Left to right: Jane Ring, Debbie Ackerman, President Susan Yonts-Shepard, Kamila Lipowska-Torrez, Adriana Cabrera, Eilleen Brackens, Maria Cabrera, and Dawnielle Miller
On Thursday, April 23, at the Lyceum on Washington Street in Old Town Alexandria, some sixty people, members and guests of the Commonwealth Republican Women’s Club of Alexandria, attended its annual membership event. This annual meeting celebrates the women and men of Alexandria who contribute year round to the CRWC’s activities, welcomes newcomers to the Club and explains what the CRWC does.
A highlight of the meeting is the presentation of a donation to a local charitable organization; this year’s beneficiary was Casa Chirilagua which is Christian faith- based, none -profit organization of people “learning together to love their neighbors as themselves” in a Latino neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia.
Casa Chirilagua was represented by Dawnielle Miller and Maria Cabrera. Ms. Miller explained that Casa Chirilagua (casachirilagua.org ) is a Latino neighborhood organization in Alexandria that improves the lives of the people especially children and young adults in the neighborhood through mentoring, after-school programs, and Christian outreach. Ms. Cabrera said that the Casa Chirlilagua was founded to help refugees from Chirilagua, El Salvador but that it has expanded to serve multiple Latino groups and now has 100 weekly volunteers who serve 80 grade-school children and their families.
Another highlight of the evening was a speaker Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute (www.galen.org), well known for her studies of health economics and an old friend of the CRWC, recalled predictions of the Galen Institute in 2010 that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) would be anything but affordable and explained in detail how those predictions proved correct. The CRWC audience had many questions for Ms. Turner that showed that they were generally on the same wavelength.
