Often a good idea can fall by the wayside, or be hoped for but not realized, but when local business owner and realtor Mignon Lagatta ran with her idea, it resonated through the community. In the spring of 2017, Lagatta created a group of professional and retired women with the sole purpose of raising money to donate to a local nonprofit.
“Thank You Ma’am is a non-profit that gives back to other nonprofits,” explained Lagatta over the phone. “We’re a group of women who get together on a quarterly basis and commit to each giving a hundred dollars.”
Lagatta is a Nevada native who grew up in Carson City but left the region after high school. She lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles and then came to Reno. “I think my favorite part about Reno is we have that [culture],” she said. “I feel like Reno just has a little bit of everything.”
Four times a year, Thank You Ma’am members meet to select a new local organization to support. They focus their efforts on small groups that are not funded through federal dollars and try to highlight organizations that are not well known. Members are able to nominate a nonprofit and all the names go into a hat. At each meeting, four names are drawn at random; the member who nominated the selected group then has five minutes to sell the nonprofit and convince the other members of Thank You Ma’am why the nonprofit is a good fit for their generosity. By the end of one hour, there is a vote and a local group is selected.
“Our goal is to try and get more organized so we can reach a bigger demographic,” explained Lagatta. But over the past year Lagatta saw the most growth in membership, despite meetings being held exclusively on Zoom. Lagatta had an initial idea of having 100 members and at the April 2021 meeting, there were 103 members. With each contribution, Thank You Ma’am was able to collect $10,400 dollars from the meeting and put their total donations since their launch just shy of $100,000.
Groups they have supported include the Urban Lotus Project, the Reno Gleaning Project, Awaken, Project 150, Nevada Youth Empowerment Project, the Eddy House, and the newest recipient is Forever 14, a group committed to preventing teen suicide.
Lagatta wants to help as many nonprofits as possible “and there are so many out there we don’t even know about,” she said. She encourages her group members to go out and find these organizations and elevate them through a nomination. Lagatta also encourages these nonprofits to approach a member of Thank You Ma’am. Community members interested in joining in this endeavor can visit their website.
“Pull together, come together,” Lagatta said. “Let’s support our local community and just dig into the needs of our community. There can be ten nonprofits nominated but only four can speak,” she explained “but every meeting there is potentially four nonprofits being spoken about that nobody’s heard of.”