This week, we found an opportunity to give that is very close to our hearts. It does not put food in the mouths of hungry people, but we both feel it is important all the same.
Shakespeare Link Canada is a group devoted to using the works of Shakespeare to try to make the world a better place. They do this in a number of ways, but the one that caught our attention was a project in Mozambique. For this project, SLC brings accomplished Shakespearean actors to Quelimane, Mozambique to work with local music and dance groups to create performances that speak to the problems facing the people of Mozambique - the devastating prevalence of AIDS, the unjust nature of gender relations, and the overwhelming poverty. This year, the group will be producing "A Winter's Tale", and will include my friend, Matt Schwader. In order to get the entire group of artists to Mozambique this summer, SLC is trying to raise $28,000 now. They are a couple thousand dollars along the way to their goal, but they have a long way to go and can use all the help they can get.
We gave to SLC because we believe that plays can help spread compassion and understanding, and that more compassion and understanding means less hatred and violence.
If you would like to help send these committed artists to Mozambique, you can donate here: (the site also has information about the group and the other things they do around the world)
Shakespeare Link Canada
* If this link gives you problems, try again a little later. It seems to be getting more hits than it can handle...
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Week 4 - Feed My Starving Children Donation
This was a busy week for Jen and I. Because we had a scenery load-in at the theater, I was working long days all week, which meant that we really could not go volunteer anywhere. Instead, we decided to give some money to the place we worked last week, Feed My Starving Children. Please take a look at the week three post to see more about this organization and what they do. These people make a little money go a very long way, with 93% of donated money going directly into their actual operations, which is basically finding the most hungry people on earth and feeding them. You can also see more about them at their website:
Feed My Starving Children
Feed My Starving Children
Week 3 - Feed My Starving Children
This week, we were able to get in at Feed My Starving Children in Aurora. This group is a Christian organization, based in Minnesota but with locations all over the Midwest, that sends a specific formulation of food to the places in the world where there is the greatest need.
The food they send is basically a very nutritious mush made from chicken flavoring, dried vegetables, soy protein and rice. It is formulated to be as highly nutritious as possible for the lowest cost, and also to be able to be digested by people who are starving to death. The food is packaged into bags, each of which makes 6 meals. The bags are then placed into boxes, 36 bags per box, so that each box makes 216 meals at a cost to the organization of 24 cents per meal. All of the food is packed by volunteers, and paid for by donations. 93% of donations to FMSC go directly into purchasing the raw materials for the food bags. When you go to volunteer, they ask you to consider paying for the food you are packing, a suggested $52 donation.
We could only get into an evening session on a week night, so we had to try to get from Navy Pier at 5pm to Aurora at 6:30pm. It was a close thing, but we just made it in time to hear the entire introduction, an overview of what they do and why. We were part of a full group, which for this facility is 60 people. There was a wide range of ages, but the group was overwhelmingly made up of young people, high school and middle school students with their parents. We signed up as individuals, but it s clear that most people come to this work as part of a church or school group. The way the packing works, there are U-shaped stations around the work room. Each U has two stations for loading bags and sealing them, with a box packing station in the middle. Everyone gets around a table and gets a job - holding the bags on the funnel, scoping ingredients, weighing the bags, sealing the bags, or packing the bags in a box. As with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, everything was clearly thought out and had a good process to get a good result. Jen and I did not do any of this part though. We volunteered for the smaller crew, the warehouse crew. These people move raw materials from the warehouse to the stations and move the boxes from the stations to the warehouse. The last part of the job is what Jen and I did - we filled trays with rice and soy nuggets all night long. The rice comes in huge tyvek bags weighing about 2000# each and the soy comes in big pallet-sized boxes weighing about 800# each. Our job was to use big, gallon-sized scoops to fill the trays that went out to the packing stations. In the one hour of actual packing, I loaded almost all of one bag of rice, and Jen loaded almost all of a box of soy. What that actually means in volume of cooked rice is staggering!
The night went by quickly. The packing room is full of noise and high spirits because they make the tables shout a silly chant or something when they finish a box. The warehouse was a little quieter, which was more our speed anyway. We had a very nice time and worked with some great FMSC staff people. We loaded about 90 boxes, totaling a little over 19,000 meals, all of which were headed to Haiti as part of a large shipment of more than 200,000 meals. The only down side is they made us wear hair nets, so we looked like this:
If you want to help out loading food bags or donate some money for the cause, you can find their very good website here:
Feed My Starving Children
The food they send is basically a very nutritious mush made from chicken flavoring, dried vegetables, soy protein and rice. It is formulated to be as highly nutritious as possible for the lowest cost, and also to be able to be digested by people who are starving to death. The food is packaged into bags, each of which makes 6 meals. The bags are then placed into boxes, 36 bags per box, so that each box makes 216 meals at a cost to the organization of 24 cents per meal. All of the food is packed by volunteers, and paid for by donations. 93% of donations to FMSC go directly into purchasing the raw materials for the food bags. When you go to volunteer, they ask you to consider paying for the food you are packing, a suggested $52 donation.
We could only get into an evening session on a week night, so we had to try to get from Navy Pier at 5pm to Aurora at 6:30pm. It was a close thing, but we just made it in time to hear the entire introduction, an overview of what they do and why. We were part of a full group, which for this facility is 60 people. There was a wide range of ages, but the group was overwhelmingly made up of young people, high school and middle school students with their parents. We signed up as individuals, but it s clear that most people come to this work as part of a church or school group. The way the packing works, there are U-shaped stations around the work room. Each U has two stations for loading bags and sealing them, with a box packing station in the middle. Everyone gets around a table and gets a job - holding the bags on the funnel, scoping ingredients, weighing the bags, sealing the bags, or packing the bags in a box. As with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, everything was clearly thought out and had a good process to get a good result. Jen and I did not do any of this part though. We volunteered for the smaller crew, the warehouse crew. These people move raw materials from the warehouse to the stations and move the boxes from the stations to the warehouse. The last part of the job is what Jen and I did - we filled trays with rice and soy nuggets all night long. The rice comes in huge tyvek bags weighing about 2000# each and the soy comes in big pallet-sized boxes weighing about 800# each. Our job was to use big, gallon-sized scoops to fill the trays that went out to the packing stations. In the one hour of actual packing, I loaded almost all of one bag of rice, and Jen loaded almost all of a box of soy. What that actually means in volume of cooked rice is staggering!
The night went by quickly. The packing room is full of noise and high spirits because they make the tables shout a silly chant or something when they finish a box. The warehouse was a little quieter, which was more our speed anyway. We had a very nice time and worked with some great FMSC staff people. We loaded about 90 boxes, totaling a little over 19,000 meals, all of which were headed to Haiti as part of a large shipment of more than 200,000 meals. The only down side is they made us wear hair nets, so we looked like this:
If you want to help out loading food bags or donate some money for the cause, you can find their very good website here:
Feed My Starving Children
Week 2 - Kiva Loan
This week we did not have a lead on a good volunteer opportunity, or could not get a spot on a volunteer crew. We found out that these fill up pretty far in advance for places that are doing a lot of good. Since we did have a good service opportunity, we decided to make a Kiva loan.
Kiva.org is a broker of micro loans. These are loans given a relatively small amounts to people in developing nations for the purpose of expanding a small business, or starting one up. The people who get these loans are in geographic locations and income brackets that the large banking industry has left behind. Access to small amounts of credit allows them to support themselves whereas lack of credit might leave them dependent on charity or completely destitute. The best part is that these are loans, and they get paid back, allowing the person making the loan to either recover the money or help someone else. There is a great deal more information about micro loans and about the risks and rewards involved with them on the Kiva site, found at:
www.kiva.org
Our first Kiva loan went to a woman named Yugabet, in Kenya. This is her profile from the site:
Yugabet is a resident of Mombasa, Kenya. She is married and has one child. Yugabet is a fish monger, a business she has run for one year. She learned of Milango from her friends.
Yugabet is applying for a loan of 80,000 Kenya shillings to purchase fish. Her main challenges include the high cost of products and transportation.
She will use the extra income from this loan to purchase a freezer and open a shop.
We chose to make this loan because we wanted to support a woman entrepreneur in Africa, although you can choose from many countries and many types of businesses. We also chose this loan because we could give the last money needed to complete the loan. "Milango", mentioned in the profile above, is the African partner to Kiva that actually makes the loan. This loan is expected to be repaid in 11 months, in small increments.
Getting signed up with Kiva was easy, and we had no trouble making the first loan, although I was a little surprised by the automatic addition of a small donation to Kiva for operating expenses that popped up on the checkout page. I was happy to contribute, but it was something I would have liked to hear about before checkout. Overall, we recommend this site.
Kiva.org is a broker of micro loans. These are loans given a relatively small amounts to people in developing nations for the purpose of expanding a small business, or starting one up. The people who get these loans are in geographic locations and income brackets that the large banking industry has left behind. Access to small amounts of credit allows them to support themselves whereas lack of credit might leave them dependent on charity or completely destitute. The best part is that these are loans, and they get paid back, allowing the person making the loan to either recover the money or help someone else. There is a great deal more information about micro loans and about the risks and rewards involved with them on the Kiva site, found at:
www.kiva.org
Our first Kiva loan went to a woman named Yugabet, in Kenya. This is her profile from the site:
Yugabet is a resident of Mombasa, Kenya. She is married and has one child. Yugabet is a fish monger, a business she has run for one year. She learned of Milango from her friends.
Yugabet is applying for a loan of 80,000 Kenya shillings to purchase fish. Her main challenges include the high cost of products and transportation.
She will use the extra income from this loan to purchase a freezer and open a shop.
We chose to make this loan because we wanted to support a woman entrepreneur in Africa, although you can choose from many countries and many types of businesses. We also chose this loan because we could give the last money needed to complete the loan. "Milango", mentioned in the profile above, is the African partner to Kiva that actually makes the loan. This loan is expected to be repaid in 11 months, in small increments.
Getting signed up with Kiva was easy, and we had no trouble making the first loan, although I was a little surprised by the automatic addition of a small donation to Kiva for operating expenses that popped up on the checkout page. I was happy to contribute, but it was something I would have liked to hear about before checkout. Overall, we recommend this site.
Week 1 - The Greater Chicago Food Depository
The first thing we did on our giving campaign was to volunteer at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. We did this through a group from Holy Name Cathedral that goes and volunteers on the first Saturday of every month. It was a group of ten people or so that drove from the church down to the GCFD complex just off Pulaski Rd. at about 42nd St. The complex is enormous - way bigger than I expected, and relatively new. It is a model of efficiency. The staff was great. They escorted us into the volunteer room, and gave us a quick initiation about what we would be doing that day and how it would all work. I was amazed to find out that the GFCD collects food for all of the pantries in the city, sorts it, repackages it and gets it out to the soup kitchens and smaller food depots all over the city. They get donations from individuals and from corporations as well as buying a small amount of food. They guarantee a stock of 18 basic items, including fresh milk and fresh eggs, year round. This is to ensure that the kitchens and pantries around the city can always meet a full range of nutritional needs for the people they service.
The day we were there, three tasks were being performed - making emergency food boxes, re-packing cereal from huge vats into smaller bags, and sorting and checking bread products. We were assigned to the Flex line, packing emergency food boxes. It is called the flex line because it can be set up to do a bunch of different packages. The boxes we were packing were for individuals who were in dire need of food as the result of a natural disaster, fire or other emergency. Each box contained about 25# of food and was intended to be enough to last 3-4 days for one person. They included things like soda crackers, cereal, powdered milk, raisins, peanut butter, jelly, canned chili and some other items. The process of getting all of this together was really incredible and amazingly efficient. There were about 50 volunteers. Some built the boxes and placed them on the line. Others filled the boxes, with still more volunteers behind them unwrapping the pallets of food and keeping the fillers stocked. Then there were people who picked up the garbage generated by all of the unwrapping. Jen and I did this job because we were not quick enough to get a spot on the line. The GFCD recycles all of the cardboard that comes from all of the packing of the pallets of food. As the boxes were filled, one team labelled each box while another team weighed each one (to make sure the right amount of food is in each box...) and still another team ran the boxes through a machine that tapes both the top and bottom of the box closed. The last step was a group that pulls the boxes off the line and stacks them on pallets to go into the warehouse until they are needed.
Once all of this gets organized, which took about half an hour, the lines rolls for about two hours. In that time, we packed around 1300 boxes of food, equivalent to a little more than 30,000 pounds. It was a workout! When the line was rolling, Jen and I had to scramble around and grab all the cardboard and shrink wrap that was coming off the line, which was more work than it sounds like. We also helped open trays of canned food to help keep the line stocked, and helped bring in more pallets of food as the ones we had were depleted. It was a lot of bending low and standing a little hunched over. For all that, we had a lot of fun, and had a good time joking with and getting to know the other volunteers. Some were old hands, and some were first timers, like us.
Once it was all over, we introduced a number of our co-workers to Ricobene's, a great little diner on Pulaski that serves these killer breaded steak sandwiches. We got to hear about a couple other volunteer opportunities from them, including a food pantry in Lakeview and a student mentoring program. In all, we had a great day and we will definitely come back and work here again. Everyone on the staff was friendly and knowledgeable and the palpable sense of knowing we were helping to feed someone was a rush we will not soon forget.
If you are interested in helping the GFCD, you can find their website here:
http://www.chicagosfoodbank.org
The day we were there, three tasks were being performed - making emergency food boxes, re-packing cereal from huge vats into smaller bags, and sorting and checking bread products. We were assigned to the Flex line, packing emergency food boxes. It is called the flex line because it can be set up to do a bunch of different packages. The boxes we were packing were for individuals who were in dire need of food as the result of a natural disaster, fire or other emergency. Each box contained about 25# of food and was intended to be enough to last 3-4 days for one person. They included things like soda crackers, cereal, powdered milk, raisins, peanut butter, jelly, canned chili and some other items. The process of getting all of this together was really incredible and amazingly efficient. There were about 50 volunteers. Some built the boxes and placed them on the line. Others filled the boxes, with still more volunteers behind them unwrapping the pallets of food and keeping the fillers stocked. Then there were people who picked up the garbage generated by all of the unwrapping. Jen and I did this job because we were not quick enough to get a spot on the line. The GFCD recycles all of the cardboard that comes from all of the packing of the pallets of food. As the boxes were filled, one team labelled each box while another team weighed each one (to make sure the right amount of food is in each box...) and still another team ran the boxes through a machine that tapes both the top and bottom of the box closed. The last step was a group that pulls the boxes off the line and stacks them on pallets to go into the warehouse until they are needed.
Once all of this gets organized, which took about half an hour, the lines rolls for about two hours. In that time, we packed around 1300 boxes of food, equivalent to a little more than 30,000 pounds. It was a workout! When the line was rolling, Jen and I had to scramble around and grab all the cardboard and shrink wrap that was coming off the line, which was more work than it sounds like. We also helped open trays of canned food to help keep the line stocked, and helped bring in more pallets of food as the ones we had were depleted. It was a lot of bending low and standing a little hunched over. For all that, we had a lot of fun, and had a good time joking with and getting to know the other volunteers. Some were old hands, and some were first timers, like us.
Once it was all over, we introduced a number of our co-workers to Ricobene's, a great little diner on Pulaski that serves these killer breaded steak sandwiches. We got to hear about a couple other volunteer opportunities from them, including a food pantry in Lakeview and a student mentoring program. In all, we had a great day and we will definitely come back and work here again. Everyone on the staff was friendly and knowledgeable and the palpable sense of knowing we were helping to feed someone was a rush we will not soon forget.
If you are interested in helping the GFCD, you can find their website here:
http://www.chicagosfoodbank.org
The Premise
This year, as my wife, Jen, and I were discussing resolutions, we decided that we wanted to find a way to do more charitable giving, both of our time and our money. We have been very fortunate. We have all we need - jobs we love that pay us well, an apartment we really like, plenty of food and heat and so on. We felt that we needed to pass along some of our fortune tho those who do not have all of those things. We had come across many opportunities and worthy causes to support, but we realized that we talked a lot more than we acted. Jen suggested we resolve to do one volunteer opportunity each month. I said that I thought that was too easy, and that is we really wanted to get serious, we should do something every week. We decided that this was the level of challenge we were up for, even though we knew it would be hard to fit it in to our weekly schedules. We agreed that to qualify as our weekly giving, we would have to work at least two hours as volunteers or give at least $25 to a charitable organization. We are into our fourth week of the year now, and every time I talk about our year-long goal to someone, they seem interested in our quest. Therefore, in an attempt to document our adventures and hopefully inspire some of our friends to give a little more often, I have decided to write about what we do each week. So far, we have had a great time with some great organizations, and heard about a great many more. So here goes...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)