Thank you to everyone who made our 27th Annual Prepare For Winter Dinner such a success--including our remarkable sponsors and table hosts, host committee from PCA including On The Rise board member Laura Portney, keynote speaker Letta Neely, emcee Joshua Gerber, and our outstanding event staff.

We are stunned by the generosity of our community who helped us near our $250,000 goal. You can still give to our 2024 Prepare For Winter campaign and help over 400 women and gender-diverse On The Rise participants experiencing homelessness this season.

Photos From the Dinner

Thank you for making our 2024 Empty Bowls event such a tremendous success. This year, we hosted a 2-day event on March 23 at Puritan & Co. Restaurant, and a second day on the 24th at On The Rise. We are so thrilled to have yet again exceeded our goal for another year! Thank you to the sponsors, potters, restaurants, collaborators, and community members who supported this year's campaign. 

These vital funds support more than 450 women and gender diverse On The Rise participants each year, allowing them to access tangible essentials like food and clothing and transformative, relational advocacy services. Your support sustains our unique approach to addressing homelessness and hunger in our community.

Photos From Our 2-Day Event

With 300 On The Rise supporters, community members, and corporate and government leaders at our 26th Annual Prepare For Winter Dinner, we exceeded our $25,000 Winter Challenge goal to unlock a $50,000 matching gift, meeting our $250,000 revenue goal for this year's dinner!

Thank you to Tomasina & Jim Lucchese for hosting this year's event, and to Home Made author Liz Hauck for her moving address.

Thank you to our sponsors and supporters for another amazing dinner, and we look forward to seeing you again next year.

From May-June 2023, we partnered with Lamplighter Brewery to host three events benefitting our programs, including a trivia night, block party, and an informative On The Rise community night at the brewery. Lamplighter collaborated with us to create the Our House beer, which patrons could purchase from the taprooms knowing that proceeds would support women and gender-diverse folks moving through homelessness. This incredible partnership raised both funds and community awareness about who we are and what makes us unique–and what keeps supporters like you engaged with us year after year!

We offer a sincere thank you to all of our sponsors, potters, soup donors, supporters, and attendees, who helped us raiseover $20,000 in support of our work with people moving through homelessness. We are so grateful to have united with our community at Puritan & Co. for the first time in four years to experience an event that not only met our hopes and goals, but far surpassed them.

"At On the Rise I felt something I haven’t felt in a while. And that was hope. I felt problems being solved, and people being seen. I felt the dignity of personal connection."
-Lauren Sandler, Journalist, Author, and Prepare For Winter Dinner Keynote Speaker

At our 2022 Prepare For Winter dinner, we so valued coming back together as a community with our long-time and new supporters, sponsors, and community partners. Our return to an in-person dinner was a tremendous success, and has raised over $250,000 towards our work with women, and trans/nonbinary people experiencing homelessness.

Photos From the Dinner

Our Keynote Speaker

Lauren Sandler is a journalist and author investigating inequality, with a focus on gender. Her most recent book is This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN America Jean Stein Prize, about the constellation of factors that leave an extraordinary young woman homeless in New York. Lauren is the bestselling author of the books ONE AND ONLY and RIGHTEOUS. She has written essays and features on inequality, gender, and culture for dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, as well as cover stories for Time.  Lauren has been a frequent commentator on the BBC, throughout public radio, and on many television news networks. In addition to her journalism, she leads Public Voices Fellowships with the OpEd Project at Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Virginia, and Yale. Lauren has worked on staff as a producer at NPR and an editor at Salon, and has been awarded MacDowell, Poynter and Dora Maar fellowships. She grew up in Cambridge and lives in Brooklyn.

Lauren Barnes is a Partner at Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, where she has worked her entire career to ensure continued and meaningful public access to the civil justice system to hold wrongdoers accountable. Her professional endeavors are an extension of the interest Tony and she share in working towards equity and inclusion so that all may have the resources they need to live fulfilling lives. While Lauren is the Board member, dedication to On The Rise is a full Barnes family affair and they are all thankful to be able to support the mission of providing safety, community, and advocacy for individuals who have experienced the tragedy of homelessness.   

We loved hosting you in our space on Saturday, April 9, and hope you enjoyed the variety of scrumptious soups and eye-catching ceramics at our 9th Annual Empty Bowls event. This year we had over 450 bowls donated by 10 different pottery studios, and over 60 gallons of soup donated by 14 local restaurants.

Thanks to the contributions of these incredible potters, restaurants, sponsors, volunteers, and community participants, we raised over $12,500. All of this support ensures we have the resources to work with over 400 people in our community moving through homelessness.

"On The Rise brought me through a rough part of my life. I loved everyone there at On The Rise — I still do. I'm with them all these years. And I feel like I'll be with them for the rest of my life; they're my second family." -A program participant who shared her story at our event