Everyday Needs Versus Holiday Wants - an appeal from Sara Collins: Chair, Board of Directors

Dear friends of Hands On Charlotte,

The holidays are often about "wants."

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, proclaims the opening line of a popular old holiday song.

Kids want a bike, or the newest Uggs, or the bloodiest video combat game with the coolest explosions.

Grown-ups want a new car, or just a couple of minutes to relax, or to happily discover at midnight on Christmas Eve toy assembly instructions that aren't written in Mandarin Chinese or Swahili or some ancient Russian characters.

(For the record, I want a decent pair of black leather gloves and for there to be no fog on 77 North heading over Fancy Gap as I travel to West Virginia.)

But for many, the holidays are about "needs" - basic ones, such as food and shelter; and more complicated ones, such as education or money to pay medical bills.

"Find a need and fill it," advised Ruth Stafford Peale, wife of theologian and author Norman Vincent Peale and an author, editor and speaker in her own right. Good advice at any time, but especially during the holidays, and especially during this time when needs are staring us in the face every which way we turn.

Hands On Charlotte has needs. You may not realize that, but we do.

We need you to keep our projects full so we can help our partner agencies keep their focus on meeting our community's critical needs.

We need you to let us know when you're coming to a project, and when you're not, so our project leaders can manage the projects and continue to deliver the best volunteer experience possible to both you and our partner agencies. People are depending on you!

We need you to let us know if there are other ways you'd like to serve the organization or our community, whether that's serving on one of HOC's many committees or suggesting a new project or partner agency.

And Hands On Charlotte needs your financial support.

Volunteering may seem like it's free, but it's not.

Like you - and perhaps your own business - we have bills to pay. The website you use to register for projects and learn more about HOC didn't spontaneously program itself into existence in the cyber-world. The lights and water don't "volunteer" to turn themselves off and on in the office.

The mulch you spread on Hands On Charlotte Day or at a BIG Project didn't chop itself into tiny bits or deliver itself to project sites. Unlike a Disney movie, the shovels and wheelbarrows and paint cans and brushes don't magically come to life and dance across the city to other project sites.

We have the single most dedicated staff of any nonprofit organization in this city, but they don't "volunteer" to work for us. Like you, they have mortgages and kids and car payments, too.

Houses of faith often solicit their congregations for their "time, talents and treasures." We at Hands On Charlotte are deeply grateful for the time and talents you share with us every day of the year, and we don't take lightly the contributions you make in these ways to meeting the needs of our community.

But we need your treasure as well to ensure that Hands On Charlotte can continue to provide ways for you, in turn, to help meet the needs of the community.

As the onslaught of holiday charitable appeals begins to hit your mailboxes and in-boxes and phones, I hope you'll consider making a gift to Hands On Charlotte to meet our needs this season.



With gratitude for your service and support,

Sara Collins

Chair, Board of Directors

To the Holiday Volunteers

As the holiday season and the end of the year quickly approach, I believe this is a time many people reflect on life, and express their thankfulness while trying to find purpose and meaning. This sentiment causes people to become naturally selfless and give of themselves. While this feeling and sudden urgency is commendable, we should not let a season dictate our civic engagement and philanthropic deeds.

As a nation, there is a huge trend to volunteer during the holidays. Please don’t misunderstand me; giving service at anytime is a tremendous gesture, but I’m here to challenge you. Start volunteering this holiday season, but don’t stop after Christmas. On Monday, January 3, when the holiday season passes, the homeless man will still be hungry, the middle school girl will still need your guidance, and the elementary school garden will still need beautification. We need your efforts year round. I challenge you to push yourself, and break from the culture of just holiday giving.

Of course, some people prefer to donate financially during the holiday season. If you are in a position to make a charitable donation to Hands On Charlotte, we hope you will visit our website today. Without your financial support during the holiday season, we would not be able to fund our service projects throughout the year.


Shari Lerline Williams is an AmeriCorps member with Hands On Charlotte

Friday Roundup 11.19.10 - The Let's Have a Discussion Edition

Slow down, life! I am trying to enjoy the next six weeks. Christmas carols are on the radio. People are cooking delicious food. Colored leaves are falling from the trees. It’s just a great time of year, and I need life to shift down a couple gears. Who is with me?

Busy week at Hands On Charlotte. My fellow AmeriCorps members and I played catch up after being away at the conference. We are in full swing planning service projects for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so be sure to check back here for details as we move into 2011.

At the core of MLK Day and most of our programming is the idea of civic engagement. Hands On Charlotte exists, in large part, to facilitate opportunities for Charlotteans to connect with their community. So when I read a recent article explaining how North Carolinians are participating below most national averages for civic engagement, I took a step back. How can Hands On Charlotte better engage YOU?

Look, I have access to readership statistics, and something like 30 people read this blog. So let’s have a little discussion here. How can Hands On Charlotte better reach out to you, your neighbors, your friends and your family? How can we compel you further to join us at our projects? What is it going to take to get 3,000 new volunteers to join us for MLK Day? Post a comment or send me an email. We would love to hear from you!

Normally on the Friday Roundup, I list a number of weekend projects for you to consider. This week, I’m highlighting only one. Tomorrow’s BIG Project is at Hawthorne High School, where our volunteers will join students and faculty in building a peace garden in memorial of Tiffany Wright, the pregnant teenage student who was gunned down over a year ago while waiting for the bus. We need 80 volunteers, and we currently have 50 signed up. Can you join us tomorrow from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.?

Thanks for reading! Check back next week as we kick off the holiday season in style!


Tanner

Weekend project has special meaning

All Hands On Charlotte projects are important, but this Saturday’s BIG Project may be one of our most meaningful efforts of the year.

I’m sure you recall the headlines from last year: Pregnant Teen Gunned Down at Bus Stop. That teenager was Tiffany Wright, and she was a student at Hawthorne High School. In the aftermath of that tragedy, her fellow students spoke about building a peace garden in remembrance of Tiffany. For more than a year, that garden has remained just an idea. Until now…

As part of HOC’s monthly BIG Project, our volunteers will be building that peace garden at Hawthorne. We hope it will serve as a lasting memorial to Tiffany and to other area youngsters whose lives have been cut short by violence. We hope it will provide some comfort to students whose daily existence is marked by conflict and anxiety. We hope that building the garden helps our volunteers deepen their appreciation for the blessings and the people in their lives.

And we hope you will join us. Please visit the HOC web site to sign up.


Bob Young is the associate director of Hands On Charlotte

Back in Charlotte and fired up!

Whew! That was a very busy week. We left Sunday for Atlanta and put in 56 hours in four days. Then I flew to Chicago for a wedding then to Raleigh then home to Charlotte. It feels great to be back.

The trip to Chicago gave me a few days to digest the Hands On Network’s AmeriCorps member conference. If there was an overriding idea to the training, it was that we – as individual citizens – are connected to the people in our communities in important ways. As AmeriCorps at Hands On Charlotte, we have the opportunity to foster those community connections. Here is how we think we can reach that end:

1. Organize volunteer events: A.M., Bryan, Janelle and Shari are part of Hands On Charlotte’s frontline in designing service projects for Charlotte-area volunteers.
2. Recruit volunteers: Marcel, Sarah and I help out here. Whether it’s in person, on the phone, through email, blog, Twitter or Facebook, we are always trying to find ways to bring new Charlotteans onto the volunteering seen.
3. Support volunteers: Once we have volunteers at our events, it’s our job to support them. We have to let them see the impact their making and equip them to continue their work.

So here’s my question to you, our most dedicated supporters: How can you help on these fronts? With which of these three bullets can you bolster our efforts? Do you know an area non-profit that needs some help in the coming months? Organize an event! Do you know someone who wants to volunteer but doesn’t know where to start? Recruit someone to join you at an HOC project! Do you have ideas about how HOC can better support its volunteers? Send me an email, and I’ll read it aloud at our next staff meeting!

What I learned at the conference is this: AmeriCorps members can organize, recruit and retain volunteers until we’re blue in the face. Unless we convince the community to join these endeavors in significant ways, our impact will lack the breadth and depth to answer sufficiently our community’s needs.


Tanner


PS – The wedding was great! And if you haven’t been to Chicago, I suggest you make it a priority…in the summer.

Pop quiz (and it's easy yes/no questions!)

Can you read?


Can you do basic (no more than algebra) math?


Can you describe a platypus?


If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're perfectly qualified to tutor in one of Hand On Charlotte's adult literacy/GED tutoring labs.


Each week, HOC provides volunteers for labs at two Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) campuses, Central and Harris (by the airport). Six projects are offered at various times during the day and evening Tuesdays through Thursdays.

I've been a tutor since I joined HOC in 2000 and have co-led the Thursday night project at CPCC's Harris Campus since 2003 (I think!). It's been the most rewarding of all my HOC experiences by far. I've been a bookworm since I was a kid; I can't imagine not being able to read, to be transported through the power of words to another time, place, perspective, experience. To be able to help other people become confident in their ability to transform the characters on a page to images in their minds is the greatest privilege!

Right now, we need a lot more volunteers who are interested in literacy to join us at the Harris Campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. to experience this great privilege. A typical night finds the lab full of 10 to 15 students, eager for some personal attention and instruction. That same night finds the lab near-vacant of volunteers to help them. Sometimes, we have as few as three tutors; other times, we have seven or eight. Either way, tutors have to juggle at least two and sometimes three or four students, and no one gets a quality experience in this situation.

I think volunteers shy away from tutoring older students and adults out of fear. Perhaps they don't realize that most of our students range from reading at the third-grade level to finishing their GED and are afraid they won't know or remember what to teach or how to help them. (Here are a couple of hints: the textbooks used in both the literacy and GED programs are super-easy to understand and it's OK to send a student to the restroom for five minutes while you brush up on your long division skills!)


Perhaps they're nervous about the kinds of students they'll encounter. I've met the most amazing folks: a woman in her mid-50s who came "to school" after the women in her church laughed at her when they realized she couldn't read; some of the Lost Boys who braved the killing fields of Rwanda to come to the U.S.; a sharecropper's son from South Carolina in his late 70s who came to the lab faithfully every day after work and spent three-and-a-half hours learning the alphabet.


And (here's where that platypus comes in) sisters from Somalia who worked as hotel maids by day and studied English by night. It's hard enough to explain a platypus to someone whose native tongue is English; try explaining it to someone who's just learning our language! But I promise you, this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a tutor!


If you can describe a platypus, tell a noun from a verb and/or add a (short!) column of numbers, please consider trying one of the adult tutoring projects! I can't speak for the others, but on Thursday nights at the Harris Campus, we've got a dedicated corps of regular tutors who welcome you to join us! More importantly, we've got an enthusiastic corps of regular students who will be more grateful for your presence and brains than I can express to you on this blog.


Tutoring is not just about volunteers teaching the students; there's plenty of learning happening both ways. But you'll have to come find that out on your own. See you Thursday!


Sara Collins is the co-leader at the CPCC GED tutoring program.

Update from the retreat

Bryan, Janelle, Marcel, Sarah, Shari and I are deep into our AmeriCorps member conference. We also appear to be deep into the Georgian woods. The first day was fun. Exhausting, but fun. It was filled with team-building fun, motivational chats and a bonfire with Michelle Nunn, the CEO of Hands On Charlotte's parent, the Points of Light Institute. For all the cheesy and awkward moments, it was a good day. There are some pretty exceptional people here, and it's always good to learn from exceptional people.

It's always fun to spend time with other AmeriCorps members from sites around the country. There are members here from New York, Chicago, San Fransisco, Seattle and Miami, among other places. Rest assured, the Charlotte cohort is representing our city well.

Details will follow next week, but I wanted to drop a line and say hello. Hopefully everything is going well back in Charlotte!

Friday Roundup 11.5.10: The Pre-Wilderness Retreat Edition

Happy Friday, everyone! This week zoomed by – perhaps because all the Hands On Charlotte AmeriCorps members are heading to Atlanta this weekend for a conference. As you may know, Hands On Charlotte employs seven AmeriCorps members – A.M., Bryan, Janelle, Marcel, Sarah, Shari and yours truly. As part of our development, we attend conferences and trainings throughout the year. Next week’s conference is at what appears to be a wilderness retreat outside Atlanta. I will Tweet and blog to keep you updated. Wish me luck.


In other news…not many people have updated their demographic information, and so not many people are eligible to win one of three US Airways gift cards worth $250 each. If you want to enter the drawing, all you have to do is update your demographic information on our Web site by November 10. That is next Wednesday. As I blogged yesterday, right now, your chances of winning are pretty good.


While I’ll be in Georgia by Sunday, there are plenty of fun volunteer opportunities for you here in the Queen City. Here are a few of your options:

• Saturday – Spruce up Hospitality House: Hospitality House offers a place for people to stay while their loved ones are receiving medical care in Charlotte. They need your help cleaning on Saturday morning.
• Saturday – Assistance League Thrift Store: This is one of my favorite projects. Come help sort donations at the AL Thrift Store. Proceeds go to help low-income communities in Charlotte.
• Saturday – The Amazing Race: Volunteers will try to follow clues and to solve problems in a race around Uptown. Total walking is about 4 miles.
  
  

I hope you have a great weekend! Check back next week for blogs and Tweets from the Georgian wilderness. And don’t forget to enter the US Airways drawing!




Tanner

Right now, your chances would be pretty good

We are giving away three US Airways gift cards worth $250 each. To be eligible for the drawing, all you have to do is update your volunteer demographic information on our Web site by November 10.

Now, here's the thing: If the drawing were today, your chances of winning would be really, really....REALLY....good. I don't want to tip my hat as to just how good, but I'm willing to bet there are very few better chances to win $250.

Do you want to enter the drawing? All you have to do is log on to our Web site, then update your demographic information. If you have any problems, email Tanner Kroeger.

One US Airways gift card gone, three remain

Congrats to Ben Miliam, who won the $1,000 US Airways gift card from Hands On Charlotte Day. He stopped by today to pick up his winnings. Above is a picture of Ben and Lisa Quisenberry, our executive director.

So how would you like a gift card to US Airways worth $250? Well, we are giving away three of them in 10 days. Everyone who updates his or her demographic and contact information on our Web site by November 10 will be eligible. If you have questions email Tanner Kroeger.