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!

Throughout this month, we’ll be posting updates from our various volunteering projects and fundraising efforts, as well as some super practical tips for non-profits and other charitable organizations to digitize their volunteer and philanthropy efforts and maximize exposure for their causes. We hope you will join us on our journey, or at least send positive vibes to these organizations we hold near and dear to our hearts!

To kick off our month in style, we’d like to call your attention to two great causes being supported by Texties in the local NYC and Rochester offices:

NYC Texties Will Light The Night With Walk for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

This Wednesday, Oct. 5, five Texties from the New York office will participate in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) Light The Night Walk event in New York City. Later this month, members of the New York City office will also be participating in two other initiatives, volunteering their time for Harboring Hearts and The Gay Men’s Health Clinic.

Each year, in communities all across the US and Canada teams of families, friends, co-workers and local and national corporations come together to raise funds for LLS’s Light The Night Walk events and bring help and hope to people battling blood cancers. Since 1949, LLS, the world’s largest voluntary (nonprofit) health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research and providing education and patient services, has been dedicated to curing leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma.

To make a contribution to the Text 100 NYC Office’s Light The Night Walk, visit the team page here: http://pages.lightthenight.org/nyc/Manhattn11/Text100

Raising Awareness for Hunger and Homelessness in Rochester

Text 100 Rochester is proud to work with Dimitri House during this month of service! On October 25, Rochester Texties will be joining the folks at Dimitri House for a morning of volunteer work, where we will be repainting their community kitchen and helping to set up beds for the winter shelter which opens just a few days later on November 1. Until then, we are hoping to raise as much as we can for this great local cause. When it comes to hunger, no amount is too small – even a contribution of $5 can help put food in a family’s holiday basket.

Named in memory of a good-natured local homeless man, Dimitri Mamczur, Dimitri House began in 1980 as an organization to support the hungry and homeless of Rochester, NY by serving delicious meals and bringing warm hospitality and loving acceptance to the people who need it most. More than 30 years later, Dimitri House is independently operated and continues to help the poor and homeless throughout our community. Its mission continues to be to advocate and network with other local agencies to ensure an adequate response for the poor and to empower individuals to take control of their lives. Dimitri House provides services such as a food cupboard, drop-in program, men’s emergency winter shelter, and holiday programs to support the less fortunate in Rochester. More details on what each service includes can be found here.

If you’d like to learn more about our cause, or contribute to this great organization, please visit our donation page on Crowdrise: http://www.crowdrise.com/text100rochester.

The world is looking to Copenhagen where the UN climate conference 2009 is currently taking place. At Text 100 we advise many clients on CSR and social media communications and have therefore been very interested in considering the communications landscape surrounding the conference this year. We want to find out how Web 2.0 and especially the rise of social media has revolutionized the way politicians are communicating their positions, how NGOs are trying to influence the discussions and how COP15 is bringing climate experts to the “blog table” to offer insights into the climate discussion. It is very interesting to take a look behind the scenes and understand how many different stakeholders can stay up to date every minute of  the day.

Prior to the start of COP15 we created an international Text 100 COP15 team with the objective of monitoring the social web including blogs, Twitter, social networks, online forums, YouTube, Flickr etc. and analyzing what we found. The team started its work with the COP15 pre-conference in Barcelona, on 2^nd November. After six busy weeks we have observed the following, topline trends.  We will be pulling together a thorough analysis of our findings in early January.

• NGOs, politicians and journalists are important users of social media today. Interestingly, companies and  industry associations do not seem to be  exploiting the potential of social media.
• Twitter and blogs are the social media tools used most. An interesting example is the twitter wall of Greenpeace on 5th December in Berlin: Greenpeace put a big screen in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate. At the end of the day, it received 15,000 tweets with the hashtag #savetheclimate. There were people in Germany sending messages to Angela Merkel and what she should focus on. One can see this twitter wall also in the Greenpeace GreenAction blog: http://twitterwall.greenaction.de/. 
•  NGOs leverage social media to inform their members and followers about current activities, to call for action and to report about progress made in Copenhagen. A good example is WWF Climate Blog. 
• Interestingly, social media is mainly used as an information channel. In many cases there aren’t a lot of comments and dialogue that show a vivid discussion about the climate conference. However, a positive example in terms of interaction and dialogue is the Climate Thinkers Blog of the Danish government which invites some of the world’s most renowned climate thinkers to participate in a virtual global climate debate. 
• Prior to the conference, topics discussed in social media were about expectations, attendees and results, as well as practical questions about how to travel to Copenhagen, how to find a hotel etc. With the start of the conference we can see a big shift in the discussion. Now it is more about climate content such as negotiation progress, positions and opinions of different parties as well as news-worthy activities of NGOs.

If you would like to hear more about social media usage at COP15 please listen to the Englisch radio show of Deutsche Welle or read the related article on their Web site.