Illuminate the Darkness kickoff 2019 – A journey through dementia

Hello. This is Ann Marie Hansen, founder and president of Gianna Homes here in Minnetonka and Plymouth, Minnesota. I’m reaching out to all of you, our friends, volunteers, donors, family members, that we have served here over the last 20 years to ask you to participate in our $50,000.00 donor match up to Thanksgiving Day of 2019.

So this is a wonderful past family that we served many years ago. Their father lived with us and the daughter wants to kind of give back and help Gianna Homes reach our fundraising goals for the 2019/2020 fiscal year. We’ve called this campaign Illuminate the Darkness of Dementia. In our constant contact e-newsletter, you will have read the story that this daughter has shared with us about her family’s journey through dementia, and their diagnosis in the late nineties. So quite a quite some time ago and how far we’ve come now in research and science and modalities of different care and so forth that we are able to bring to our residents each day.

And that’s why we need each of you. What it costs to care for our residents is significant. The families can’t always meet that 100 percent. And the cost of delivering care and what residents pay is, there’s a gap there. So my job each year is to raise money against that gap, so that we can make sure to offer our residents the outstanding staff, the level of interaction and engagement. It’s just a variety of all of these things, and the dollars add up very quickly.

And so as much as fundraising isn’t my favorite thing, and I’m told many fundraisers say that I know that it’s you, each of you, who make it happen each year here. So I’m reaching out to you to help us here in our Illuminate the Darkness of Dementia campaign. I will be doing some vlogging, I’m told by my marketing people and our, Breece, who is our fundraising consultant here, that I have to do more of this. So sorry if you hate seeing my face in your inbox, but I’ll be sharing more of our story and kind of where did we come up with that Illuminate the Darkness theme and why that spoke to us for the next fiscal year of fundraising.

But for the moment, if I could just have you all prayerfully consider what it is you could give so that we can reach that $50,000.00 donor match by November 28th, Thanksgiving Day, I would be beyond ecstatic for that. I know I come back to some of you every year, and you’re just so generous in your giving and here I am again, in October. We always know in a fall is our giving, our giving opportunity. And as some of you might remember, we’re not doing a gala this year because we did the summer garden party to celebrate our 20 anniversary celebration at the Minnetonka home here. And we were so blessed by many of you coming to that day to celebrate. Your families, your loved ones, volunteerism, just so many aspects of how many people it’s taken in our community to make us, to make us who we are.

So again, I’m reaching out to you to consider this. Look for emails, look for a letter in your mailbox, and an opportunity to do online giving in the next few weeks. God bless you. And you can always find .