Wills for West Marin Workshops – September 18 to October 23!

Join a free workshop on writing a will and leaving a bequest—offered in 8 locations across West Marin—from Tomales to Stinson Beach this fall. Fundraising expert and author of Fundraising for Social Change, Kim Klein, will lead many of the workshops in partnership with local nonprofits. The workshops on September 25, October 1 and October 13 are offered with Spanish interpretation. Continue reading to learn more!

Background Information:

A coalition of West Marin nonprofits – including Mesa Refuge – have joined together with the support of West Marin Fund to encourage everyone to make a will and consider including a nonprofit as a recipient.

We believe everyone should have a will—regardless of your age or amount of assets. Having a discussion with your family and friends about your will can increase your quality of life right now! Writing a will ensures that you’ve done everything you can for your family as well as the causes and organizations you care about, ensuring their existence far into the future.

For the people who live here, and the thousands who visit, West Marin is paradise and seems nearly perfect. But the good things about West Marin don’t happen by accident. West Marin’s natural beauty hides a host of problems like low wages, high housing costs, poor public transportation, and other challenges of rural living, and more than 60 nonprofits help address our local issues and create the quality of life we value here.

Kim Klein’s journey to become a pioneer in teaching small nonprofits how to raise big money started in seminary where her field placement took her to one of the first domestic violence shelters in the country, La Casa de Las Madres, in San Francisco, CA. Starting by asking churches and synagogues to support the shelter, Kim realized that the taboo in our culture about talking about money made it hard to ask for donations. As a development director at the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women, Kim helped them decrease their dependence on foundation funding by building a successful individual donor program. Finding that very little information existed about how small grassroots social justice groups could raise money from their communities, she decided (in collaboration with her friend Lisa Honig) to start a magazine, the Grassroots Fundraising Journal. Kim is the author of Fundraising for Social Change, now in its 7th Edition, in continuous print since 1985. Kim is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors at Mesa Refuge.