The New Orleans (LA) Chapter, along with the Crescent City Chapter and Pontchartrain Chapter, celebrated Founders Day during a luncheon on November 11, 2017 at the Federal City Auditorium in Algiers. Each year, Links Chapters across the country gather during the month of November to celebrate friendship and honor our founders Margaret Hawkins and Sarah Scott Strickland.
It was 71 years ago that Margaret Hawkins and Sarah Scott Strickland invited seven of their friends to join them in organizing a new type of inter-city club. This organizing meeting of The Links was not a spontaneous action. In 1945, Link Hawkins had conceived the idea of a group of clubs composed of friends along the eastern seaboard and had spent many hours with Link Scott in thinking, planning and discussing the possibilities of such an endeavor.
The two women envisioned an organization that would respond to the needs and aspirations of Black women in ways that existing clubs did not. It was their intent that the club would have a threefold aim — civic, educational, and cultural. Based on these aims, the club would implement programs, which its founders hoped would foster cultural appreciation through the arts; develop richer inter-group relations; and help women who participated to understand and accept their social and civic responsibilities.
Today, the membership of The Links, Incorporated consists of more than 14,000 professional women of color in 284 chapters located in 42 states, the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. It is one of the nation’s oldest and largest volunteer service organizations of extraordinary women who are committed to enriching, sustaining and ensuring the culture and economic survival of African Americans and other persons of African ancestry.
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