The Blue Lotus Center

I love a good spreadsheet! ?? As our busy season at The Blue Lotus Center winds down, more time can be devoted to fun office tasks like creating the FY2025 budget! For most people this already sounds like a boring post, but there is a select number of us out there who love this stuff. The more complex, formula-filled, and well formatted the spreadsheet, the better! Luckily I found a kindred spirit in my board treasurer, Roger J Dickson, who shares my enthusiasm for Excel. He has put in dozens of hours helping me prepare our budget for the board, complete with tables, graphs and detailed summaries. These are some of the best spreadsheets I’ve ever seen, and they’re going to make life way easier for our staff next fiscal year. If you don’t have board members like these at your nonprofit, you should get some! Thanks, Roger!

The future of nonprofits is collaborative. This past week I had the honor of speaking at the Volunteer Center of Washington County's "Driving Change" event celebrating the retirement of their famous Do-Good Bus*. Several times a year groups from local businesses, churches, and community organizations hop on the bus to volunteer together at The Blue Lotus Center and other area nonprofits. This is just is one example of the myriad ways that Colleen A. Mayer and her team at the Volunteer Center engage and boost the nonprofit sector in Washington County through collaborative efforts. We also attend a monthly "coffee chat" meeting with other organizations to discuss collaboration, and this fall we co-hosted our first (of hopefully many!) wellness days for nonprofit employees out at the Blue Lotus Center. Much of this collaboration is facilitated by their excellent social entrepreneurship cafe, "The Hub" which is largely staffed by volunteers, promotes nonprofit volunteering and events, offers tabling and bulletin board promotional opportunities, and even donates all of their tips to local nonprofits. There are few organizations out there that do as much for the nonprofit sector as the Volunteer Center, and we are proud to collaborate with them on so much. What a wonderful organization and group of people! *Don't worry folks! The bus has been replaced with a Do-Good Van (Minibus? Mobile?) that will continue to serve the Washington County community.

We would like to thank our amazing donors, and sponsors for an extraordinarily successful match campaign! We exceed our goal of $125,000 thanks to your dedication and support in helping us a blaze a boardwalk all the way around our 4-acre pond! We can not thank you enough for all you do for the Blue Lotus Center!

Donate now and your contribution will be doubled, thanks to our generous sponsors! The Blue Lotus Center strives to help make nature accessible for those who need it most. Please join us in supporting our 2024 Fall Match Fundraiser. To Donate: https://lnkd.in/grrc-Xim hashtag #thebluelotuscenter hashtag #accessibility hashtag #nonprofit hashtag #enjoylife hashtag #specialneeds hashtag #WestBend hashtag #outdoors hashtag #naturecenter hashtag #recreational hashtag #naturalenvironment hashtag #therapeutic hashtag #naturelovers hashtag #kindnessmatters hashtag #fundraisertime

Donate now and your contribution will be doubled, thanks to our generous sponsors! The Blue Lotus Center strives to help make nature accessible for those who need it most. Please join us in supporting our 2024 Fall Match Fundraiser. To Donate: https://lnkd.in/grrc-Xim #thebluelotuscenter #accessibility #nonprofit #enjoylife #specialneeds #WestBend #outdoors #naturecenter #recreational #naturalenvironment #therapeutic #naturelovers #kindnessmatters #fundraisertime

To learn more about our 2024 Fall Match Fundraiser or to donate: https://lnkd.in/gh8ZK5mH Thank you for your support!

Donate now and your contribution will be doubled, thanks to our generous sponsors! The Blue Lotus Center strives to help make nature accessible for those who need it most. Please join us in supporting our 2024 Fall Match Fundraiser. To Donate: https://lnkd.in/grrc-Xim #thebluelotuscenter #accessibility #nonprofit #enjoylife #specialneeds #WestBend #outdoors #naturecenter #recreational #naturalenvironment #therapeutic #naturelovers #kindnessmatters #fundraisertime

Join us for our 2024 fall march fundraiser September 17-27, 2024, as we blaze a trail of 1,600 feet of accessible boardwalk, seating areas, and lookouts around our pond! Thanks to our generous sponsors, your gift will be doubled and will have twice the impact. Your donation will help us blaze our first accessible trail, all the way around the pond for our guests to enjoy on foot, or by wheelchair. Many of our guests have not experienced the trail due to mobility challenges, your generous charitable gift will increase their experience here at the center for years to come! To learn more or to donate: https://lnkd.in/gZMbCM4F

Here is me and my friend Debbie the fish! At The Blue Lotus Center, twice a week we have friends from Portal, Inc. come volunteer to water our flowers and keep them looking beautiful. Today was their annual Run, Walk, and Roll 5K at Fish Day in Port Washington, and Debbie invited me to come run. I’ve never ran a 5K race before and love our partnership with Portal, so I decided to do it! How did it go? Hills make running harder, apparently. I run around a lake with zero elevation change, so that was a fun surprise. However, the Portal staff, volunteers, and clients that cheered me on helped tremendously. A wonderful event for a great organization!