How do we make a bigger impact?

That’s the question a group of five women in Des Moines asked themselves when looking to give back to the community. Rather than give $50 to charity, the group realized it made more sense to rally people to pool their resources.

The group 100+ Chicks for Charity started on that simple premise. Led by the founding group of Liz Lidgett, Mary Cownie, Ashley Shafer, Charise Flynn and Jenny Ferrari, 100+ Chicks launched earlier this year with the idea of getting at least 100 women together once per quarter to raise at least $50 each for charity, for a total of $5,000 per quarter and $20,000 per year.

“It was just sort of a grassroots effort, a few of us coming together, people getting involved,” Flynn said.

At the first quarterly meeting on Feb. 22, more than 120 women donated $6,200 to the Children’s Cancer Connection.

The idea came from an existing organization, 100+ Women Who Care, which sets a goal to raise $100 per member four times a year, twice as much as 100+ Chicks. The 100+ Chicks founders wanted to find a way to get people involved who wanted to give back but could only afford to do so at lower levels.

At each meeting, participants are asked to submit a charity of their choice for the money to go to. Three people are chosen randomly to present their charity to the group, which votes on which cause should receive the money after the presentations. In addition to selecting a charity, an important element of the process is that it exposes people to charities they might not have heard of, Flynn said.

The name implies a younger demographic, which is what Flynn is expecting, but she stresses that there are no rules to limit the age of participants, or on how many members can donate at a meeting. The important thing is to get people involved in a bigger cause.

“The way we look at it is that’s probably one nice dinner a month that you are sacrificing, or probably even less than that when you are stretching it over a three-month quarter,” Flynn said.