“Every Single Person Who Looks Brown Is Scared” Heartbreaking, unacceptable, un-American. When I read this week in the NY Times https://lnkd.in/ey3ST9Ft about the fear spreading across Chicago, restaurants closing, parents standing guard at school, Americans facing off against Americans, I saw our work at Share Our Strength in a new light than before and realized that five ordinary things about Share Our Strength are extraordinary today.
I’ve always been focused on getting results – measuring progress against the ambitious goals for school breakfast, summer meals, and family economic mobility. Everything else was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
But in this moment, the means to the end - the way we do what we do - may be more important than the outstanding results we get. Because we’re modeling a way of serving for our sector, our government, and society. Just think of how we:
- fight to ensure benefits for all Americans whether we agree with their political views or not
- have never wavered from equity, diversity, and inclusivity because No Kid Hungry means no kid.
- have not once departed from our commitment to bipartisanship
- focus on state and local because that is where real people live their lives
- empower chefs, teachers, corporate executives, and countless others to engage in community regardless of their political party, income level, religion, gender, etc.
These are not exactly radical innovations. They used to be the norm. That we have stayed true to them may be Share Our Strength’s biggest selling point right now. We’re not the only one. Others ranging from first responders to nonprofits like Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Upstream, Edesia Nutrition, The United Negro College Fund, UNCF International Rescue Committee, and many more reflexively put principles above politics. For those who do not, the bullet points above may be the beginning of a useful playbook. The icing on the cake is that we are getting amazing results for the children and families we aspire to serve.
The nature of chronic and complex social problems is that measures of programmatic impact will always go up and down, back and forth. But what does not fluctuate is the way our values inform everything we do. Perhaps en route to ending childhood hunger, we’ll do something even more important: what Bobby Kennedy in the 1960’s urged, to “dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” #nonprofit #philanthropy #equity ##bipartisanship #hunger #NoKidHungry Share Our Strength #neighborshelpingneighbors #chefs #culinary #schools #schoolbreakfast #BeCivilNotSilent
