Gifts Without Season

Cape Cod has more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations. Add to that number the nonprofit groups located on the islands and just over the bridges, and you have an enormous cadre of workers – many of them volunteers – who are filling gaps in critical areas that include affordable housing, the environment, hunger, and healthcare. Below are seven of these groups, a small sampling but enough to demonstrate the great work that local nonprofits are accomplishing. Now, at the threshold of the holiday season, is a perfect time to show your support for these charities and your other favorite causes.

Dancing for a Cure
Dance Designs of Hyannis

11 Enterprise Road
Hyannis, MA 02601
508-367-4531

E-mail: dancedesigns@comcast.net
www.dancingforacure.net

What started as one woman’s quest to help her best friend diagnosed with ovarian cancer has blossomed into an official fundraising arm of Friends of Dana Farber Cancer Institute. In 2006, Susan Mendoza Friedman, owner of Dance Designs of Hyannis, was desperate to help her best friend Karen. Being a dancer and not a scientist, she knew raising money for research through dance was what she could do best. This is how Dancing for a Cure was born.

A DFAC planning committee formed and grew, with a quarter of the current membership comprised of Cape Cod breast cancer survivors. The first DFAC holiday benefit was held in the Dance Designs studio and raised approximately $5,000. All involved were thrilled.

But that was just the beginning.

By 2008, the holiday event had grown into a full-scale show at Barnstable High School, with community merchants and restaurants hosting various DFAC benefits all year long. To date, DFAC has raised over $50,000 for Friends of Dana Farber. Initially, the Friends were just the benefactor of the money, earmarked for cutting-edge research to cure breast and ovarian cancer. This past spring, the Friends unanimously voted to make Dancing for a Cure an official Friends’ fundraiser, one of four they sponsor each year.

The fifth annual DFAC Holiday show will take place December 18 and 19 at Knight Auditorium in Hyannis. A Dance Marathon is also planned for March 12, 2011 at the Hyannis Middle School.