Localista’s Post

Transcript

Hi, this is Shilpa. And I'm excited today to be with Rose Thompson, who's the Executive Director of Activate. Good. Welcome to the welcome, Rose. Thank you for having me with you. Absolutely. And for those of you who are not familiar with Activate Good, they're very well established nonprofit organization in the community and their role is to kind of collect, connect volunteers to many, many different local causes in the community and locally says very excited to be partnering with Activate Good on an on an upcoming project. And basically what we're doing is we're collaborating with them to do a community service project. And the project is going to be with Step Up Ministries, Gigi's Closet, and I'll let Rose talk more about that. Yeah, we're excited to host this Learn, Serve and network project for your group with local Lisa. It is July 11th at 5:00 to 7:30 and Step Up Ministries has been a wonderful community partner of Activate Goods for many, many years. And G's Closet need your groups help sorting donations. It is a closet that offers professional clothing for men who are going out and seeking employment, I believe to date. They've prepared an outfitted over 1700 men going out and interviewing and they host image consulting classes through Gigis Closets and Step Up Ministries that help men interview with confidence. So your group will be a part of helping to, you know, organize the clothing and get that closet sorted for the men who are going out to seek employment. Wonderful. So for those of you women who are familiar with Dress for Success, so this is an equivalent for men. Yeah, they do similar work for sure. Um, so pretty much, I guess the work involves, you know, sorting out the clothes and the donations, right? That's correct. And it will go a little bit deeper because activate good will have a trained project leader there facilitating a deep conversation with your group and with staff from Step up Ministries to learn more about this issue area and hopefully have some takeaways after the service project and some action that you all can take beyond that day. To serve out in the community and over that 2 1/2 hours you all will have a nice chance to network with one another as well. Wonderful. And on that note, Rose, can you talk a little bit more about the Learn Learn server network model? For sure. So we launched this last year and activate good builds it into all of our projects and events, whether those are with our corporate partners or with our youth programming. And what we do is we build in on some additional time for dialogue at the start of the project, asking the community partner hosts some questions and asking the volunteers some questions to kind of gather perceptions before they're volunteering together and just having an open floor and conversation. About that particular issue area. And hopefully that conversation trickles into the action while they're serving together. And at the end of the project, we build in extra time for reflections and pulling the group back together and, and talking about what was learned and what actions they could take beyond that volunteer shift together. You know, it's our hope that through this model, we will remove volunteerism from transactional to transformative. We want volunteers to feel empowered beyond that. Went off volunteer opportunity to go out and and do more good within their community to help the causes that need it most. That that's really nice. I mean, I love how you said that transactional to transformative because, uh, you don't want that to be just a one off experience. You're doing, you go there for a specific purpose, you do it and then you go out and that gets out of your mind. So hopefully this way the impact the, you know, the needs in the community and the impact that you can have by doing all of this can kind of sink in deeper. Exactly, volunteers doing right now is is necessary. It's on the decline 7% nationwide and and we need people power now more than ever. It pains me everyday to see just the sheer volume of VON volunteer needs going unmet in our community. So we really hope to continue to build up our community, our volunteer community network and help our volunteers feel empowered to like plug in and serve with causes that they're passionate about. OK, great. And so this opportunity is for anybody on the local ESTA group or even if you're not and you'd like to come out, you're welcome to. So do there's a sign up link? Uh, please do sign up. So we have an idea of how many people are coming and I think we're gonna cap this around maybe 10 or around 10, right? Yeah, that's a good group for a deep discussion. So I think keeping it around 10 volunteers would be great. OK. So please sign up. There's not a whole lot of slots, but we hope to keep doing this more and more and you'll get. If you have any questions, reach out to me or to Rose. Thanks again, Rose for this opportunity and look forward to seeing a good number of you there. Thanks again. Thank you.