Fraternity holds night of Afro Latin music to support abortion access
Members of the international Sigma Lambda Beta fraternity invite the community to attend a fundraiser at downtown Manhattan’s S.O.B. (Sounds of Brazil) on Tuesday, May 21.
The fundraiser is to support the I Need an A organization.
Sigma Lambda Beta’s local alumni chapter won an $8,000 educational foundation award, which will help the group create an event that would aid with abortion access and in dismantling machismo.
“The brothers—we got together, and we started compiling ideas and we landed at our event, ‘Breaking Down,’” Karl Michael Iglesias said about his fraternity’s decision to try to create programming focused on cultural awareness.
Sigma Lambda Beta’s event is meant to create a gathering at S.O.B. Doors will open at 7 p.m. for a salsa dance workshop led by world champion professional salsa dancer Selena Tornez (who appears in the musical film “In the Heights”). Attendees can purchase tickets for the night’s raffle.
From 7:45–8:30 p.m. the Lulada Club, New York City’s all-woman salsa orchestra, will play their first set. DJ Ace Fusion will serve as the DJ between sets, and during those times, there will be an education station where organizations like the New York Foundation for the Arts and the NY Abortion Access Fund will provide information about abortion access, artist career support, and voter registration resources.
From 9:15–10 p.m., the Lulada Club will play their final set.
At the end of the night, all funds raised will be turned over to the I Need an A.com organization.
I Need an A, which accepts tax-deductible donations, operates a website that was created by a team of people in the tech sector who have had abortions. Many of the site’s creators found it difficult to find information about reproductive care services when they really needed it, so they decided to design and build I Need an A to make it easier for other people to obtain access to abortions.
“We started in 2016, really with me and my co-founder-and-spouse building the thing that we wished we’d had when I googled how to get an abortion and the information online was a mess,” said Rebecca Nall, founder of I Need an A. “There was a lot of information about fake clinics, there was a lot of outdated information about the real clinics, and there wasn’t one list to find every clinic near me. Everything was really fragmented, so we started building a database of all the abortion clinics, all the abortion funds, and built a user experience that enables abortion seekers to find just the information that’s important to them based on their location and how long they’ve been pregnant.
“Since Roe v. Wade was overturned,” Nall added, “we’ve become even more of a critical piece of infrastructure for both abortion seekers and the abortion movement, and we’ve been fundraising to continue investing in the innovation of our tool.”
When the brothers of Sigma Lambda Beta came up with the idea to work with an abortion-related organization, they said they also had trouble finding one on the internet. “We truly started off in the same way, with a Google search and trying to find an abortion-access advocate in our area or in the nation,” Iglesias said. “It was very noticeable how googling that kind of information was very hard in some ways.
“What stood out was I Need an A coming right up there to the top of our search. Looking through it and seeing what they were standing for and the fact that they are a 501c3 project, we thought that the intersection was right on the nose between our two organizations, so we’re on the path to raise somewhere around $2,000 to $2,500.”
For more information about the “Break It Down: Featuring LULADA CLUB” event, check out Sigma Lambda Beta’s Eventbrite page or contact S.O.B. at 212-243-4940.
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