Just ask Olivia Thomas.
Corporate finance executive, single mother, legislative insider, and life-long volunteer, Olivia Thomas has played a variety of impactful roles. Now serving as the executive director of Safe Place and Rape Crisis Center (SPARCC) in Florida’s Sarasota and DeSoto Counties, Thomas attributes her ability to toggle among multiple identities to a single skill set she acquired courtesy of the Junior League of Sarasota where she has volunteered for more than 17 years, ultimately serving as president from 2006 to 2007: civic leadership development and training.
“It was actually …

It’s easy to forget in the bustle of our everyday lives that The Junior League has an impressive history. Not just as a 110-year-old women’s volunteer group now active in four countries, or as one of the largest and most effective non-profit groups focused on voluntarism, but at the community level.
Consider the Junior League of Oklahoma City. In its more than 80 years of service, JLOC has done a lot to achieve lasting community impact. The League’s first project was construction of the Walnut Grove Community Center, which served approximately …

Participating Junior Leagues are eligible for 70 percent of proceeds
Stunned by the U.S. Census Bureau statistic showing that in 2010 one in five U.S. children was living below the poverty line and convinced that children have the innate capacity to help one another, Junior League of the Palm Beaches Sustainer Elizabeth Truong has just authored a book entitled Donate Clothes, which teaches children, through story and illustrations, the rewards of helping others.
Available on the Web through www.sarageoffrey.com or Amazon.com, Donate Clothes is the first book in a series known as …

Maybe it helps to be in LA, but the Junior League of Los Angeles has just been named the winner of a prestigious 2012 Women in Film PSA Production Award for its “Speak Up When You’re Down” campaign promoting perinatal depression awareness. The PSA, which will be developed in both English and Spanish for use in U.S. and international markets, is designed to educate women, their families and health care providers on a major health issue that affects mothers regardless of income or education.
The competition was tough. JLLA joined other …

Junior Leagues have, for decades, created and run some amazing projects addressing big problems like childhood obesity, women’s health, illiteracy, alcoholism and foster care. So it’s ironic that many community members recognize Junior Leagues best for their fall/winter holiday markets.
But that’s OK, given the purpose of these fundraisers, which is to finance initiatives that create long-term community-wide impact.
And, let’s face it, holiday markets are fun – fun to put on (but a lot of work!) and fun for the families who shop there. And who in some cases also have …

Those are big topics. And you are invited to participate. It’s a concrete demonstration of the collective power of the more than 155,000 members of The Junior League that the producers of Women, War & Peace, a new documentary that focuses on women around the world living in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan, reached out to us to generate awareness of the documentary and the global issues behind it.
Airing as a five-part series on PBS affiliates around the country, starting on October 11, the documentary places women at the …

. . .that knows no borders. Today, around the world, there are more people held in slavery than at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. The United Nations estimates that 12 million people worldwide are exploited through forced labor and the commercial sex trade, and in the U.S. alone, one hundred thousand minors are believed to be victims of sexual exploitation.
What are you going to do about it?
 
Learn
Find out more about the problem of modern-day slavery and how you can help to eradicate it:
Government Resources

United States Department of Justice
Characteristics …

This August marked the premiere of the Disney DreamWorks feature film “The Help,” based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, which portrays the relationship between the races in the South in the early 1960s through the eyes of black maids employed by white housewives, many of whom are members of the Junior League of Jackson, MS. In the midst of the film’s jampacked promotional  tour, our editor was one of the hordes of media who got the chance to chat (very briefly) with the Jackson triumvirate that brought the film …

The Junior League of Boca Raton was honored with the COMMUNITY IMPACT AWARD for improving, in a sustainable way, the lives of low-income farmworkers in its work with In the Pines.
Working in concert with its community partners—the Farmworker Children’s Council and St. Jude Church—the League developed a rich variety of services critical to keeping the families who reside at ITP intact, and pioneered a program to replace 20 of ITP’s outdated residences with dwellings that are LEED Platinum-certified.
To keep the rent affordable, the League took a cost-efficient approach to environmentally …

Three months after the devastating tornado that hit Joplin, MO in May, survivors are still picking up the pieces and putting them back together. But life goes on, and one important facet of life in any town is the first day of school. And even though six of Joplin’s 18 public schools were wrecked in the storm, and three other schools need to undergo major repairs, school opened on schedule this year.
Because there isn’t a Junior League in Joplin, the Junior League of Kansas City, Missouri stepped in to help …