Orinda Juniors members came together to assemble 72 blankets with a message of encouragement for women undergoing breast cancer treatment. These blankets are intended to offer extra comfort to patients during their treatment. We will be donating the blankets to the HERS Breast Cancer Foundation in Fremont, California.
The Orinda Junior Women’s Club is thrilled to announce the winners of Youth Ink 2024, the annual creative writing contest open to middle school students who live in or attend school in Orinda. The prompt for this year’s event was “Roots,” though participants had the freedom to explore other topics. Here are the talented winners of this year’s top prizes:
In addition, we’d like to acknowledge the honorable mentions for their commendable entries (in alphabetical order):
The awards ceremony took place at the Orinda Library Auditorium, with guest speaker, Kathy Cordova, Executive Editor of The Orinda News. We extend our gratitude to all participants for sharing their talents with us. We are very grateful for our volunteer judges – Linda Bizzarri, A.J. Brown, Anne Lowell, and Sana Shukairy. Their commitment, expertise, and careful consideration were instrumental in reviewing each entry and selecting this year’s winners from an outstanding pool of submissions. Lastly, we’d like to thank our community sponsors: Friends of the Orinda Library, The Intuitive Writing Project, Lamorinda Arts Council and Orinda Community Foundation.
In November, the Orinda Juniors gathered to make two gifts for our annual fundraiser. The first is a beautiful olivewood spoon and ceramic spoon rest presented in a reusable burlap gift bag. Additionally, we’ve created charming wildflower bouquets that come in your choice of colored glass vases – yellow, blue, green or grey.
Orinda Juniors members made 38 mastectomy comfort pillows during our September meeting. The pillows will be donated to HERS Breast Cancer Foundation, where they will be given to patients who are recovering from breast cancer surgery.
At the Orinda Juniors Women’s Club April meeting, members came together to help package 1,800 reusable cloth masks for students and staff of Oakland Unified School District. The masks were produced by Junior member, Kristiana Tom, owner of Mask the Bay, who received a donation of 15 bolts of fabric from Orimono Imports. The support of a retired Oakland elementary teacher, Mrs. Penny Wong and her neighbors also contributed to this amazing effort.
In early December we VIRTUALLY held our annual holiday meeting and mug exchange. While we only had a few of us there, we still enjoyed spending some time together, playing some trivia, and enjoying a bit of the holiday spirit.
The Orinda Juniors were the lucky recipients of a chocolate making class that was held by two wonderful ladies, Earlene and Erin. Earlene has been a chocolatier for 50 years! How lucky were we? So magical. We even got to take some home to hide from our families
Thank you to the Wilder crew for allowing our event to be held at the beautiful Quarry House. And thank you all for a great turnout!
Thanks to so many of who came to our meeting last night and helped to make our time with our guest speaker, Dr. Allyson Mayo, such a great conversation! We had an amazing discussion and learned so much about the root causes of behaviors and what we can do to help address them in our families and lives.
Happy holidays from all of the Orinda Juniors! We hosted our annual holiday party tonight.
Thank you all so much for the gifts you donated to The Bay Area Crisis Nursery families. The Nursery depends on outside assistance and is mostly run by volunteers. Every gift is a blessing.
