By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

WestSide Baby‘s experiment in moving the annual Benefit Tea outside West Seattle/White Center, to enable more to attend (and theoretically, to donate), paid off in a big way:

WS Baby executive director Nancy Woodland made that announcement onstage at the Hilton Seattle Airport Conference Center with emcee Ian Lindsay at the end of this afternoon’s event. The preliminary tally of almost $175,000 was 40 percent higher than their goal.

It was facilitated in no small part by a round of raise-the-paddle donations:

They ranged from one teagoer’s pledge of $10,000, to many promising $311 – a number suggested by an anonymous donor who promised to match up to $10,000 worth of individual $311 donations – to smaller sums.

Each one of those is important, declared guest speaker Kathy LeMay, a “philanthropic expert” who said she had come from an upbringing more in a position to need donations than to give them.

She told her inspiring personal story of being moved to action while living in Seattle in her early 20s and hearing of the brutality endured by women in Bosnia:

She brought the story home by saying that while no one in the audience might ever give so much that they would have a hospital wing dedicated in their name, “You are the world’s great change agents … please be proud of it.”

And Woodland expressed her pride at the generosity of those in attendance – “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Earlier, she had expressed a wish that WestSide Baby could help even more children than the nearly 20,000 they served last year, provide even more than the half-million diapers they handed out – provided by individual and corporate donors as well as purchased by money WS Baby received – provide more car seats, clothes, cribs.

As board member Amy Daly-Donovan (above), the event’s first speaker, had said, “We are so grateful for the donations we receive. We strive to fill every request 100 percent but are often limited to what’s on the shelves.”

The exceeding-expectations $175,000 will certainly help toward replenishing those shelves more abundantly and more often. Its ingredients also included the proceeds from $50 glass-art “babycakes” made by West Seattle’s Avalon GlassWorks:

Two of the babycakes were also tickets to win popular TrollBeads bracelets, courtesy of Wyatt’s Jewelers (WSB sponsor), but nobody knew who had them till everyone opened the boxes simultaneously on cue toward the end of the event.

Yet more donations were generated by a “tombola” drawing – each ticketbuyer could choose which prize they wanted to try for including a stroller and an Oregon Coast giveaway.

All of it went toward helping families like that of Angela McCann, a one-time WS Baby client turned volunteer/donor featured in a video shown at the tea.

She too embodied the “one person can make a difference” spirit that was underscored with guest speaker LeMay’s final exhortation to the mostly female crowd, “”be the kind of woman who, when you wake up in the morning and put your feet on the floor, the Devil says, ‘oh cr*p, she’s up!'”

You can donate to WestSide Baby any time through its website at westsidebaby.org. And watch for word of a cocktail event in May.