Inspiration Avenue Charity Auction

A number of my friends belong to the Inspiration Avenue etsy team and I have been hearing about the charity auction they are running from March 7 - 14, 2010.  The monies raised will be donated to benefit young girls with facial disfigurement through the Angel Faces organization.

From the "About" page at the Angel Faces website:

Established in 2003, Angel Faces is an innovative healing retreat for adolescent girls with facial disfigurements. This unique retreat focuses on the healing process within a holistic framework of mind, heart and spirit. The end result is a new and hope filled start for the girls who leave the retreat with skills and tools to create the life they want and to over overcome the challenges of living with a facial disfigurement.

Adolescent girls with facial differences often live a life of rejection, staring, teasing in school and unwanted questions? Many children with facial disfigurement are socially stigmatized, ostracized and shamed because the disfigurement in their appearance.

With so much emphasis in today's society placed on looks, on fitting in, on beauty and with the already skewed conceptions young women already place on themselves (starting from very young ages), imagine if you can, dealing with facial disfigurement?  Most young women deal with the idea that they do not look like the "ideal" image they wish for themselves.  That alone is more than enough.  Coping with disfigurement compounds the issue of image.  Being able to help these young women discover their spirit, their strength and most importantly, their beauty is a worthwhile undertaking.  I can't help but think though that more educating needs to be done to the rest of society.

Please take 5 minutes to watch the video which is from the Angel Faces website.  The speech by this young woman who is a student at Wellesley College is touching, moving and inspiring.

I asked my friend Charlotte Littlejohn, one of the artists who will be donating to the auction, to share with us something about how the auction will work. 

Items will be listed on the Inspiration Avenue blog and each person donating will start the bidding for their item(s).  Bids will be left on the comments for each post of the item(s) you are interested in bidding on.

The auction will run from the 7th to the 14th of March, so you will need to check back often to see if the item(s) you are interested in is being bid on by others.

When the auction is over, a member of the Inspiration Avenue team will send a paypal invoice to the highest bidder.  The winner will have 72 hours to make a payment.  Failure to do so will mean that the winning bid goes to the next highest bidder.

Bookmark the Inspiration Avenue blog so that you can return on the 7th to check out the items being offered and place your bids.  Good causes are worth sharing and supporting, and good luck to all who decide to participate.