philanthropies and think it might be a corrupt money-making society don't worry--with bloggers alone they sent $500,000 to Haiti last year. They're legit.)

They asked us if we thought it was possible to raise $7200 in November, which is enough for 4 full-tuition scholarships which can only be used by single parents. They are need-based and guaranteed. I personally know at least 4 people who could use these to basically change their lives. Think about how awful your day is sometimes and how tired you are at night. Can you imagine having to read or study or write a paper or go to a night class after your kids go to bed? Yuck. And--let's be real for a second--if you find yourself in this situation it's probably because your jerk husband left you. So--there's that to contend with as well.

And, if I may, your jerk husband probably (most likely) left you (in part) because of pernogrify he saw on the internet. I don't mean to be gross but it IS gross. The internet is gross. Let's take back the internet. Let's use it to do good things. I applaud the church for challenging us to raise this money (100% goes directly to the scholarships) and I applaud them for embracing social networking instead of being afraid of it. Well, I do.

ALSO, in the heady excitement of the boxed lunches and getting out of the house we, the mommy bloggers, may have implied that $7200 was nothing, that we could raise that in a weekend, and that they could count on three--no, four TIMES! that amount to come rolling in from the donation widget on our sidebars. We may have gotten carried away. But let's see what we can do. Let's just see. It's a good cause. Donate if you can. Take the widget and put it on your blog. Let's just see what happens. Like my sidebar says, "Mommy Bloggers Unite!" I embrace the term mommy blogger. Would I have chosen it for the name of my club? No. Never. Not, probably, in a million years.  But there it is. It doesn't have to mean "lame." I have just decided that it means cool and interesting. And, if my lunch at LDS Philanthropies is any indication, people kind of fear the mommy bloggers. It's kind of rad. Don't get us mommy bloggers angry...You won't like us when we're angry.