Branch Profile
Northville Home Tour
This year's Annual Northville Home Tour will be Saturday, September 13, 2008 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The Tour features four residential homes and one commercial business---an artist's loft located on the third floor of a downtown building. All locations are within walking distance of downtown Northville.
In September of 1995 the Branch sponsored the first Home Tour. This is an intensive fund-raising project and one that is very popular with the Northville-Novi community. Four or five homes are presented for each tour. AAUW members as well as others in the community serve as hostesses for the homes. Many beautiful homes have been presented over the years with a brand-new log home being on tour twice.
The Home Tour is scheduled to coincide with Northville's popular Victorian Festival and has become an integral part of the Festival. It has been a sell-out event each year it has been held.
Funds raised from the home tours have enabled us to
establish scholarship endowment funds for the Women's Center at Oakland
Community College and the Women's Resource Center at Schoolcraft College.
We have increased our donations to AAUW's Educational Foundation, the
Legal Advocacy Fund and the Virginia Gildersleeve International
Foundation. Funds also help support the Amerman Elementary School's Gender
Equity Project.
2008 Home Tour
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Remember the Ladies
Branch members developed a research project which revealed that the Northville and Novi school libraries were short on books about women. The "Remember the Ladies" theme was embraced and through group or individual donations of $25, books about women and women's history were donated to the school libraries. Over the last several years, additional branch monies have been given to both the Northville and Novi libraries to expand their collection of materials related to women.
Amerman Elementary School Project
Following the Amerman Elementary School Gender Equity Project's failure to receive other outside funding, the Branch agreed to provide $700 so the project could continue. We have continued to provide yearly funding. This project includes several activities within the school for girls to help them improve their self-esteem. In addition to financial support, several members are actively supporting some of the activities with donations of their time and talents.
The "Lunch Bunch" is one such activity. On Tuesdays from November through May, many of Amerman's fourth and fifth grade girls participate by discussing age appropriate literature that incorporates, among other things, character analysis, and presents positive role models from the literature. It is a "girls only" group and actively shares insights, opinions, and analyses of the characters and situations being presented in the literature.
