The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), supports 151,000 seniors in North Carolina. – Second Harvest Food Bank of NWNC
The week’s sponsor:
Blue Ridge Companies truly sets a high standard with it comes to corporate social responsibility. Without much fanfare, they support an array of charitable groups and causes in communities throughout this region and the country. In addition to their incredible, long-term support of Second Harvest Food Bank of NWNC every year, they also do an amazing job of supporting Toys for Tots, and for stepping up to support almost any community service project you can think of. They’ve won the Piedmont Triad Apartment Association’s Owners Cup Challenge – a competition between management companies to see which can raise the most food/money during its annual food drive – that at one point we joked about renaming it the Blue Ridge Cup.
Blue Ridge has also stepped up to the plate to support all of my stunts meant to raise funds during PTAA’s Annual Food Drive. It began with a jump into one of their community pools wearing nothing but a bathing suit, high heels, a pink tutu, a tiara and their slogan painted on my back. From there it progressed to a dance video (that hopefully will never be seen again) and now includes this walk.
Much thanks to everyone at Blue Ridge for their always-awesome support!
ActivityDays 59: Got in some serious hitting with my buddy Tyler (a reluctant subject in the background of the pic) at Taylor Tennis Center. Getting in some miles in the a/c was a welcome relief from the heat and humidity we’ve had lately.
Miles walked/run: 5.75 miles. Here’s a collage of screenshots from my FitBit for the week:
40% of food produced in the United States goes to waste. Source
The week’s sponsor:
Blue Ridge Companies truly sets a high standard with it comes to corporate social responsibility. Without much fanfare, they support an array of charitable groups and causes in communities throughout this region and the country. In addition to their incredible, long-term support of Second Harvest Food Bank of NWNC every year, they also do an amazing job of supporting Toys for Tots, and for stepping up to support almost any community service project you can think of. They’ve won the Piedmont Triad Apartment Association’s Owners Cup Challenge – a competition between management companies to see which can raise the most food/money during its annual food drive – that at one point we joked about renaming it the Blue Ridge Cup.
Blue Ridge has also stepped up to the plate to support all of my stunts meant to raise funds during PTAA’s Annual Food Drive. It began with a jump into one of their community pools wearing nothing but a bathing suit, high heels, a pink tutu, a tiara and their slogan painted on my back. From there it progressed to a dance video (that hopefully will never be seen again) and now includes this walk.
They donated enough for a week’s worth of sponsorship and requested the week that I would be in San Diego for the National Apartment Association’s #Apartmentalize Conference. The week began last Sunday (June 10) in Zion National Park in Utah, then on Monday, I flew to San Diego and spent the rest of the week in San Diego before heading home late Saturday (June 16).
Much thanks to everyone at Blue Ridge for their always-awesome support!
ActivityDays 41 – 47: An incredible week that began with a day of hiking in the unbelievably spectacular Zion National Park in Utah on Sunday. Then I flew to San Diego to spend the week attending the Apartmentalize Conference, and as you likely know “conferencing” includes lots of walking!
Miles walked/run: 36.12 miles. Here’s a collage of screenshots from my FitBit for the week:
At the day job I work for a trade association that represents the apartment industry, thus the companies I work with are on the front lines of our nation’s housing situation. You may not be aware of it, but we do indeed have a housing situation that can be best summed up as this: we have too many people who don’t make enough money to pay for the housing that’s available, and/or we don’t have enough housing units that are affordable for people at the bottom of the income scale. Even worse, we have a LOT of people who, thanks to any number of life events, lose their housing and thus end up living in flop houses, cars, tents or under a bridge.
Because apartment owners and managers provide over a third of the housing in the U.S, and a majority of the rental housing, they are often looked to for a solution to the problem of affordability and homelessness. It would be great if they could snap their fingers and solve the problem, but due to the complexity of the issue (static income, increases in the costs of everything from health care to food, lack of housing inventory in general, etc.) this is not something housing providers can solve on their own. That’s not to say that people in the industry aren’t trying, and a perfect example is a woman named Lori Trainer who has been working for years down in Florida to address homelessness in her community. (Here’s a link to a video about some of her work, and I’ll embed it below as well). She just wrote an article for Multifamily Insiders titled The Story Behind the Sign that helps put homelessness in perspective. Here’s an excerpt:
We’ve all seen the homeless person with the sign on the side of the road and when we do, many people think these thoughts. What the people offering these judgments don’t realize is that the overwhelming majority of people don’t “choose” to be homeless. In fact, nearly 50% of the homeless in America are working. Why are they homeless then? Well, that is the “564,788 person question” (the number of homeless on the street each night according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness).
The causes of homelessness range from sad to tragic. Job loss, foreclosures, divorce and natural disasters such as the tragedies we are seeing in the Midwest and in Canada are a few examples. These storm victims certainly didn’t choose to be homeless or do anything wrong but they are indeed homeless now. If their insurance isn’t perfect, takes a year to work out the details or worse yet, doesn’t pay, what do those families do? They have lost everything; their homes, belongings and jobs. They are now homeless…
Another very prevalent and sad demographic in the homeless arena are families. Approximately 206,268 were identified in the last count. Divorce, domestic violence, death, single parents and low wage workers are all in this category. Children are resilient but often suffer irreparable damage when forced to live in vehicles, shelters or motels for weeks or months on end. 60 Minutes did a great job highlighting this epidemic:https://youtu.be/L2hzRPLVSm4 (Be sure to have tissues handy!)
Then Lori goes on to point out that there are many, many more people who are just a misstep away from becoming homeless themselves.
Many people think it could never happen to them. But the truth is that one out of three people are two paychecks away from being homeless. There are 12 million renters pay more than 50% of their annual income for housing and 37 million people living in poverty in America. Simple fact, a minimum wage worker cannot support a household and pay rent. There is a critical shortage of affordable housing in the US and, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition; approximately 200,000 units are destroyed annually. That combined with the “aging out” tax credit population and the mile long waiting lists for section 8 vouchers, we have the perfect storm.
One of the initiatives we are working on at the national level in the industry is to identify the programs that industry groups are participating in at the local level around the country. For instance, my employer is working with Partners Ending Homelessness to help match their clients with available apartment units in Guilford County. What we’ve found is that like many things in life, the concept is simple but the implementation is complex. Still, we’ve seen progress and we will continue working because this is an issue that will be with us for the foreseeable future.
That’s just one initiative in one community, but that’s the kind of effort we’re going to need in every community around the country to address homelessness, because quite frankly this is not an issue that can be solved from Washington. What our national leadership CAN do is address the big picture issues that underlie homelessness, including:
An economy that is not providing adequate income for average workers
A health care “system” that bankrupts some, and financially cripples many
A crumbling infrastructure that threatens all of us
A byzantine regulatory structure (think HUD & EPA) that makes affordable housing development a challenge
Another chief culprit is an under-performing, and some would say under-valued, education system, but that’s not just a Washington issue so let’s not throw it entirely on them. The point is that homelessness is the most severe symptom of an ailing nation. If we are truly measured by how we treat the least of us, then as a nation and a community we have a lot we need to do to heal ourselves.
Here’s the video about the effort in Florida that Lori’s been a big part of:
Being an addict means so much that is negative in our lives. Lies, stealing, distrust – we wrap addicts in all of these things. However, I would like to believe that that is only part of the truth.
One of the major obstacles to recovery is public stigma. The stigma comes, in part, from the way we talk and think about recovery. Addict. Junkie. Druggie. These terms carry with them the Hollywood scenes and dramatic memories of the underbelly of alcoholism and addiction. These words cause us to ignore the people like myself who are living in recovery. These words and prejudices cause us to objectify the addict and the alcoholic. We can then easily place them in the box with the “town drunk” as too often incurable. As a result, when I sought help, the help that was available to me existed only in church basements, amid bad coffee, smoke-veiled doorways and broken stories of destruction and carnage…
According to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 23.1 million people ages 12 and older needed treatment for an illicit drug or alcohol use problem last year, but only 2.5 million received treatment at a specialty facility. About one-quarter of those who need treatment but do not receive it lacked insurance, according to the article…
There are an estimated 23 million people in the United States who are living in long-term recovery. I am an addict, but I’d prefer to say something different. I am a person in long-term recovery. What that means to me is that I haven’t had alcohol or other drugs since July 10, 1999. This has allowed me to become a better person, a loving father, grandfather and husband. I have established myself as a productive member of my community and a successful business leader.
Kim’s focus here is on the price that individuals pay for their addiction and the lack of resources many of them find when they look for help, but we should also keep in mind the impact that the lack of resources have on the rest of us. Our prisons are full of people put there for drug crimes, we have foster homes filled with children who are a product of homes broken by addiction and we have friends and families who suffer the agony of watching their loved ones kill themselves slowly and abuse those around them in the process. In one way or another addiction takes a tremendous toll on everyone, not just the addicted, and we long ago passed the point where we need to change how we address the issue.
Most of all he testified to the messiness of life. In high school a lot of people are trying to fix you and improve you and elevate you. Neal Tonken listened and affirmed that things were confusing. Because he loved passionately, spoke loudly (and occasionally out of turn), and found life overwhelming in both beauty and frustration, he understood what you were saying. What I was saying.
He did all of this without letting us off the hook. I got a C-plus each semester in his class. I might have been newly alive but I was messy, and it was no good to be alive if you couldn’t make something of that passion in a way that makes sense to other people. “His work suffers from lack of personal discipline and attention to detail,” is how he put it.
He had high standards and expected us to meet them. But we wanted to. He did not have much time for BS. In the tributes after his death, classmates remembered his comments when they tried to sneak something by him. Dan Manatt, now a documentarian, tried to loaf by with a paper on The Great Gatsby that used a lot of fancy words to cover up that he was winging it. “There’s much less here than meets the eye,” wrote Mr. Tonken. Sam Thomas, now a novelist, did the same thing on a paper. “This is pure fluff. If it weren’t well written it would be an F. D.”…
Another student, who had graduated almost 20 years after I had, drove straight from Ann Arbor when she heard the news. She brought her Norton Anthology of Poetry. She came into the room to read him letters that were just arriving from students who heard he was ill. A special inbox had been set up, and it was filling rapidly. She read letter after letter from students who weren’t just recalling events from his class but how he had changed their lives too. The room filled up with grateful souls.
That was Neal’s last lesson. That example. To let us see life in that rich tally—an accumulation of gratitude deserved and expressed. I got a chance to thank Neal, and it makes me think of other teachers to whom I am grateful—Bonnie Mazziotta, Sally Selby, Juan Jewell, George Lang, Ellis Turner, Susan Banker, JoAnne Lanouette, Harold Kolb and Anthony Winner. I carry with me what they have given by their instruction and their example. Perhaps you have teachers like that in your life. Write them. Be clear and direct. Tell them “thank you.”
I’ll take this another step and say that you shouldn’t just thank those who taught you in school. Think of the mentors you’ve had at work, church or civic organization. Think of the friends and peers who helped guide you through life with a perfectly timed piece of advice, a nudge in the right direction or a much needed “I call BS” moment. Think of your grandparents, aunts and uncles, and close family friends. Think of your spouse. Think of your parents. And after you think of them you most definitely should reach out and thank them.
Your legacy can be pretty easily identified by how people speak about you when you’re gone. Stuart Scott, a grad of RJ Reynolds HS here in Winston-Salem and UNC, became famous as a sportscaster for ESPN. Based on how his colleagues are speaking about him I’d say he’s left a helluva legacy.
To me one of the most important things we can do as human beings is to assume positive intent from the person we’re working with or talking to. What that means is that even if you say or do something I disagree with, I assume your intention in saying or doing it was to create some kind of positive outcome. By doing this I can look at another person’s action or words and think, “Okay, why would Jane think that was the right thing to do?” even though I might think it’s completely wrong. Rather than take it as an assault or an insult, I view it as a step towards some kind of (eventually) positive outcome.
One of the most maddening things about human beings is that we tend to see everything in black or white, right or wrong, us versus them. It’s maddening because it instantly divides us and it makes us predictable and easy to manipulate. It also prevents us from solving our society’s hard problems which all live in the gray areas, the ambiguous territory between what’s obviously right or wrong, the responsibility of not me, or you, but both of us.
All of this is nothing new – people have been like this since the dawn of time – but now we get to see these tendencies on full display on a daily basis through peoples’ new forms of interaction, namely social media. Not to put too much import on Facebook or Twitter, they are simply a new way for people to express the feelings they’ve had all along, but in the past we were limited to hearing the opinions of those we actually shared a physical space with or the limited number of people who wrote for a newspaper or broadcast on radio or TV. Now we can see or hear the opinions of people we might see in person once a decade, and their friends, and those drips of sharing turn into a flood of opinions.
Unfortunately, most people either don’t have the time or the ability to formulate nuanced or well thought out positions on the issues of the day and so they default to sharing some quote or visual that represents their opinion and helps identify them as being in the pro-this camp or con-that camp. Then they get a thumbs up from those who think like them or maybe a visceral “eff you” from someone who sees things differently.
It would be easy to dismiss this as silliness, as just people spouting off on stupid platforms intended to waste time at work, but I think that would be a mistake. When you have serious social issues like the police protests going on, any medium that is potentially contributing to the division in our society should be taken seriously. So the question becomes, are our social media channels contributing to a widening divide in our country?
Short answer: maybe, but they don’t have to. Let’s return to my original statement about assuming positive intent. Take any of the things you see on Facebook – or whatever your social media platform of choice is – that you disagree with and think to yourself, “They must be saying or sharing that because they believe something good will result. What is it?” By doing that you avoid thinking, “Man, Jon’s a moron for saying that and I know that because I’m right and he’s wrong.” The moment you pass judgment is the moment you begin to close your eyes, your windows to the world, to the possibility that there’s an alternative view you may not have considered.
Of course some people don’t have positive intent. In fact there are plenty of people who would like nothing more than to take advantage of any given situation, but you can rest assured that they will reveal themselves very quickly. You have nothing to lose by assuming positive intent and then reacting accordingly if you find otherwise, but if you don’t assume positive intent then you will never have the opportunity to learn from those who think differently than you. Remember, different doesn’t have to be wrong or right, it’s just different.
So folks, please as a favor to me, when you’re getting all hot and bothered about an issue please remember to do yourself and our society a favor – assume positive intent until proven otherwise.
This is a fantastic TED presentation by Dan Pallotta on why the non-profit industry is perpetually hamstrung by its inability, among other things, to break out of a structure that limits compensation, suppresses risk-taking, prohibits access to capital markets, imposes frugality at the expense of future growth potential and tags all overhead as negative. It’s a must-watch for anyone in the non-profit sector, but the charitable arm of the non-profit sector in particular.
Here’s a link to the full transcript and a couple of excerpts that really hit home:
So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce,the more money you can make.But we don’t like nonprofits to use moneyto incentivize people to produce more in social service.We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyonewould make very much money helping other people.Interesting that we don’t have a visceral reactionto the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people.You know, you want to make 50 million dollarsselling violent video games to kids, go for it.We’ll put you on the cover of Wired magazine.But you want to make half a million dollarstrying to cure kids of malaria,and you’re considered a parasite yourself…
Businessweek did a survey, looked at the compensation packagesfor MBAs 10 years of business school,and the median compensation for a Stanford MBA,with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars.Meanwhile, for the same year, the average salaryfor the CEO of a $5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S.was 232,000 dollars, and for a hunger charity, 84,000 dollars.Now, there’s no way you’re going to get a lot of peoplewith $400,000 talent to make a $316,000 sacrificeevery year to become the CEO of a hunger charity.
Some people say, “Well, that’s just because those MBA types are greedy.”Not necessarily. They might be smart.It’s cheaper for that person to donate100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity,save 50,000 dollars on their taxes,so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game,now be called a philanthropist because they donated100,000 dollars to charity,probably sit on the board of the hunger charity,indeed, probably supervise the poor SOBwho decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity,and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influenceand popular praise still ahead of them…
So we’ve all been taught that charities should spendas little as possible on overhead things like fundraisingunder the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising,the more money there is available for the cause.Well, that’s true if it’s a depressing worldin which this pie cannot be made any bigger.But if it’s a logical world in which investment in fundraisingactually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger,then we have it precisely backwards,and we should be investing more money, not less,in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thingthat has the potential to multiply the amount of moneyavailable for the cause that we care about so deeply…
This is what happens when we confusemorality with frugality.We’ve all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overheadis morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead,but we’re missing the most important piece of information,which is, what is the actual size of these pies?Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it’s tiny?What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charitybecause it made no investment in its scaleand the professional fundraising enterprise netted71 million dollars because it did?Now which pie would we prefer, and which piedo we think people who are hungry would prefer?
I read Scott Sexton’s column about Ken Glazener with great interest because Mr. Glazener walks by my house just about every day and unfortunately I knew nothing about him other than:
He walks alot
He picks up a lot of trash which he totes back to his house
I’m pretty sure he lives in the subdivision behind my house because when he returns from his walks he usually takes the road by our house back into the subdivision.
Other than that I knew nothing about him even though I’d seen him for years. Now I know what he’s been up to:
Most days, he walks upwards of 10 miles along Forsyth County roads with an equally scruffy dog by his side, carrying a plastic grocery bag that he fills with discarded cans and bottles…
Glazener is a retired dentist, “not rich but comfortable,” he said, while recounting one of the many times a kind stranger approached to offer a few bucks for a hot meal…
Some days he starts his walk with a plastic bag in his pocket. Others, he figures (correctly) he’ll find one that’s been tossed and he’ll use it. He recycles bottles and saves aluminum cans until he has enough – 200 or so pounds – to rate a trip to OmniSource, a scrap metal yard off U.S. 52 across town.
“I bet I get 300 cans a week,” he said. “Unfortunately most of them are beer cans. If I thought people were drinking them at home, sobering up and then leaving to throw them out on the roadside I’d be wrong. It’s scary to think about.”
The money he gets for the cans, a few hundred bucks a year, he sends to a scholarship fund he set up at the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry.
Since our house fronts one of the roads that Mr. Glazener travels I can attest to the fact that most of the bottles/cans discarded from passing cars contained an adult beverage before they were tossed. For 10 years I’ve been finding empty bottles of a certain brand of vodka and more empty PBR cans than I can even count in the ditch in front of our house. It’s disheartening to know that some of our neighbors are boozing it up behind the wheel and that they have such terrible taste.
Next time I see him I hope to thank Mr. Glazener for his service and for being smart enough to do his community service while also getting some great exercise. Let’s just say he doesn’t look close to the age, 71 years old, that’s mentioned in the article.
For 40 years, my father, Ward Gay, was a tennis coach, at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, Mass., the city where he grew up. When he started, rackets were wood. The No. 1 men’s player in the world was Ilie Nastase. My dad studied tennis bibles written by Rod Laver, Bud Collins and Harry Hopman, and taught himself the rest through years of little victories and mistakes.
He liked natural gut string, one-handed backhands, the serve-and-volley, the chip-and-charge. He was also a science teacher at the high school, and he enjoyed how tennis was a game that rewarded mental acuity as well as physical skill. His favorite tennis maxim was the well-known adage he borrowed and passed on to every player: You’re only as good as your second serve…
My dad admired the pristine grass at Wimbledon and the red clay at Roland Garros, but the kind of tennis he really adored was city tennis. Cracks in the hard court. Rusty chain-link fences. Holes in the nets. Trucks howling by on the street. Country clubs weren’t his thing.
Tennis was for everybody, he felt…
In early March, just days away from the first tennis practice of the season, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
He resigned from coaching the team. He told me about it matter-of-factly, but stepping away after doing this for so long had to have been devastating. Spring afternoons on the hard court had been a ritual for him, a sanctuary…
Last Thursday, Aug. 21, in a Boston hospital that overlooked a pair of beautifully ragged tennis courts on the Charles River, my dad died. He was 70 years old.
The next day, my brother and I walked down the street to the courts we grew up on. We pulled out a couple of our father’s old rackets we’d uncovered in the garage, and hit like we used to hit when we were young. Dad had given us and so many others a sport we could play for the rest of our lives, but his reach was much more than that. We ran with our rackets back, ready for anything.
Befuddled 