My friend Maggie Kane hates biscuits and gravy.
"I'm like that one southerner who hates biscuits and gravy," she says. 🤢
But when she was developing the vision for A Place at the Table Raleigh - a nonprofit pay-what-you-can restaurant in Raleigh with a goal of ensuring people can eat good food regardless of means, she realized it wasn't about what she liked.
So she tapped into the collective wisdom 🧠 of her most important audience -- the people she aimed to serve -- by forming a community advisory board that directly included people experiencing poverty or serving those experiencing poverty.
She surveyed this group and realized something: She was the ONLY person who hadn't wanted biscuits and gravy on the menu at A Place at the Table.
"Who am I to tell the community what it needs?" She reflects.
"And so, it will forever be on our menu." 🍽️
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What's your Biscuits and Gravy? ⚡
When dreaming up solutions to create a social impact, it's important to:
➡️ Challenge our assumptions and ideas about what others want or need
➡️ Get input from the people most impacted
➡️ Get curious and ask questions
Tune into my YouTube channel (link in the comments) on Wednesday, November 6 to catch my full nonprofit founder interview with Maggie!
Two weeks ago, I drove 12 hours to Indianapolis to interview local leaders in animal rescue.
⁉️ BUT WHY ⁉️
It's all part of my next phase, and a long-term vision to expand my library of nonprofit and social impact educational content to include deep dives on a variety of social and community issues.
Introducing: Changemaker Cafe!
Changemaker Cafe is at the very beginning stages (like, research-and-development, pilot-production stages), but I'd love your ideas, connections, and feedback as this thing gets expanded and built out.
My current plan is to build out a handful of videos covering multiple angles of a specific social issue or social impact strategy at a time, and share them in sequential order for digestible learning about that topic.
Most of my connections here on LinkedIn are superstar social impact champions! I may not know everything about a particular social issue, but I bet you know someone who knows someone who does! I'm hopeful you can help me discover experts across a variety of issues - homelessness, education, and more. I started with animal rescue because, well, I love animals. 🙂 But this is just the beginning.
In the meantime... meet Max*. 🐕
He was part of my Indianapolis adventure, and will probably star in one of my introductory videos to this new content! I still have many interviews with subject matter experts to go, and a ton of editing - so we probably won't be able to publish the finished content for several months. You get super-cute Max as a teaser for now. 😊
I also want to share my learning and observations as I start this expansion into new types of content and connect with subject matter experts around the USA (and one day the globe?!):
💗 Unsurprisingly (but worth repeating regularly), the people I've interviewed so far, like the vast majority of social changemakers, are trying their very hardest (and are often tired). Their work takes all of their mental and emotional capacity, and they need the publi
Rabbi Amy Coben Weiss learned how kids in her community lacked basic needs items like socks and underwear from a social worker. Fired up, she wrote about the problem for an article in the Houston Chronicle.
I'm thinking: How amazing would the world be if everyone who heard about a problem in their community took action?!
That spark was all it took to launch Amy's mission to get as many pairs of undies as possible to kids who needed them.
Compassionate community members started donating in response to her initial article, and the effort grew into a full-fledged nonprofit, Undies for Everyone, a few years later.
But it wasn't until Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017 that Amy's efforts scaled rapidly, with a little help from a certain neighbor who did a Facebook Live post sharing the need...
Catch the whole story on my YouTube channel when I post this Sunday morning (and don't forget to subscribe!)! (Link in the comments)
#nonprofits #nonprofitfounders #nonprofitstartup #fundraising #leadership #publicspeaking #socialimpact
No one showed up to Preston Ross's first litter cleanup almost 4 years ago, but that didn't stop him.
Soon enough, 4, then 8, then 13, then 26 people attended the cleanups in the weeks that followed. Fast forward to today, over 1,500 volunteers have helped The Great Raleigh Cleanup keep the streets of Raleigh clean.
But Preston believes the real magic isn't in how many pounds of litter they clear from the sidewalks -- it's about the connections, community, and purpose helping out gives people.
As he puts it:
"I started this in the middle of the pandemic and we know what that time was like as far as people and isolation and so much heartbreak and depression during that time. And I think I just I gave people a reason to be outside. I gave people a reason to be together."
In social impact work, you're achieving a mission, an outcome.
But purpose and connection is a secondary outcome of the work that we don't always acknowledge, or talk about.
It may be one of the most important outcomes of all.
❤️ For social impact stories + actionable tips on how you can grow your impact, check out my channel (and subscribe!): https://www.youtube.com/ambermelaniesmith
