Charity diner

Laci Bell Crow is a registered nurse at Renown Medical Center and also volunteers as the Reno chapter leader of the national charity organization Dining for Women. Crow is hosting a charity fundraiser dinner on Feb. 21. For more information, visit diningforwomen.org or contact Crow at lacileebell@gmail.com.

What’s Dining for Women?

What we do is we have a potluck, and instead of using the money that we'd use to go out to eat, we donate that money that we would have gone out to eat with, to help girls and women in extreme poverty go to school and have better futures.

What are some of the organizations you’re working with?

One of them is called Smiles on Wings. That helps girls, little girls, who are rescued from brothels. It houses them and gives them an education, so they don't get stolen back and have to live a life of forced prostitution. … There are like 20 different small grass roots organizations that we give to, nothing big. We're giving nursing scholarships to girls in Kenya, so that they can go to secondary school and college. Otherwise, they'd have no access to secondary school. After fifth grade, that's it, being girls.

Tell me more about the dinners and the concept.

We all meet at one of our houses. It'll be my house for the first one. And we all bring food or a drink, wine or snacks to share. We socialize for a bit and then we watch a video. Dining for Women is a national organization, so they send me these videos. So we watch the video and learn all about the cause we're donating to that month. And then we learn about it, talk about, spread awareness, and, most importantly, we donate to it.

What got you interested in this?

I've been to places where I've seen women and girls treated poorly and not having access to education and their bodies flesh-peddled. And I think we can help that problem. I've been to Honduras, Europe, Mexico. I've just seen poverty and lack of opportunity, especially for women and girls. I'm a nurse, and I came from San Diego recently, and I saw a lot of genital mutilation in the Somali girls from there. It's really terrible, and almost every girl in Somalia gets that. So that's one of the things we give to is a clinic that helps repair the damage that's done after they have a baby, because oftentimes, when they have genital mutilation, their baby dies, and the mama could die. But we can fix it.

That’s terrifying.

I know. It's so sad. … There's this quote from Gandhi that I think really captures Dining For Women and that's “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”