WalkingElephant

Dropping in on City Year Boston

The first time we present a check to one of our Beneficiary-Nonprofits I like to deliver it personally. Usually this is my first face-time with someone in the organization, and for them with someone from our side. Good feelings abound. And the first tangible currency that is the product of all the hard work people representing both entities put in is finally exchanged. Yes, we give them money, oxygen to all nonprofits. But, they give me inspiration. To be honest, I think I get more than equal value!

It happens every time: I think I understand an organization, their mission, and how they work by reading about it and watching a few videos. Then I meet them, on their turf, and realize that I had no idea... Dropping off our check at City Year last Friday [$3,679.52 - our biggest so far!] did it to me again. 

The grand tour of City Year Boston's headquarters as it turns out includes a tour of City Year's national/global Headquarters [yes, global: City Year is active in the UK and South Africa now]. 

Pictured above, left to right: Renaldo Mili, Kayla Faust, Jenna Hadley, Matt Parks, me, Nicole Kfoury, Stephen Mondach, and Emily Hildreth

I don’t have any experience with City Year out on the streets of in the schools, but a visit to their offices on Columbus Avenue is the organizational version of a group hug.

Big Citizenship is the new book by Alan Khazei, City Year’s co-founder on the subject of what he calls “pragmatic idealism,” which he first made manifest through City Year. I’m glad I’m reading the book AFTER my September 24, 1010 City Year visit; I witnessed in 90 short minutes so many of the concepts, values and traditions implemented in the organization’s early days, and described in the book’s early chapters. No executive or development office hand-holding: Young, 20-something corps members gave me an amazing tour of the four-floor headquarters building, including national/international headquarters’ offices, the Boston offices, the workshops and a variety of meeting spaces with whiteboard-paint walls full of ad-hoc dry-erase bullet lists and mind-maps.

What followed was a sit-down in a conference room with two new second-year corps members and now team leaders who were so inspired by their first-year experience that they decided that there was nothing they’d rather do than re-up. – And there they were: the whole lot of them, every new first-year Boston City Year corps member – in their signature red jackets and Timberland boots– in the large meeting room taking part in a spirited Friday Leadership Development Day training session together just off the first floor lobby… just like it says in the book, just as theyve done sinve the earliest days in the late 1980s. Everyone, and I mean each and every person I saw looked genuinely happy to be there, and fully-engaged in what they were doing.  And what they are doing at City Year – fighting the epidemic school drop-out rate in our country – is critical to the future of America.

The corps members’ personal stories are uplifiting and highly-motivating for me.  Not that I needed incentive to continue developing The Benefit Restaurant™ Project, but when I am afforded an insider’s perspective on the amazing systems, traditions, and people that  our funding is supporting, my resolve to keep tuning and to figure out how to propagate the system we’ve implemented at our pilot restaurant, The Elephant Walk in Waltham, is refreshed and re-doubled.

So, this is a public thank you to City Year Boston – and specifically Elliot Haney who gave me the tour, [and took the picture in this post], Jenna Hadley and Nicole Kfoury the second-year corps members and team leaders who shared with me their personal stories, and Matt Parks, the Corporate Relations Manager who spent time with us and presented me with a copy of Mr. Khazei’s book [which I am half-way through and highly recommend!]. I am awed by your service and moved by your spirit.

Note: Alan Khazei will be speaking about his new book, Big Citizenship, at More Than Words, the Moody Street, Waltham bookstore-café [that – coincidentally, I promise! – is also one of our Beneficiaries] this Wednesday, October 6 at 7:00pm. I hope to see you there!

More Than [at a loss for] Words

Yesterday I went over to More Than Words on Moody Street in Waltham to present them with their $3,144.14 Benefit Restaurant Donation check as our July beneficiary. I'd been in as a customer a couple of times before, but this time I got the Royal Tour. It blew me away.

From the customer's viewpoint, More Than Words [MTW] is a casual, urban bookstore/café - complete with a full-service to-order beverage counter, a rich selection of used books and music for sale, comfy couches, and free wi-fi. Staffed by earnest, friendly young adult baristas and booksellers, the experience is akin to a compact, well-loved Barnes and Noble.

But my tour guide, the very impressive MTW Associate Marceline Josile [pictured below with the equally impressive MTW Founder and Executive Director Jodi Rosenbaum, and me], by ushering me down the back stairs, lifted the veil on the sophisticated and finely-tuned machine occupying the enormous basement below.

More Than Words' business is books. Made up of row-upon-row of bookcases loaded with painstakingly catalogued books for sale - some openly sorted, others in plastic bins - shelves packed with a hundred or more boxes of un-sorted fresh donations from individuals and businesses, and the enormous commercial laundry basket-fulls of rejects, the MTW "warehouse operation" is a model of data-driven efficiency.

Have you ever wondered what happens to a book you donate to a used book reseller? Well - after thanking you - the smart ones [like More Than Words] enter your books' ISBN numbers into a deep database of current statistics on the popularity and pricing of titles available from myriad online used book resellers.

Hey, it's nothing personal, but you can bet that a significant percentage of that beloved library you painstakingly collected and that you finally screwed up the courage to edit simply won't make the cut.  - More Than Words is a business. And one that's outgrowing its space. They simply can't accommodate dead inventory. So they are forced to cull, and they do so with ruthless precision.

But it's not just their organized workflow or their scientific methodology that impressed me. They post up-to-yesterday sales data parsed against sales-forecasts-by-profit-center [yup - they track seriously granular data] for the entire staff to see. They've got personal performance objectives quantified and posted for every co-worker to see. [Their level of transparency would - and should - embarrass the Obama Administration] Their level of operational efficiency and business savvy and acumen embarrassed me, quite frankly. I was so stunned and impressed by all Marceline and Jodi were showing me that it was easy to forget for a while that...

The REAL mission of More Than Words is to help shape and direct the precious lives of all the challenged young people they can. To quote from their excellent website, " Youth at MTW are in teh foster care system, court involved, homeless, or have dropped out of school. These subsets of the youth population face tremendous barriers to employment and there are few training programs that are designed to empower youth to develop the skills, experience and self-efficacy critical for a safe, meaningful and successful transition to adulthood."

I've seen it first-hand: More Than Words sells coffee and books to the public; but far more importantly, More Than Words delivers the goods to challenged young people when it comes to building self-respect, self-confidence and character, teaching real-world job skills, and an awareness of what it takes to make it in the working world. I met about a dozen of their current associates and graduates yesterday and have never been more impressed with the confidence, carriage, and professionalism of young people growing into their grown-up shoes.

More...means less...

...but it shouldn't have to.

Yes, because of my Cambodian restaurants - The Elephant Walk - and Cambodian partners, Cambodia anywhere in the news always draws my interest. But, because of the principle behind my Benefit Restaurant Project, a recent NY Times blog post by Nicholas Kristof - "Does Haiti's Earthquake Hurt Cambodia" - pierced me through the heart.

Of course, when I learned of it, I immediately feared that the Chilean earthquake with diminish ongoing relief efforts in Haiti. But - shame on me - I didn't connect the dots all the way around the world the way I would have expected. Instead, in the Kristof piece a gentleman who runs a Cambodian AIDS patient relief foundation very eloquently shared his experience with our collective, global giving being largely fixed, bringing me back to first principles of the Benefit Restaurant Project:

In the world today, unfortunately more giving to one cause or crisis means less to others, because the "giving pie" is more or less fixed in size. If one organization takes a larger slice, that means smaller slices for everyone else. The unspeakably horrific Haitian earthquake rightfully attracted tremendous resources and attention - but away from Cambodia, and everywhere else. Now, the Chilean earthquake almost certainly will draw resources and attention away from Haiti. 

Digging a tad deeper, said the Kasumisou Foundation's Mark Rosasco - the gentleman I referred to above: "...the school kids, the church groups, the women's clubs, etc. - in short, the very groups on whom small foundations like mine [depend] shift their attention and fundraising energies to... the calamity of the month." I live in the business world where we live through seasonal demand cycles - busy in the spring and fall, slow in winter and summer. But imagine what the boom>bust, feast>famine cycles must be like in the nonprofit world when your support disappears because something bad happens somewhere. You're suffering, because they're suffering. 

The nonprofit world needs more support altogether, of course, but equally importantly, nonprofits - and perhaps especially the smaller ones like Mr. Rosasco's - need consistent, long-term funding so they can remain strong, stable, and focused on doing their essential good. - A widespread proliferation of The Benefit Restaurant model - a funding commitment to nonprofits of a small piece of every single transaction, each and every day - would go a long way toward ensuring that the pie grows larger, and that a larger piece for someone in crisis doesn't mean that another hungry one goes unfed.

A new river runs!

On September 1, 2009 The Elephant Walk in Waltham became a river - at least as I envision it!

Now a Benefit Restaurant™, The Waltham Elephant Walk is donating 4% of its sales to charity on a continuous, permanent basis. As such, the restaurant is a source of sustainable giving, a continuous flow funds directed by carefully purposed and well managed non-profits into the ocean of societal needs inundating us all.

I am responsible for writing for three blogs - this one, benefitrestaurants, and elephantwalktalk. As my erratic history shows, I've failed to post on anything resembling a regular basis. I am hoping that my recent meeting with myself on this matter will improve my performance in this regard. At that meeting I settled on clearer purposes for each of the three blogs, which I expect will help the words flow:

• tenthousandrivers will explore the ocean of need as I perceive it: social problems challenging us.

• benefitrestaurants will study and explain how restaurants can be - and now at least one is! - rivers filling that ocean, providing a reliable flow of funds to help meet our social challenges.

• elephantwalktalk will continue to focus on my "day job," the company and people I've worked with and loved since 1991.

Hunger Relief is the focus of The Elephant Walk's first three months as a Benefit Restaurant™. September 2009 the commitment is to the Bristol Lodge Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Waltham, Massachusetts; October's beneficiary will be Project Bread.

Today is a great day

Today we began working with a new purpose at The Elephant Walk in Waltham. We are now a Benefit Restaurant�, raising money on a continuous, transparent basis for charities and non-profits - a different one every month.

Our theme for the first three months as a Benefit Restaurant� is hunger relief. Our first beneficiary is the Bristol Lodge Kitchen, a soup kitchen on Moody Street in Waltham to which we are donating 3% of our September sales [no, not a percentage of profit, a percentage of sales].

I'll have plenty more to say about this soon enough but TODAY was worth noting all by itself!

Planting a flag

I'll have a lot more to say in days to come but feel it's important to make it a matter of record: Today is indeed the day that the Benefit Restaurant concept became real.

After 8+ years rattling around in my brain, after nearly as many years of periodically bending the ears of my wife, many family members, friends, business partners and colleagues about all the good we might do if only... The Elephant Walk in Waltham began raising money for the Bristol Lodge Kitchen, a soup kitchen in the restaurant's - and my - home town of Waltham, Massachusetts.

Yesssss!!

In Search of Sustainable Giving

My previous post mentioned three extraordinary, ongoing efforts to improve our world. Two common threads among them stand out to me: The first, of course, is the belief that literacy and education are crucial fundaments of a stable community that seeks to thrive. The second - and what I want to focus on here - is that it takes money to build and maintain those foundations [double entendre intended].

On September 1, 2009, The Elephant Walk in Waltham will become a Benefit Restaurant� [not to worry: it will still be The Elephant Walk too!], committed to a new form of philanthropy that actively seeks to reduce the "drag" on the charity/non-profit world that the necessity of fundraising imposes.

We'll share more details of The Elephant Walk in Waltham's added purpose as September 1st approaches. In the meantime I urge you to visit benefitrestaurants.org to learn more about this new concept.

Because...

...it takes ten thousand rivers to fill an ocean of need. << Hence, Benefit Restaurants.

Each Benefit Restaurant™ will be a river, providing a continuous flow of funds to help fill the ocean of need engulfing us. No, one river can't water every garden; one restaurant committed to directing funds to charities and non profits won't sustain them all. But, ten thousand?...

On September 1^st we begin with one.

Benefit Restaurants: each one a river

The river image is so powerful, symbolizing continuity, rising and falling, carrying life, containing life, bringing and sustaining life. Each river has its original source, is fed in a multitude of ways along its winding path, and flows continuously until finally feeding its lake or ocean.

In my first post I mentioned that I'd finally figured out how I can better help fill the needs surrounding me: I will be helping through Benefit Restaurants. On September 1, 2009 The Elephant Walk, a restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts in which I am a partner, will become a river. As America's first Benefit Restaurant™, the Waltham Elephant Walk will be directing a continuous flow of funds to charities and non-profits, working to do its part to help fill the ocean of need awaiting us all.

I am seriously excited! And I'm also extremely grateful to my business partners for supporting me in this new endeavor by committing their shares of the business to the common good in this manner. Through Benefit Restaurants there is now a way to harness the rivers they represent and to direct their flow into that ocean of need!

Introducing Benefit Restaurants

On September 1, 2009 The Elephant Walk restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts will begin operating as America's first Benefit Restaurant™.

As a Benefit Restaurant™, The Elephant Walk in Waltham will commit 3% of its monthly sales on a perpetual basis to a different registered 501(c)(3) organization each month.

A Benefit Restaurant™ is not a charity. Rather, it is a for-profit entity that has made a systematic, long-term commitment to to provide financial support to charities - locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

Of course the impact of a single Benefit Restaurant's giving will be greatest locally and nearly insignificant globally. This is why my ultimate, admittedly audacious goal for Benefit Restaurants is that there be thousands of them, working together to ease the financial constraints limiting the profound good most charities and non-profits are capable of doing.

But we will begin with one - The Elephant Walk in Waltham - where we will prove the Benefit Restaurant™ concept's viability and potential, and will work to grow from there.

Please follow benefitrestaurants.org to follow our journey that begins September 1, 2009!