Meet Lisa...

Hey Everyone,

I'm not sure what you want to know about me, but I guess I should start somewhere. Thankfully, there was some instruction at the "Hello, my name is" blog site.

Hi. My name is Lisa Minunni and I am a multi-year senior at UB. This is my last semester! It has been a long and aggravating road for me (almost 7 years) but it is finally almost complete. I am graduating with a Comm degree in preparation of becoming an event planner. I basically want to work for a non-profit organization, planning all of their fund raisers. To give you an idea: over the summer I completed an internship at Roswell Park Cancer Institute downtown in the special events department. There, I assisted in planning some of Roswell's biggest fundraisers like the Ride for Roswell, Denim and Diamonds, and All Star Night. All of thest events are rather significant and raise a huge amount of money each year. To give an idea, the Ride alone brought in $2 million. Needless to say, I was very excited to be a part of such amazing events.

Along with my internship, I had the privelage of planning one of my own events. It's pretty amazing how it all came together. About 3 weeks ago, I heard a speaker from the country of Myanmar, where a terrible cyclone hit their area in May of this year. Embarrassed to admit, I had no idea it happened. When I heard what this man had to say, I cannot even begin to describe what came over me. 134,000 people were dead or missing because of this nasty storm. How did I not know this happened? He told us many stories of survivors; some of people who lost their families and their children, but even those of children who lost everyone and everything they knew. I just cannot imagine.

The next day, I went to work (at the Gap) and the company had challenged all employees to get involved in the community more. Long story short, there is a contest going on... whichever employees get together, volunteer at an organization, make a video about it and get people to vote for it online, the video with the most votes wins $10,000 for their charity. Since I was so touched by what happened overseas, I got a team of people together and we planned a Dance A Thon that raised $1,200 so far for the orphanage in Myanmar, where there are too many orphans than they can help on their own.

We made a video and it will be posted online by tomorrow night, which is the deadline. Would you guys be willing to please vote for us? You can go to this website and look for our video, titled "Giving the Children a Chance". You can vote starting Sunday, August 31st, one time each day until September 6th. It would be so great if you could help us win money for the children in Myanmar!

Now that you've heard me babble on and on, I hope that I didn't bore you too much. It would mean so much if you could vote for us. Many thanks in advance!

Enjoy the weekend!

~Lisa