The founders of Women With A Purpose, Andrea Paprocka, left, and her mother, Stacey Nami, of Titusville.
By Amy Macintyre
Women With A Purpose, a group started by Andrea Paprocka and her mother, Stacey Nami, of Titusville, provides financial relief for community members in need. They do so by holding monthly charitable dinners, and then donating the proceeds to a nominee selected by lottery.
For the founders of Women With A Purpose, it all started in 2009. Nami was overcoming health issues of her own, an experience she wishes to keep private. Afterwards, she and her daughter began to brainstorm how they could help others in need.
“We wanted to make it affordable, easy, convenient and fun,” Paprocka said. “We had a lot of girlfriends who wanted to give back.”
They based it on a girl’s night out with friends, but with a twist. They would host a dinner at a local restaurant and along with the price of the meal, everyone would donate $10 to a local person or family in great need or distress.
Paprocka said they found their first recipient when a friend told them about a young girl in Trenton in need of assistance. With the money they raised during their first dinner, she said they were able to help pay for her school stipend and buy her warm clothes for winter.
“After the first dinner we got a huge reaction from the people who came,” Paprocka said. “They started to tell their friends and it just grew from there.”
Six years later, membership has grown to 2,000 and a typical dinner will see anywhere from 100 to 150 attendants. And don’t let the name fool you. They insist that Women With A Purpose is for everyone and that plenty of men and children attend each dinner.
“We call it a girls night out, but it’s taken on such a life of it’s own and everyone is welcome,” Paprocka said.
“You’re helping out someone and meeting new friends or meeting up with people you haven’t seen in years,” Nami said as she explained why she thinks the dinners are great social events.
Each dinner is held at a different local restaurant that provides the organization with a special rate. A minimum donation of $10 is collected in the beginning of the evening, as well as nominations for next month’s recipients.
Nami and Paprocka agree that the donations are not center stage during the dinners. “The money is not even a huge theme of the evening,” Paprocka said. “It’s about showing the community and strangers that you want to help.”
“They know that they are not alone and people are rooting for them,” Nami said. At the end of each dinner, Paprocka says all of the donations go directly into the hands of the recipients who attend the dinner. The recipients also get a chance to speak and rarely is there a dry eye in the restaurant. “They’ll start to cry and the members in the audience start to cry,” Paprocka said.
Behind the scenes of each dinner, they are hard at work. “We don’t eat. We work all night,” Paprocka said.
“We make it look easy, but by the end of the dinner, or even before that dinner, we are thinking about our next one,” Nami said. “It’s a hectic night, but when you hear the stories of the recipients–this is why we do it.”
Both agree the experience is humbling. Paprocka said that each of the recipients may only be in front of her for a few hours at the dinner, but they leave a lasting impact. “I think back to my small little problem that I’m obsessing over and it puts everything into perspective.”
Paprocka has adopted the organization as her full-time job and looks forward to growing Women with A Purpose on a national level. “I have some things up my sleeve,” she said, noting the possibility of chapters or sister organizations in other states.
Bobby and Ashley Adams were recent beneficiaries of Women With A Purpose. After months in the hospital and a life saving double lung transplant, Bobby was on the road to recovery. His wife Ashley was by his side the whole way, but with the major medical hurdles out of the way, a different type of pressure came in the form of mounting expenses.
As the Bordentown couple begin the next chapter of their lives together, new lungs and all, they face financial challenges no newlyweds could ever imagine. Bobby, a probation officer, will not be able to return to work until next year. He is receiving disability, but it’s only 40 percent his salary, Ashley explained. She is a foster care recruiter, but is currently out of work.
Although Bobby has what Ashley described as good insurance, there are still co-pays, travel expenses for appointments in the city, and medication that he will be on for the rest of his life.
Shortly after Bobby was released from the hospital, an acquaintance of the couple nominated Bobby to be the recipient of funds raised by Women With A Purpose. By lottery, he was chosen as the recipient for the June charitable dinner at the Trenton Country Club.
Bobby was not able to attend, so Ashley went in his honor. Surrounded by family and friends, the dinner gave her a moment to take a breath after four months at the hospital and appreciate all the support offered by the 130 attendees that evening.
“It was amazing,” she said. “We didn’t expect there to be a turn out like there was and the majority of the people that were there, we didn’t even know.”
The mother-daughter duo responsible for Women With A Purpose say Ashley’s experience at the dinner is the exact reason for their organization; people coming together to support friends, co-workers, or perfect strangers in times of need.
For the Adams, the aid they received from Women With A Purpose was a positive end to a long ordeal. When Bobby was still bedridden, the couple decided to carry through with their plans and married in the hospital. There are no flowers allowed inside Temple University Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, so instead Ashley Adams draped a small crown of plastic daisies in her long red hair. It wasn’t the bridal bouquet she dreamed of for her wedding day, and the simple white dress her friend bought her was not the gown she she had in her closet, but none of it mattered. She was going to marry the one she loved.
The previous spring, a perfectly healthy Robert “Bobby” Adams asked for her hand in marriage. Less than a year later, he was placed in a medically induced coma. The 33-year-old was stricken with acute respiratory distress syndrome, ARDS, that led to irreversible lung failure. Doctors informed Ashley that without a lung transplant, the prognosis was grim.
While Bobby lay unconscious in the hospital bed, Ashley, 27 years old at the time, said she made the decision. She needed to be by his bedside through the difficult months ahead, so the wedding scheduled for November could not wait.
On March 20th, the first day of spring, family and close friends gathered in the hospital’s ICU wing for a wedding. Ashley found a judge to marry them and Bobby’s nurses brought cake and ginger ale up from the cafeteria.
Right before the ceremony, they received the best wedding gift they could have asked for: a double lung transplant scheduled for later in the day.
Women With A Purpose gave the Adams a lift, and despite already being husband and wife, they intend to have the Nov. 7 wedding ceremony they had began planning before Bobby’s illness.
The next dinner will be held on September 21, 2015 at the Chauncey Hotel and Conference Center in Princeton at 6pm. The recipient will be Mercer County assistant prosecutor John Carbonara, who is recovering from a debilitating stroke from 2014
Paprocka said his name was entered by a group of dinner attendants who knew Bobby Adams. For more information on Women With A Purpose, visit womengive.org. RSVP at wwap.njpa@gmail.com.
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