By Jamye Cooper
DFW Executive Director

Our education team works hard each month to provide key information to enrich our members’ understanding of our featured program. But occasionally members or leaders have questions that aren’t addressed in our materials.

When that occurs, people may be contacting the program director or staff directly. Some of our funded programs report that they may be answering the same question from more than one DFW member or chapter. These can be time consuming calls for the program. But beyond that, if one program has a question, there’s a good chance others might as well.

To address this concern, we’re asking you to please send your questions directly to the Education Team. We have promoted this as the appropriate way to get additional information and there are two primary reasons.

• Organizations receiving our grants are usually on a tight budget with a very small staff, and they’ve already spent a tremendous amount of time assembling and transmitting all the materials we require for their grant application and our educational needs. Their directors are grateful for the support of Dining for Women, and many will spend time on the phone to answer questions if anyone from DFW calls. If even 5 percent of our chapter leaders called one director they would receive 20 phone calls, many with similar questions.
• In addition to protecting a director’s time, bringing questions to the education team benefits everyone. When you have questions, it’s likely others will have similar questions. We can turn multiple phone calls to a program director into a single phone call or email and also make the answers available to all on the website. Your questions may alert us to gaps in our documents or factual errors.

So please help everyone in Dining for Women as well as respecting the time of our funded organizations that have small staffs and critical missions and bring your questions to our attention to resolve. Please send questions via email to: education@togetherwomenrise.org