The Financial Blogger Conference 2011

This past weekend was amazing for me. It was the first annual Financial Blogger Conference (#fincon11 if you are looking for tweets about it), organized by Phil Taylor, of PT Money and attended by 250 Personal Financial Bloggers. You may be one of them, or you might have read their work through my frequent Sunday Roundups.

I’ll have another article or two to bring stories from the conference, but today I want to share what we did Friday afternoon. One of my fellow bloggers, J Money from Budgets are Sexy is also the co-founder of Love Drop. From their site : Love Drop is a micro-giving network of people who unite as a community to help one person or family a month. By subscribing to the team for as little as $1, we make it easy for our members to change lives in a fun and tangible way. Each month Love Drop delivers a unique combination of unexpected financial gifts, personal encouragement and the support of local and online communities.

The first event of the afternoon was to perform a work of charity at Phil’s Friends. Phil’s Friends is a faith-based charity that provides support and comfort to those who are fighting cancer. They distribute care packages to patients and their families, organize fund raising events, and even help host concerts with the likes of Avalon, 33 Miles and Mark Schultz. The purpose of Phil’s Friends is “to bring hope.” People are diagnosed with cancer every day, and often have no place to turn. We all need comfort, peace, and joy, and Phil’s Friends seeks to provide this “hope” for everyone who needs it.

80 of us spent about two hours helping clean and organize the new office space, help assemble care packages, and write and address cards to cancer patients. You can see the YouTube Video if you’d like. You can see the excitement of this wonderful group of people and how just a bit of time multiplied by a bus of 80 of us can really make a difference to this charity.