Season to Give

It is fitting that as we prepare for the Christmas Giveaway, the Tennessean is running a series of articles about nonprofit agencies in middle Tennessee. One of CRC’s 80+ nonprofit partners, United Neighborhood Health Services, was profiled today.

” Freda Brooks spent the better part of this year living on the medical equivalent of the edge.

Brooks, 49, has high blood pressure and diabetes. For the first time in her 32-year work life, she is part of the working uninsured. Brooks thinks that’s what gave her the nerve to ask a coworker the kind of question that might seem impolite.

“I asked her, ‘How do you afford your insulin?’ ” Brooks said. “She told me, ‘Well, I go to the United Neighborhood Clinic.’ “

United Neighborhood Health Services is a full-service community clinic system founded in 1976 that aims to ensure that everyone — regardless of income or insurance status — has access to the health care they need, said Dr. Keith Junior, chief medical officer. Today, the nonprofit agency operates more than a dozen clinics in mostly lower-income areas of Nashville and Hartsville and areas where other medical practitioners are scarce.

The agency also takes health services to the homeless, has established clinics in a few Nashville area schools and housing projects and operates a clinic at Skyline Medical Center.

United Neighborhood Health Services will take care of about 30,000 patients in somewhere between 85,000 and 90,000 office visits this year, Junior said. Of its patients, 8,000 to 10,000 are under age 19. About 55 percent of patients are uninsured and billed on a sliding scale based on income and family size.

“What we try to do is see people and keep them out of the hospital if we can keep you out of the emergency room, keep people from becoming a catastrophic case,” Junior said.

This week, Junior, has treated what may be terminal liver disease, diabetes and the complications of diabetes, such as wounds that will not heal, hypertension, flu symptoms, high blood pressures, asthma and bronchitis.

“It is a godsend, a godsend. I don’t know where I would be it weren’t for them,” Brooks said.”

UNHS is one of the 67 agencies that will come next week to pick up Christmas gifts and basic necessities for their clients. Our biggest requests this Christmas are socks, underwear, coats, clothing, and blankets. I am amazed by how many people are in need of the most basic items. For information on how to help visit www.crcnashville.org.

T minus eight and counting

For me, Christmas always comes early. For three days in early December, Betsy and I give away what will become Christmas for a lot of people less fortunate than ourselves. It is the best three days of the year.

This year, smart little button that she is, Betsy did a survey of all our partner agencies to see what they need the most. And this week, we will sort, sort, sort.

What's in the boxes? We don't know!

We have about 200 boxes to go through, donated by various big-hearted companies that know we can deliver the goods to more nonprofits than any other agency in Tennessee.  We’ll spend all week doing it and we’ll love every minute of it. You just never know what you’ll find in those boxes. We won’t go into the year we got Outhouse Santas.

Then next Monday, Bobbie Cox is coming with homemade Christmas cookies! Bobbie is one of our most loyal partners. She works for a giant human services agency in Middle Tennessee, the South Central Human Resources Agency. She also works a second job to support her nonprofit habit.

She decided to get her coworkers to help her bake cookies for all the giveaway participants because she says  we do so much to help her.  Betsy and I are all about the food so we’re tremendously excited. If we can just get through sorting the boxes in time.

Nardos

Nardos Matusala has been coming to CRC for a long time. She works for a nonprofit, Quality Living, that provides services for people with special needs. I’d always wondered about Nardos’ accent, but until this week I didn’t know the dramatic story that has been her life.

Nardos was born in Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa. She was born in the midst of a war between Ethiopia, which had taken over her country, and Eritrean freedom fighters. She remembers her family running from her home to a hole in the yard for shelter whenever they heard planes overhead. To this day, she shutters when she hears the sound of an airplane.

When she was eight, Nardos’ family fled Eritrea. Her  mother put two sets of clothes on Nardos and her four sisters and they literally walked for a month to a refugee camp in Somalia where they spent the next three years.

The family arrived in the United States in 1982. They were placed in an apartment in Philadelphia where they knew no one.  They were afraid to go outside. On their first Fourth of July in America they cowered when fireworks went off, thinking for a second that they were being bombed.

In college, Nardos was asked to write a paper on her childhood. She wrote a paragraph. When the teacher read it, he asked her to write more. Six pages of fear, repression and anxiety emerged.

Today, Nardos is anxious to return to Eritrea for a visit. Her brother, not yet born when the family came to America, doesn’t understand the struggle the family endured. She wants him to understand how precious freedom is.

America has many faces and stories. Sometimes, sitting at the dock door waiting to load bleach and detergent into a van, I get to hear one of them.

Be a CRC Elf!

The holiday season is almost here! Pretty soon we’ll be eating turkey & dressing ’til we feel sick. Don’t forget the Thanksgiving Day parades, and the hours of football yet to come. After that, there will be Christmas shopping, parties, time with family & friends, Christmas lights, watching “Rudolph”, “It’s a Wonderful Life” and of course “A Christmas Story”. “You’ll shoot your eye out!”

It’s also the season of giving. We’ve been blessed with a warehouse full of gifts for the 60+ nonprofit agencies that have signed up for the Christmas Giveaway. Now we need some “elves” to help us sort through all of the donations and put together piles of gifts for the agencies. This is your chance to be a Christmas Elf for CRC and give something back  this holiday season.

Nov. 23^rd – Dec. 4^th – (Weekdays) Sort donations and create gift piles

On Sat. Dec 5^th -we will have a sorting party. Volunteers will be asked to sort gift piles based on Wish Lists from each agency. We’ve been stocking up for months and there are hundreds of boxes of gifts to sort through.

December 7th-9th – Giveaway Days. We need “elves” to help us load the gifts into recipients vehicles.

*Santa hats and snacks will be provided for all volunteers.

Click here for more information or email betsy@crcnashville.org.

I hope you will join us in spreading holiday cheer!

The girls from Bedford County

Mary, Robin, Leta and Joyce are the girls from Bedford County. We just love them. They all run different nonprofits, but they’re all in each other’s business.  Joyce is the heart of Caregiver’s Relief, which helps people who have to take care of relatives with long-term memory issues such as Alzheimer’s. Mary and Leta help autistic children and their families through the Bedford County Association of Exceptional Students and Robin runs the People’s Church Food Bank.

But as I said, they’re all in each other’s business. They help each other by volunteering, during fundraisers, and just with the general moral support everyone needs when their stress-o-meters go off.  They always carpool up to Nashville for the giveaways and then have lunch afterward.

Leta was telling  Betsy and me about one of their miracle days last week. All nonprofits have miracle days. It’s one of the reasons we do what we do. The Exceptional Students are going to have their own Christmas Giveaway for families with autistic children. Many of their families are in profound need because on top of astronomical medical bills, some of them have lost jobs because of the Recession (and, by the way, when can we just call this a Depression because, from where I’m sitting, that’s what it is down here at the bottom of the economic barrel).

But I digress. Their miracle was finding Shelley Lewis at the Stor-N-Lock in Shelbyville. They need space to store all the gifts they’re going to give away. Shelley not only offered them space at no charge, but also offered to loan them a truck to come pick up all the CRC Christmas Giveaway stuff. So a big shout-out to Shelley and her husband, Ed. If you need to store some stuff in the Shelbyville area, you go see them.

And if you just need a good giggle, you need to be at CRC when the girls from Bedford County are here.  Robin, Leta, Joyce and Mary are their very own floor show.

Go Eagles!

If you’re in need of a lump-in-your-throat, three-hankie post, this just in from Joan Anderson, an administrator at Project Reflect, one of CRC’s partner nonprofits. Project Reflect, co-founded by Sister Sandra Smithson, just started a middle school this year to pair with its elementary school. 2009 was the inaugural year of the middle school’s football program.

“What a game last night! Project Reflect’s Smithson Craighead Academy Middle School won the city public-middle-school championship for football last night in a 20-6 game against J.T. Moore held at Hunters Lane High school. The dark, cold night put no chill on the exciting play on the field. J.T. Moore had not lost a game in three years. SCA’s team, cheerleaders, and drum corps were outstanding.

Following the game, the captain of the SCA football team collected the trophy, walked up to Sister Sandra with team in tow, gave the trophy to her and said, “Sister Sandra, this is for you.”  She said, “Thank you so much for this gift. But this trophy belongs to you and the team, and I want you to keep it to remind you of what you can achieve.” So today we hope to order a trophy case for SCA Middle School’s first trophy.

Please join in celebrating this win for the kids. And pray that they win big this year in the classroom, too.”

These kids will be winners in the classroom as well as on the field because Sister Sandra and her dedicated staff will make sure of that.

Sometimes we’re clueless

Occasionally things come through the dock door that we just don’t know what to do with. Like the 32 palettes of flower bulbs. Or a giant piece of heavy-duty chain-link fence.

We got a bunch of office furniture in the other day, including this odd kind of locker thing. A lot of donations just fly out the door, but others we have to gently convince our partners to take so we can get them out of the warehouse.

The odd locker has been here for a couple weeks (which is a long shelf life at CRC). This morning, one of our partner agencies came to pick up a desk and Betsy tried to convince them that they just had to have this weird piece of furniture. Then she opened one of the locker doors to see what was inside.

Oh.  It’s  a lateral file cabinet. On its side. Sometimes we’re clueless.

Good ideas for lean times

In a time when nonprofits are asked to do more with less (by the way, we hate hearing that phrase), we need to remember that as the needs of our clients become greater the stress level of our staffs skyrockets.

The Center for Nonprofit Management hosts a monthly get together of nonprofit CEOs. Usually, there’s a speaker. But this morning, they held an informal round table to take the pulse of CEOs about this challenging economic climate.

This meeting was confidential – what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, so to speak. But some really good ideas came up. I’ll pass a few along without naming names.

1. Think of ways to reward your hard-working staff that don’t break the budget. Give them a day off with no strings attached.  Many staff members actually treasure time over money, and that’s an easy way to keep people motivated. Another idea: Host a lunch for a staff member’s birthday, with the agency picking up the tab for the honoree.

2. Love on your board a little. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that board members have business lives, too, and they may be impacted by the recession. Find ways to involve your board members without asking for money. Every one has talents that can be useful to a nonprofit.  See if there isn’t someone on your board that has something non-monetary to contribute.

3. It’s the little things that count. Bring in bagels and cream cheese one morning for your staff. Reward a particularly well-done job with a gift card to a grocery store or gas station. Reserve a prime parking spot for the employee of the week.

What else? If you have a great idea to relieve stress and reward your staff, send us a comment!

Senior Power!

We have a lot of senior centers that partner with CRC. And one of the comforting things I’ve learned over the years is that all of them are actually run by seniors. There’s probably a politically correct name for seniors now, like “advanced citizens” or “people who are just smarter than me.”  But don’t think they sit around playing bingo (although that would be fun every now and again). This is Marianne Watson. She runs the Perry County Council on Aging and she has the most piercing blue, blue eyes you’ve ever seen. She and her husband, Tom, were at CRC today getting a massive desk set someone donated for her new office.

Marianne is embarking on a major building campaign, renovating an old factory building for a new senior center. That’s remarkable in itself in this rotten economy. But a side product of her project is that she will be putting people to work. Perry County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. More than 20 percent of the county’s residents are out of work.  That sad fact even caught the attention of the New York Times, which published an article about the county’s economic struggles.

Marianne is in the trenches every day, not only serving her clients but helping to boost her community’s spirits. Nice work at any age.

Packed to the rafters

We had an excellent day at CRC this week. It was almost magical, in fact. One of the great things about being in the “give stuff away” business is you just never know what will walk through the dock door. The first thing that happened on this particular Wednesday is that a major novelty wholesaler arrived with a truck load of boxes.

This is fun stuff. Mini-fans with colored lights. Baskets holding resin dogs. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse pocket watches. And our absolute favorite – gold sequined cowboy hats! We tried them on, of course. In all, we got 216 boxes of novelties that will go over big in the Christmas Giveaway.

Next to arrive was our printer, who had four cases of leather portfolios that had been printed with the wrong color for his client. He was going to throw them away, but then he thought of us. Score.

Toward the end of the day, Pastor Danny Gibbs arrived with a Budget rental truck full of food he’d gotten from another local charity for his own nonprofit. BUT, he also had a pallet of children’s books for us. Brand new. And, he wondered, did we want two pallets of Clorox, too? Score again!

Here’s Betsy doing her best Vanna White impression, showing off our warehouse packed to the rafters. Clorox and books to the left; novelties to the right. See the box labeled “gold”? That has our hats in them. We’ll model them for you one day. Life in the warehouse can be fun for two chicks who love to window shop.

The best part, though, is that all this stuff will go directly to people who otherwise wouldn’t have a very bright holiday season. We love to see our warehouse full. But it’s even better when the warehouse is empty because that means we’re doing our jobs.