At The Link

"Clothing presents a special problem. It makes up 40% to 50% of all donations and most of the time it is of little use to disaster victims. In Haiti, clothing donations of winter coats poured in. Of course, it’s never cold enough to warrant a winter coat there, even in January. Similarly, tons of clothes ended up in the dump after Hurricane Katrina, and in Japan it took one-third of one organization’s workers just to sort through the donated clothing before most of it was trashed. “It takes time to sort through and process all the stuff, and most of it just goes to the dump anyway,” says Holguin-Veras."

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Sex Toys, Winter Coats, And Spanish Flags: The Uselessness Of Post-Disaster Donations | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

Must read article to help you consider what to donate the next time. And, what NOT to give. 

"The presumption throughout Perkins’s theology of community is that a people transformed and mobilized by Jesus Christ in their institutional behavior will consistently support economic policies preferential to the poor, not out of obligation to law but as an expression of public discipleship. John Perkins might be considered the father of the faith-based movement, but the faith-based movement in its historical origins was about reading the Bible as the comprehensive divine plan of human liberation with resources for countercultural action and community building."

— Charles Marsh - Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community

January Adventures

I leave this weekend for about a two week stretch that has me going to three other cities for a couple of different reasons, but closely related. I have a CCDA Emerging Leaders Cohort retreat in Jackson, MS next week and I’m doing some research on the feasibility of launching into a full blown video based series/curriculum at NeighborLink. We’re trying to figure what makes the most sense when it comes to educating, equipping, and training volunteers not only in Fort Wayne, but in all NeighborLink locations. 

First up, I’ll be heading to Atlanta, GA to spend time with some fellow CCDA Emerging Leader Cohort members who work for an organization called, FCS Ministries. FCS been working and pioneering the Christian community development model in South Atlanta for around 30 years. 

I’ll be looking to discuss and trying to understand what role a NeighborLink model could play in an established organization like this. As we continue to expand from the Network perspective, we’re having conversations with organizations like these and who better to get insight from than FCS.

I’ll also be looking to gain some wisdom from these longtime practitioners on the content of this video series. I’m also working on securing a couple of meetings with some creative folks that may help shape some of our creative direction with the videos.

There is a lot of great talent in Atlanta that is focused socially minded and innovative initiatives. 

After Atlanta, I’ll carpool with several others from Atlanta area to Jackson, MS for our CCDA retreat. This retreat is going to be a great time of fellowship with peers and getting a personalized tour by Dr. John Perkins of his ministry, life story, and some of the history behind the Civil Rights movement as it played out in and around Jackson, MS.

The CCDA board of directors will be with us for a portion of the time as well. So, I am looking forward to having my mind and worldview stretched beyond it’s current understanding by these brilliant people. Feeling really bless by this opportunity. 

From Jackson I then head to Denver, CO, one of my favorite places, to visit some college friends and do some more networking and research for this video series. I’ll be spending time with Ryan Taylor and others from Mile High Ministries. They also have been working in Denver for quite a long time. One of the programs that operates out of MHM is a called, Urban Entry, which makes video series focused on primarily ministry in urban settings. Hoping to learn from their experiences and find a collaborators for our series. 

Overall, I’m looking forward to this trip. It’s been really neat to see my network grow across the nation and meet great people doing really interesting work. I hate being gone from my family for that long of time and am grateful for their sacrifices to allow this type of trip to happen. My wife is a champ.

Why I Love Web Based File Storage

I should have known that trying to upgrade to OSX Lion would have caused some problems. Early last week I chose to do that and it resulted in a trashed hard drive and over a week without any access to files I needed to be working on. To clarify, Lion didn’t kill my hard drive. As it was installing it located a bad spot on the hard drive the current operating system hadn’t gotten to yet. 

So, I was stuck using our old MacBook that hasn’t been updated in several operating systems but is still running strong, and after this recent incident, won’t be getting upgraded anytime soon. Since it hasn’t been updated in awhile, many of my “cloud based” programs I use, like Evernote, wouldn’t work which made working on things a little harder. Other than the MacBook, I had my iPad. This last week proved to me that I wasn’t quite established to rely on an iPad as a solid alternative to my current MacBook Pro. It could be, but you really have to be using cloud based programs and purchased programs like Pages or Keynote to do that. 

This past week made me realize how much online storage companies, like Dropbox, can make a huge impact on small companies, like NeighborLink. I’m an avid fan and use Dropbox all the time for large file transfers and collaborative projects, however I haven’t quite gotten used to using it as an actual hard drive alternative for working documents. I wish I would have because last week I was without several documents that I could have been working on…I needed to be working on. Fortunately, I have been using Time Machine to backup my hard drive on a regular basis so I didn’t loose anything. Highly recommend you do that if you’re not. External hard drives are so cheap now, you can’t afford not to do that. 

I’ll be looking into and considering paying for more storage on Dropbox in order to leave my working docs in a place I can always access them regardless of what machine I’m on. Regardless, I’ll be using Dropbox in a whole new way. 

Lesson Learned

"The Civil Rights movement teaches us that faith is authentic when it stays close to the ground. And it reminds us of faith’s essential affirmations: showing hospitality to strangers and outcasts; affirming the dignity of created life; reclaiming the ideals of love, honesty and truth; embracing the preferential option of nonviolence; and practicing justice and mercy."

— Charles Marsh - Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community.

2 Types of Volunteers Video

Here is a quick video describing the two types of volunteers we have at NeighborLink and how projects get selected. We’re still fine tuning our tutorial video series, but I like where this style is heading. Now, we just need to get a better guy on camera.

Seth's Blog: One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you're in the room... →

Video interview of Bob Lupton talking about how our traditional ways of distribution charity is actually not helpful and often toxic to any sort of relationship development or true community development. Worth the watch.

Video part of Plywood People’s Plywood Morning sessions.

I highly recommend his latest book, Toxic Charity.