Message from Mother's Day Chair

Greetings to you all,

I am honored to be the Chair of the Igbo Women League of Minnesota (IWL)’s 2023 Mother’s Day celebration. I would like to use this opportunity to thank our community here in Minnesota and the diaspora for their support of IWL’s numerous goals and projects. Your support keeps us motivated and has brought about new and growing initiatives that we are engaging in today. Through COVID-19, IWL members kept working and never allowed not even a single part of our projects to suffer. We could not have done it without you, our donors. Your generous donations kept us alive and functional as a non-profit organization spreading our wings as we make our community a better place while keeping our youth (pls note youth is plural as it relates to a group) engaged. We are indeed very grateful. Thank you.

Some of our charitable projects include but are not limited to the following; Our Youth Mentoring Leadership Program for Children of African Descent (YMLP) here in Minnesota is now in its 15th year and getting better and stronger. In this program, we teach and promote our culture and heritage through language education, dance classes, cooking local delicacies, drumming classes, field trips, and providing mentorship to our children through graduates of our YMLP program. IWL also provides educational scholarships to less privileged girls in Nigeria by paying for their tuition, books, and supplies needed to make their educational dreams come true. These girls are supported through their chosen primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions. We are on a mission of no girl left behind because training a girl is essentially training a community. We currently trained more than 80 students and have about 50 girls who already graduated through the help of our scholarship program. We also provide yearly support to some Motherless Babies Homes in Nigeria by providing them with food, clothing, and hygiene supplies. IWL has also served our community well through covid pandemic and continues to do so in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Health and Hennepin County by hosting covid vaccination events to make our community a healthier place to live. We are also involved in many other projects through grants and the list goes on and on.

The 2023 Mother’s Day Theme is “Embracing Our Heritage Engaging the Next Generation” IWL is determined to make our projects our heritage. We are so vested in our culture and heritage and the generations after us must continue to remember where they came from. Our rich cultural heritage and values make us who we are. This is why IWL is working hard to make sure that our youths are fully engaged and will be able to carry on our legacy. We can only achieve this by keeping them engaged through education and exposing them to the fundamental aspects of our being children of African descendants and the Igbo culture.

This year’s Mother’s Day event will be a Fundraising/ Gala Night. We implore you to join us to celebrate our 29th Mother's Day celebration on Saturday, May 13th, 2023 from 5:00 pm-1:00 am at Hyatt Regency Hotel Bloomington. We will have a banquet-style event with tickets available through any IWL member. Please join us and we promise to make your evening worth your time. We will have our 5K/1K Run-Walk event on Saturday, May 6th, 2023. This will be held at Central Park in Brooklyn Park. It will be a morning of health awareness, games, food, and so much for the general community. Please consider being a sponsor.

I thank the 2023 Mother’s Day Committee for working with me to put this great event together, your effort and dedication are very much appreciated. I am blessed with a group of competent and smart women. I also want to thank my family for their support, love, and patience. I look forward to having a blast with all of you and our community on that day. Thank you for helping us make the world a better place.

Sincerely,

Anne Akwuba

Vice President of IWL

IWL 2023 Mother’s Day Chair