Whatever funds are raised in Portage County stay in Portage County. The Aurora Chamber of Commerce & Valley Bureau hosted the fifth annual Jingle & Mingle with the Aurora Women in Networking fundraiser for I Support the Girls on Nov. 14 at Abigail’s Accessories in Aurora.

“We just decided to do a holiday event and get ladies out in the evening to stop by between 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.,” Executive Director Karen Bosley told The Weekly Villager. “If you can only stop by for five minutes, you come in and say hi and grab something to eat and have a little snack and you leave. It was just something that we decided we wanted to start doing,”

The event was sponsored by the AWiN organization, a network of diverse and professional women working together to achieve business and personal goals, and offered appetizers courtesy of Bainbridge Township’s Mazzulo’s Market.

There was no ticket purchase needed for residents to visit the event, but each attendee was asked to bring a donation aligned with the group’s purpose. Bosley said the donations and proceeds would be distributed to the I Support the Girls organization, a charity that collects and distributes undergarments and menstrual hygiene products for females experiencing homelessness or poverty.

“This organization is a nationwide organization, and it does so much for women,” Bosley said. “It helps a women’s self-esteem to know she is going to be able to have these products and possibly have undergarments where she has never had them before.”

I Support the Girls donated the items and funds collected to Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children, a Portage County organization that helps foster children and their families.

“This will go to them because some of these kids come from very poor families and maybe they cannot afford to go out and get the stuff so it will be there for them to use if they need it,” Bosley noted.

According to Bosley, the event became a tradition in 2018, inspired by the ACCVB Committee Chair, who wanted to organize a get-together before the holidays and host a collection.

It was first called a Holiday Open House but was renamed the Jingle & Mingle with AWiN because of its connection with the organization and has become a regular occurrence for five of the last six years, with 2020 being the exception because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bosley added that the event originated in Abigail’s Accessories and has stayed there since.

“People can come and buy everything. She has got clothes, jewelry, home goods and even has got men’s goods, purses, and home furnishing,” she said. “There are just a ton of different things. Her store is very well-known in Aurora and at night she opens it up for us.”

Each year the ACCVB picked a different charity to raise a collection box and funds for such as Volunteers of America or the Subzero Mission.

Bosley said that while the ACCVB has hosted fundraisers that distribute funds and collections to neighboring counties, the Jingle & Mingle with AWiN event has made sure everything that is received is redistributed in Aurora.

“The chamber is behind all of that stuff but sometimes a member has a business in Aurora and in another county and another city,” she said. “I cannot tell people ‘No, I am not going to help them advertise their events,’ but we try really hard to keep it right here.”

Although the event was sponsored by AWiN and was acting on behalf of I Support the Girls, Bosley said it was a great way to unite the community.

“You do not have to be a business to belong to the chamber and you do not have to be a member of the chamber to attend chamber functions so when people come to things like this, they are going to meet business owners or meet neighbor they ever never even knew,” she added. “It is a great way of keeping the community together. It’s more of a unity thing, just trying to get everyone involved and keeping everything positive and doing good things for Aurora and for different organizations.”

She added that word spread quickly about which charity this year’s Jingle & Mingle event would be acting on behalf of and just a week before the doors opened, the collection box for I Support the Girls was already half-full.