Community Chest: Project 1

It has been awhile since I've posted - sorry about that! Between doing outreach for Communities In Action and working on our Volunteer Curriculum program (to get an elective that teaches about volunteerism, causes, and community leadership into local high schools), it's been busy in ME³.

I wanted to follow-up on the idea I briefly mentioned in the last blog: A "community chest" of ideas to make our local area better. At ME³ we are constantly coming up with ideas, but there's only so much time in the day to bring them to life! Because ME³'s goal is to empower others to make a difference, we don't mind putting our ideas into a "chest" for other citizens to pick up if you're looking for a way to make a difference here but need ideas.

So here is one project I will put out there for anybody so inclined to pick it up. By the way - if you decide to take this on - we'd love to hear about your progress and results! We'd be happy to post your results and stories about the experience on our website at http://www.me-3.org/ and on this blog.


Community Chest: Project 1
Issue(s): Hunger, Waste Reduction

*Project Size/Difficulty Rating (Scale of 1 - 10): 3

Project Goal: Get more food to those who need it, while reducing the amount of food thrown away in our community.

Project Reason: With nearly 70,000 people in Wake County living at or below the poverty level, and food costs rising, we need to find a way to conserve as much consumable food as possible. Thousands of pounds of food are thrown away yearly by restaurants and food chains that could be consumed by our local needy. It seems logical to collect clean, consumable food from companies throwing it away, and get it to those who could eat it.

Number of People Needed: This project can be done with just one person, but the more people involved, the faster it will go, and the more people can be affected!

Stuff Needed: Paper. A printer. A brain. The internet. Some way to create documents, such as Microsoft Word. And possibly postage and envelopes.

Strategy: Many restaurants in our community might be inclined to donate their leftover food - food they'd just throw away at the end of the night anyway - if they knew two things:

--That they are protected by law if they donate food in good faith and somebody accidentally gets ill from consuming it. They cannot be held legally accountable as long as they donated the food believing it was safe to consume, according to the NC Good Samaritan Law.

--How to do it. Perhaps a restaurant is thinking about donating their leftovers but has no clue who to give them to or how to get the food to them.

What You Do: Educate restaurants! If they might donate if they knew those two things, then TELL them those two things! Here are some simple steps you can follow to make this happen.

Step 1: Contact a local organization that can pick up food, such as the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle in Raleigh. Tell them you are hoping to direct some local restaurants to donate food to them, and make sure they are willing to provide the volunteers/manpower to conduct food pick-ups. Make sure you understand their rules and guidelines, such as when volunteers can conduct pick-ups. You will need to know this so that restaurants can prepare their leftover donations at the right time.

Step 2: Put together information. Collect a copy of the NC Good Samaritan Law, found here. Then, put together a one-page information sheet, perhaps entitled "How To Donate Your Leftover Food". Include information such as:

--A brief statement on what you're doing. Perhaps something like, "Did you know you can donate your leftovers to our community's needy, and that you are protected by law when you donate?"

--What organization will be collecting the food. The organization's address, contact information, and if possible, tax ID number so the restaurant can write off their donation.

--A few sentences on how donating their leftovers will benefit the community. Include hunger statistics, and food waste statistics.

--What kinds of leftovers are acceptable to donate, and how to package those leftovers. The organization collecting the leftovers will be able to tell you about their restrictions and rules. Also, what times leftovers can be collected by the organization.

--Who the restaurant manager can call to arrange a pick up time for their donations: The organization's contact person, phone number, and email address.

--A "Thank You" at the bottom, with a note about how their donations may be tax-deductible. This will encourage restaurants to participate and feel good about their contributions!

Step 3: Print off both your one-page info sheet and a copy of the Good Samaritan Law.

Step 4: Compile a list of restaurants in your area - ones you wouldn't mind visiting, perhaps, or sending a letter in the mail to. Write down their street addresses, and if available, their fax numbers.

Step 5: You have a few options - you can either mail the info sheet/Good Samaritan Law to the restaurants, or, you can stop by the restaurants and speak to the manager. I recommend going in person, if you can. Speaking to somebody face-to-face will make the cause and project feel more "real" to a manager, and being there to explain why you are doing what you are doing will make them feel more comfortable about a decision to donate their leftovers.

Step 6: Follow up! Call the organization that you put on your info-sheet to collect leftover donations and see which restaurants, if any, have contacted them to start donating. Also, call the restaurants you visited or mailed and speak to the manager to see if they got started! If they didn't get started yet, politely ask if they had any questions, and encourage them to begin donating as soon as possible to reduce both food waste and hunger in our community.

Step 7: Track your results - It might be neat to keep a list of the restaurants you successfully got to donate their leftovers to the needy. Perhaps even publicly thank them for their good citizenship, on a blog, or website!

*Project Size/Difficulty Rating is a measure of how much time, resources, or how many people it may take to accomplish a project. Consider that: '1' is the approximate ease of doing a kind act for a neighbor and a '10' is the approximate difficulty of starting a large-scale organization to tackle an issue. The higher the rating, the more difficult or time consuming the project is - but the bigger the potential impact on the community, too!

Wake County, NC

I'd like to take a minute to get to know the community I have lived in for over 15 years. Though I've spent a lot of time working, learning, and playing here, and being immersed in many aspects of this community, it's hard to see the 'larger picture' working with just this group or that.

Communities In Action, our volunteer program, serves non-profits in Wake County, and connects individuals living in or near Wake County to these causes. So, here are some facts I found about the communities we're working in and for:

Wake County was founded in 1771, includes 64 zip codes, and currently takes up about 857 square miles in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. We are home to the state's capital, Raleigh - where I personally do most of my activities.

The Wake County population as of 2007 was 823,345. Almost half of this population lives in Raleigh. We are growing every day; this year, an estimated 86 newcomers arrive in Wake County daily to start lives here. We have 153 public schools, with 134,002 students enrolled in schools.

The median household income in Wake County was about $60,903 in 2006; not too shabby. However, there are a couple thousand individuals estimated to be wandering our community streets without homes; 1,706 of these individuals were actually visually counted in 2006 by volunteers. These individuals are men, women, kids, victims of domestic violence, mentally ill, or in some cases, full-time employees who simply can't make ends meet. We also have thousands of homeless and stray animals and pets, over 5,000 of whom had to be euthanized in 2007 because there was nowhere for them to go. There is hope, if our community can work together: Raleigh has adopted the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, and we have a functioning SPCA as well as adoption and foster-care pet networks that try to help as many animals as they can.

Our county-wide unemployment rate is about 3.5%, which doesn't sound too bad. However, currently, 9.1% of the Wake County population, or about 69,224 people are living under the poverty line here. In 2006, over 20,000 of these people were under 17 years old (about 11% of the local population of children). I've heard that the cause of homelessness here or in other cities is a lack of affordable housing. Poverty doesn't help the hunger situation. What was really unfortunate was learning that in the year 2000, 115,000 TONS of food were thrown away in Wake County. I was unable to find the statistic for 2007/2008.

We are fortunate as a community to have recycling, following nation-wide trends. In 1989, the city of Raleigh began its recycling program, "Raleigh Recycling", which made curbside recycling available to 101,545 households. We have a database that lists where you can recycle or get rid of pretty much any piece of junk you have in more environmentally friendly ways, from furniture, to food you don't want to eat, to eyeglasses. However, more can be done, as I can attest to personally; only in the past month was I able to convince my Cary-based apartment complex to start a recycling program to serve over 180 households there. It wouldn't surprise me if several other townhomes and apartment complexes did not yet have recycling in place. North Carolina also does not have a "Bottle Bill" yet, or a law that would enable us citizens to collect and drop off our cans and bottles and receive some spare change back. Fortunately, a local group is campaigning to make this happen.

On the environmental note, I was surprised to find that registered vehicles on Wake County roads in 2007 numbered 706,000. And that 85.6% of drivers drive alone to and fro. Only 10.7% of drivers carpool. 1.3% use public transportation, and 1.4% walk. Others worked from home.

My goal is not to paint a bleak picture of my home. I love this place and there are many great aspects to it - like the people. There are currently 4,929 registered non-profit organizations working to make things better in Wake County, and an estimated 175,000+ volunteers. But because I love this place, I know that lot more can be done, and that we're worth it.

In the next few weeks I'm going to start compiling a list of all my "ideas". It will be like a Community Chest of ideas for social action projects. My hope is that I - or one of you! - will be able to tackle each one of these projects at some point. The question I'll be asking myself is: What does an ideal community look like to me? What does it look like to you?

Can Business Save The World?

I get these daily emails from a group called Charity Focus called "Daily Good" emails. They have stories and news articles across a wide spectrum of topics, but all of them fit the theme of some kind of "good" in the world. Some of the articles tend to catch my eye over others.

This morning I opened my email box to see today's Daily Good topic: "How Business can save the world". In a society that focuses so much on 'business' at times, it's difficult to see how it can be used as a tool or a means to accomplish widespread social change, especially when many businesses may not view this as their primary goal.

The article focuses on the concept of "worker empowerment" and how empowered workers are more capable of resolving both personal and community conflicts. The purveyor of this idea was an author named Gretchen Spreitzer. She analyzed data collected over a 20 year period from 1981 to 2001 from employee workplaces in 65 countries across the world, asking questions about the amount of freedom and power they had to make decisions in their offices. She found that countries with workplaces reporting lower levels of freedom and power in decision-making had higher levels of civil unrest, and that as workplace satisfaction improved, indications of better civic life increased.

It's a bit hard to prove by itself because you can't know what other factors have played into the increased happiness in civic life or the worsened civil unrest. The article itself points out the difficulty in verifying this idea, and poses additional questions:

"Do participatory management practices result in open societies, or are the businesses that use them simply more abundant in healthy, peaceable communities? And do positive changes in society reflect enlightened business practice or the impact of politically motivated changes induced by organized labor and other social movements?"

And as is the case, I believe, in many organizations, it's far easier to learn and hone positive conflict-resolution and community building skills when your leader fosters these things. The article ends on a less optimistic note, lamenting that it may be far more difficult to get CEOs to "practice virtue in factory and community" than workers themselves.

The use of business-like practices and models has dramatically risen in the charitable sector in the past decade and spawned the use of new terms such as "social enterprise". So we can argue that business has altered the world for the better by providing new, innovative, effective ways to create social change. And I personally can agree that there are benefits of "empowering" people - in workplaces and in the community - to take charge and make things better. The questions I would ask are: What other ways can businesses be/become the bearers of positive community and social changes? What internal/structural changes would need to be made within businesses to make them model institutions? And what external things - what ways that our society and culture currently functions - would need to change to be accepting of a newer, more philanthropic corporate citizen?

All blogs need a long introduction post!

My name is Amber Smith, and I am the President and co-founder of a non-profit organization operating in Wake County called ME³. ME³ (Motivate, Educate, Empower, and Engage) envisions "a world in which every individual realizes and exercises his or her potential to make a difference in the community." Our 'end goal' is to help create a permanent culture of caring and community involvement in North Carolina and beyond. That means that helping others and the community, such as through volunteering, will become a normal part of everybody's lives - of their own choice - instead of extracurricular. It means that our communities will be known for high levels of civic engagement and participation in efforts to improve the world around us. Essentially, that the term 'apathy' will become obsolete. That we will be a community in action.

It all sounds so idealistic when I put it that way, but let me explain. Simply, I believe that all people do care about one another, that the majority of people even want to act to make a difference in the world, but that many do not know where to start. It may be because volunteering (and know that when I say 'volunteering' I mean helping others and working to make an impact in a general sense, though it is often and effectively done by working through charitable organizations) hasn't become a part of our every day lives. Maybe the media or commercialism or materialism or any number of other things are to blame. No matter the reason, the information, the tools, and the resources are out there to help people get started. They just need to know it exists. They need access to it.

And they need to see why it matters.

In his book Bowling Alone, author Robert Putnam explained the term "social capital": the premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all "social networks" [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.

In very personal, every-day life terms, when I think of social networking I think of that job Joe Somebody got because a friend of a friend was the manager of a local company, or the cuddly puppy Eva Everygirl adopted after her neighbor recommended a visit to a local shelter. There are numerous examples of times in my own life where I achieved something or learned something or got something because I interacted with somebody in my 'social network'. People are born to need people (and people who need people are the luckiest people in the world). People benefit from knowing and interacting with others, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Numerous studies show that people with greater and wider social networks have lower risks of certain diseases and illnesses.

More important (and relevant to what I'm getting at), Social Capital goes beyond the very personal, every-day life as well. As explained in the definition of "social capital", when people are connected through social networks - when they know others - they have greater inclination to do things for each other. Are you more likely to help out your best friend, or some guy in another city you've never met? Who would be more likely to help you - your brother, or a woman across the world? The concept of "taking care of your own" arguably springs from this idea of social networks and capital; the empathy we as humans have been born with is there because we need each other to survive. We need community to thrive, grow, evolve, improve.

So, why does helping others and volunteering matter? Because not only do social networks get people active and volunteering (the biggest reason people list for starting to volunteer is "Somebody I knew asked me to."), but volunteering and helping others, in turn, creates and widen's people's social networks. And altruism aside, having social networks makes us happier, healthier individuals who live longer, have a greater sense of identity, and have less heart disease. Volunteering helps the individuals doing it. Volunteering helps the community, and other individuals living in it. Sounds good to me!

Harvard University lays it out for us:

How does social capital work? The term social capital emphasizes not just warm and cuddly feelings (such as the ones you might get when you do a good deed or help somebody), but a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks. Social capital creates value for the people who are connected and - at least sometimes - for bystanders as well.

Robert Putnam says a lot of other neat things in Bowling Alone, but I want to drive this point home by making a final connection: Volunteering increases community "social capital". Communities with high social capital enjoy higher educational performance, less teen pregnancy and child suicides, lower crime rates and higher voting rates. Students who volunteer are more likely to graduate from college and get higher test scores. Volunteering enhances an individual's self-esteem and social support networks, leading to fewer premature deaths, lower blood pressure and less heart disease. Volunteering enhances an individual's career development because employers are more likely to hire somebody who has volunteered than somebody who has not. It's not just about feeling good, it's also about practicality, reality, and survival. I think volunteerism should be more than something people do when they commit a nasty traffic offense. I think volunteerism should be considered more than an activity done during the holidays or here and there. I think it should be a natural, normal part of our culture and our community - as much as working, as much as shopping, as much as eating or sleeping or having fun.

There may be lots of questions that arise in your heads from considering my philosophy, and that's okay. I assure you, over the past decade I've been thinking about these things a lot - the how, the what, and the what for? In this blog I hope to explore all sorts of concepts related to these things, and maybe determine some answers.

Also in this blog, I hope to start exploring and writing about what the blog title says I'll be writing about - Wake County's 'communities in action'. There are a gazillion great people who dedicate their time and lives to helping others and improving our community and world, right here in our area and they have a gazillion great stories to tell - stories that, I hope, will lend some perspective to all the things I'm saying.

Maybe if we just know each other a little better, we'll be more inclined to help each other out. That's what I'm hoping for.