Text 100 North America Gives Back – A Recap of our Month of Service

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We introduced you to Text 100 North America’s first-ever “Month of Service” a few weeks ago – and now that all of our volunteer efforts are wrapped up for now, we wanted to give our readers a recap of how we spent our time. Each office in NA spent time supporting organizations in their local communities through donating time, fundraising, and conducting pro-bono PR.

New York City

Texties Erin Lehr, Colby Jones, Dinah Alobeid and Robyn Douglass at the Light the Night Walk

Text 100’s Month of Service kicked off with the Light the Night Walk in New York City, a fundraising initiative to raise awareness and money for blood disease research, and to educate and help families who have been affected by diseases such as Leukemia and Lymphoma. Texties from the NYC office took to the city’s Seaport district and the Brooklyn Bridge to participate in annual walk sponsored by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is the most curable form of cancer. The team had a great time walking with survivors and their supporting friends and families and all together raised $591 to go toward research and patient care/education.

(L to R) Brittany Kotary, Lesley Stephen, Barbara Ruane, Jaimen Sfetko, Kevin Turner, Allie MacPherson, Sarah Hudson, Colby Jones and Jeff Cleveland

Text 100 New York also partnered with GMHC, the world’s first provider of HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy. Their mission is to fight to end the AIDS epidemic and uplift the lives of all affected. In 1981, six men united against fear and death from a disease then known as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The group set up an answering machine in the home of Rodger McFarlane and the first AIDS hotline was born — receiving more than 100 calls the first night. Today, GMHC continues to pioneer HIV prevention, care and advocacy.

Texties visited the GMHC’s offices to learn more about the programs GMHC runs, such as youth events, House of Latex Ball and Fashion Forward, and spent three hours helping to build safe sex kits for men and women, a very important part of AIDS prevention. On the walk back to the office, the general consensus was that GMHC is a great organization with great cause and dedicated people behind it! There’s already talk of partnering with them for next year’s Text 100 Day of Service.

Rochester

In Rochester, the Text team partnered up with local non-profit Dimitri House, an organization dedicated to supporting Rochester’s poor and homeless through a number of programs including a winter shelter, a food cupboard, drop-in program and holiday basket program. Founded in the mid-80’s, Dimitri House was named in memory of a well-known local homeless man named Dimitri Mamczur, known for his good spirit and charitable nature, despite his hard situation. One night, on the way back to his shelter (two taped-together cardboard boxes under an expressway bridge), Dimitri was struck by a car and passed away a few days later. Since then, Dimitri House’s two full-time employees and dedicated volunteers have dedicated themselves to providing support to individuals in the local community who suffer from poverty and homelessness.

Text 100 ROC at Dimitri House – Alyssa Weir, Amber Rinehard, Nicole Pavlas, Jamie Palmeroni, Sara LaFauci, Brian Carnevale, Sean Donnelly, Nicole LeBlanc, Jessica Sanderson, Elizabeth Cronin, Erin Humphrey, Bethany Latta, Lauren Ianuzi and Jen Stevens.

The Rochester team spent the month supporting Dimitri House in a few different ways: through an online fundraiser, which brought in $850 of donations (170% of the team’s $500 goal!); conducting local media outreach, which secured opportunities for Dimitri House spokespeople to appear in a handful of local broadcast segments and in the non-profit profile section of the Rochester Business Journal; and finally, by spending a day at Dimitri House volunteering time to re-paint their community kitchen and assisting in setting up the beds for the winter shelter. The team at Dimitri House was incredibly grateful for the extra sets of hands and for the local exposure they received in working with the Text team – their phone was ringing off the hook with volunteer requests following their first TV interview! The Text office is continuing its partnership with Dimitri House through the holiday season, adopting a local family through their Thanksgiving basket program, for whom they’ll be providing all of the fixings for Thanksgiving dinner – yum!

San Francisco

The San Francisco office made the most of its month with three different volunteer events to make sure everyone who wanted to participate had a chance amidst busy schedules. One rockstar Textie team conducted an in-house social media session for the Oakland non-profit, Cantare Con Vivo. Cantare Con Vivo is a unique multigenerational musical arts organization devoted to using the beauty and power of music to build community and to invest in young people as the future leaders of the Bay Area. Through their adult and children choir events, they’ve been able to fund choir programs in many of Oakland’s schools for more than 2,000 kids per week. This provides low income children with exposure to music and the arts, as well as a safe place to develop and grow as leaders in their community. The Text 100 team focused on teaching the group how to utilize the latest social media tools to help continue their growth and attract further attention to their worthy cause.

The other group of Texties volunteered at two locations of The Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco. After initial arrival and free play, the teams jumped right into “power hour,” assisting kids from first to sixth grade with homework. These children, especially those from the infamous Tenderloin district, need all the support, confidence and positive role models they can get. “It gives life a whole new meaning when you consider what these little guys probably have to encounter on a daily basis,” said Gareth Williams, Text 100 Account Director. The kids (for the most part!) were genuinely excited to do their homework and get attention from the volunteers. With seemingly never-ending cuts to our education system, helping out the kids who need it the most was a rewarding experience for all.  Check out their website at www.kidsclub.org.

Boston

Text 100 Boston also focused on giving back to the youth in their community, rolling up their sleeves and for a two-hour volunteering session at Cradles to Crayons (C2C), a non-profit organization based in Boston and Philadelphia, that provides children up to age 12 in homeless and low-income situations with the essential supplies they need, free of charge. More than 305,000 Massachusetts children up to age 12 live in poor or low-income households while 100,000 Massachusetts children are homeless each year. In Philadelphia 130,000 children reside in poverty.

The whole Text 100 Boston crew at Cradles to Crayons – Yumi Bilic, Ilena Ryan, Kate Mather, Virginia Romero, Rachel Round, Steph Kanaan, Molly Loughman, Steve Collins, Michele Moore, Sean Audet, Alison Thompson and Ken Peters.

Everything from donated clothes to shoes, toys, books, and school supplies are collected and sorted at the two Cradles to Crayons (C2C) ‘Giving Factory’ locations in Boston and Philadelphia. Started in 2002, the Giving Factory aspires to not only accommodate children with donations, but to make them feel valued by accepting only high-quality used and new materials.

Texties joined organizers at C2C’s Brighton Giving Factory for a morning of organizing donations. The organization’s mission, ‘To make kids feel safe, warm, valued, and ready to learn,’ which the team learned about during their volunteer orientation, was kept top-of-mind while the team got to work.

The Text team was split in two groups – one in charge of inspecting and the other to sort through donated items. To say the least, the team had their hands full! We were up to our necks in bags of donated items, and it was up to us to judge whether the donations met C2C’s valuable standards and then sort the clothing into appropriate compartments. Before we knew it our volunteer time was up and so were our spirits.

To see more photos from Text 100 NA’s Month of Service, check out our Facebook album.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Colby Jones and Erin Lehr (NYC), Katie Kelley (San Francisco), Molly Loughman (Boston) and Amber Rinehard (Rochester) for pulling this blog post together!