Friday, August 31, 2012

50/4000/30...The Global Giving Challenge is Here

     Global Giving is a website dedicated towards bringing organizations that are serving needs across the planet together with people who want to give.  Their site is a remarkable medley of people who are feeding the poor, caring for the homeless and pouring hope into the oppressed.  The site is remarkably efficient, allowing the user to find projects based on name or geography or even mission type.  Each represented organization has pictures and stories and backgrounds on their profile as well as detailed giving levels, providing a glimpse of what your money would be doing across the world.
     We would like to be included on this site.  It has the potential to be a strong, long-term fund-development resource.  Somewhere in this great big beautiful world there are more people who have a heart for a Youth Enrichment Center like this.  I want to make it easy to both find Joel's Place and donate to us.
     For this to happen, we need your help.  Global Giving has established criteria for who they allow onto their site.  We have submitted all the appropriate due diligence, now we have to pass their Challenge to demonstrate that we have enough established support to build on.  Here's what we need:
  1. 50 unique donors.   Fifty separate families, corporations or organizations that will donate to Joel's Place on the Global Giving site.
  2. $4000.  The total amount given needs to be over Four Thousand Dollars. 
  3. 30 days.  All gifts must come in during the month of September.
  4. The minimum donation is $10.  There is no maximum donation.
     These criteria could be met in any number of ways.  We could have one donor give $3,610 while thirty nine others each give $10.  We could have forty people give $80.  We could have ten people give $10, ten people give $50, nine people give $100 and one final person give $2500.  We could have 400 people each give $10.  I could go on, but you get the point.

     Global giving has some competitions that they hold this month: extra money for the group that has the most donors in September, matching funds if a certain percentage of the gifts are monthly and so on.  It is fun to compete, but first things first.  We are a tremendous asset to the community and I want as many people thinking about us and giving to us and praying for us as possible.

     Would you log on to this link and give at least $10?  And then forward my blog onto your friends, neighbors and other people who you think would be interested.  The competition starts at 12:01 am on September 1st.


Thank you everyone for your help and support.

We are going to crush this.

James

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Seasons

     My son erupted out of bed this morning at 6:30, arms and legs flying every which way as he threw his clothes on.  I was not far behind, staggering out of my room to make a special french toast breakfast for the kids through bleary eyes and a protesting body.  You see today is the first day of school, quite simply one of the best days of the year.  The kids are sent off every day to enrich their minds and spend time with their peers with built in supervision.  There is actually a chance to get some work done around the house without my beloved children undoing everything I just worked on.  Then they come back tired from working hard, grateful to be home.  The school parking lot was filled with adults who were grinning from ear to ear.
     Don't get me wrong, summer is a great time here in Interior Alaska.  The days are long and the temperatures are comfortably warm.  The hours have been filled with camps and lessons and parties and vacations and play.  The kids have bounced between the house and the yard and the neighborhood, leaving chaos in their wake.  Now the house is quiet and still...eery even.  It is hard to believe that only 12 hours earlier my children were playing "Whack-a-mole" with a stick and a sheet of bubbly plastic, reveling in the carnage they inflicted.
       Other than the sun coming up a little earlier, there are few differences between yesterday and today.  However every parent knows that yesterday was summer and today is fall.  The new season brings a new daily schedule and even a new emphasis to parenting.  Summer parenting is about trying to channel the energy and creativity of your children into positive activities that do minimal damage to the kids or their surroundings.  Fall parenting is about supporting your children as they struggle through the growing pains of academics and social pressures.  There are new goals, new challenges, new relationships and new dreams.  I love new beginnings and am excited every single fall at the new possibilities that are ahead of us. 
     The crazy thing is this:  If you do not have a school-age child, you have no idea that this enormous transition has occurred.  From that perspective, today is just another day instead of an annual monumental moment.
     I think there is another seasonal change happening at the same time.  I believe Joel's Place is moving into a new season.  An external observer would not see anything noticeably different: our finances are still struggling mightily and we still have slow foot traffic through the doors.  But as I sit at my desk, things are shifting.  My calendar is filling up quickly with training sessions and visits with potential donors and meetings with community partners and opportunities to connect with new demographics.  There is a growing interest in supporting Joel's Place and seeing it thrive.  This new season will see our building hosting new groups during our off hours, introducing a new generation to skateboarding, sponsoring amazing shows and activities for young people, welcoming in youth who have nowhere else to go, developing community partners who give joyfully and pray diligently and equipping our staff to show the love of Jesus to everyone who walks through our doors.
     There is a new season here at Joel's Place.  Feel free to stop by if you want to share a glimpse.

Monday, August 13, 2012

I Am The Awesomest Dad Ever

      I know because it says so on the note that my kids gave me on my first day of work here at Joel's Place.  They both made pictures of my flying through the air on a skateboard, complete with skating helmet and wide-eyed abandon on my face, to post at my desk.  They were excited for me to get a new job.  They were especially excited that the new job was in a skate park.  They were over-the-top excited that they would get to visit me and play in said skate park.
     They don't know about money troubles or mortgages or staffing or business plans or grant applications.  They don't know and they don't care.  All they know is that Dad works somewhere that is fun.  And not "fun" in that "make a game out of chores to trick us into cleaning our rooms" kind of way.  This is "fun for fun's sake" as Kelli, our Program Director calls it.  This is the fun that pushes you to run and test the limits of your body, fun that leaves you laughing until your sides hurt.  This is fun that engages the mind and the body and the soul.  This is fun that shouts so loud that it drowns out the rest of the day and makes you forget about everything but right now.
     My son is 10 and has autism.  I am sure that I will share more about him in the coming weeks, but for right now I will simply say that it has always been hard for him to have fun.  Fun usually happens in a social setting and involves sharing experiences with other people.  Social settings are especially challenging for people on the autism spectrum ...they tend to engage in something called "parallel play," playing next to someone but not with them.
     When the boy was four, he was an avid reader.  He would sit on the floor for hours, reading anything he could find for hours at a time.  His sister was just a toddler and would wobble over to where he had parked himself.  She was the only one in the world who had no respect for his boundaries.  She would wrap her arms around his neck and lean on his back, upsetting his balance.  My son payed her no mind as he continued reading, suddenly finding it harder to keep the words still as they swayed back and forth.  Finally they would topple over, the boy coming out of whatever hyper-intense world of reading and concentration he had been in, and they would laugh and wrestle.  Throughout his life, this is the level of effort needed to have fun with my son.
     Here at Joel's Place, I have an entire complex filled with boys like my son.  Maybe they are not on the autism spectrum like he is, but I have watched them all come in and every day it looks the same.  First they enter and head straight to the skate park to see if anything interesting is going on there.  If it is empty, they attack the ramps at full speed, sometimes skating...more often simply running up and down, around and around until their cheeks flush and they need to stop.  Then they wander to the cafe for some water, a snack and a video.  Next they head to the Red Room where they play pool, air hockey and video games while being told not to touch the equipment on the stage.  Then it is back to the ramps where they cycle starts all over again.  One night, my son had run himself ragged; he was lying on his back yelling to me that he was so exhausted that his legs wouldn't work.  I was shutting down so I told him to just lie on the floor and cool off until I got back.  I came out to find him rolling himself up a ramp by using only his arms.  The amount of effort he was using was immense.  He finally made it to the next level, slid back down and did it again.  At last he was lying on the ground, spread eagle and chest heaving.  I came over to him and asked what he was doing.
     He looked up at me with a big, toothy smile and answered simply, "Having Fun."

Long live Joel's Place.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Stuck

     I have been trying to write this blog post for two days now.  The cursor just blinks on the screen, taunting me.  It is not that I am lacking for ideas.  I have begun posts on Faith vs. Fear, the Olympics, my Staff, the AmeriCorps program, Fall, Vision, Superheroes and more.  Some were paragraphs long.  Some were a only a title.  All have been deleted.  None of them seemed to be a good summary of where I am at or what I want to talk about.  None of them were more than a disciplined writing exercise.  So I have been sitting here.  At my computer.  Stuck.
     There is a lot to do at the moment, even as the skate park lies quiet during the State Fair.  There is a Board Meeting this week to prepare for.  There are new grants to apply for and old grants to close out.  There are shows to plan and camps to advertise and a skate shop to revitalize and kids to feed and coalitions to participate in and volunteers to coordinate and thank you notes to write and facilities to fix and partners to meet and staff to build up.  I love it.  I love every single crazy and chaotic piece of it...even the fundraising.  I love that my job requires that I learn 5 new things every single day and utilize them right away.  I love that almost every conversation that I have in this building includes at least one laugh.
     And yet I am sitting here, stuck on what to write.  Actually, let me rephrase that.  I am sitting here, stuck on what to do next.  Part of it is money.  Do I pay the mortgage or the staff or the garbage service?  Anyone who has worked with a nonprofit can relate with that dilemna.  There's also this building.  This great big, wonderful, expensive building that sits quietly for 18 hours each day.  What do I do in order to make 1890 Marika a better-utilized resource?  And then there are the kids.  Youth are inherently messy.  They break things and hurt feelings and never react the ways you want them too.  At-risk kids are also messy, but amplified.  How do we provide a place of fun and healing for them without their baggage hurting other kids, damaging our belongings or burning out our staff?
     It seems to me that the answer will not come through simply finding more grants.  The purpose of a grant is to help move your organization to the next level, not sustain it once it has arrived.  Community is what sustains organizations and allows them to grow into their new level.  The organization needs family, friends and supporters who believe in its value and invest themselves in order see it thrive.
     Joel's Place is a community resource that needs to grow its community support in order to survive.  We are asking our staff to do too much with too few resources...and that never ends well.  Imagine if people gave Joel's Place a portion of their time and money, precious assets both, and encouraged their friends to do the same.  Imagine if our building was constantly filled with field trips and birthday parties and concerts and families.  Imagine if youth could find tutors to help with homework or counselors to help with home problems in the same building where they were taught how to skate, play the guitar, cook and do laundry.  Imagine if there were a network of trusted adults who could not only give kids a ride here in the cold winter months but also help them find food and shelter if they were lacking.  Imagine if every young person in Fairbanks knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they could come to Joel's Place if they were in crisis and it would be okay.  How drastically would that change our city?
     I am sitting here stuck today because I have come to the realization that I cannot make this happen on my own.  Even if the Joel's Place staff and I poured our entire lives into this dream, it would not happen.  This will only become a reality when our family, friends and the community of Fairbanks come together and invest in changing the world for our youth.  I am completely and resolutely convinced that We can make this happen.  Not a doubt in my mind.  Consider this a formal invitation:  Come with us.  Join us as we work to replace fear and despair and death with hope and safety and life.  We need you and are eager to have you along.

     What can you do?
  • Give financially to Joel's Place.  See that bar on the right?  Click on the giving link to help us climb out of the hole with our mortgage or pay our staff or sponsor a skater.
  • Tell your friends about us.  We are the best kept secret in town.  Tell people you know, especially those whose lives have been touched by at-risk youth, about what we do.  Bring them by.  I would be happy to give them a tour.
  • Use our building.  Consider using it for parties or meetings.
  • Volunteer to tutor or cook or clean or do security or a dozen other things.
  • Just stop by.  I am always happy to talk and brainstorm about creative ways that Joel's Place can connect with the community.
 Thank you all.  I am eager to see what happens next.