Get shopping, save Christmas. An Austin family needs you.

PROBLEM:
More than 2,000 Austin families will consider “canceling Christmas” this year because they can’t afford the toys, gifts or even food to celebrate.
SOLUTION:
You or your company can adopt a family and save Christmas.
 
It’s simple. Just visit Foundation Communities to download a family sponsorship form, fill it in to let them know what size family you’d like to [...]

Dream Dinners looking for families in need of three months’ of meals

We started doing Dream Dinners a few years ago, driving all the way up to the Mesa location until they opened the Sunset Valley store closer to our home. If you’re not familiar with Dream Dinners, here’s how it works:
You go online and browse the schedule of available times. You’re going to do the assembling [...]

Click to get those food trucks out there!

You did it: 1,000 of you pledged to donate, volunteer, or spread the word about Pledge to End Hunger, and as a result, Tyson’s sending a semi-truck loaded with 140,000 meals to the Capital Area Food Bank on Monday, March 16. Way to go!
Now we have a chance to send two more Tyson food trucks to [...]

Network while you work … at the Food Bank

 
 
 
If you’re going to put yourself out there, try to meet new people, find new opportunities… you might as well wipe some  cans and sort some peanut butter.
Scott Ingram of NetworkIn Austin and Austin TopGuns came up with this pairing of networking and giving/volutneering, and they’ve chosen the Capital Area Food Bank as the recipient. [...]

Discussion on Poverty

On Monday, January 26th, from 6 to 7 p.m., I Live Here I Give Here is presenting a panel discussion on poverty and its effects on Austin. Representatives from several local nonprofits will talk about the severity of the problem and what is being done to alleviate it. The event takes place at Caritas, 611 Neches, [...]

Every little bit helps…. sounds lame but it’s true.

“Every little bit helps.” I know you hear people saying that all the time when they want you to donate money or things, and it sounds suspicious. If you do only give $1 or $5, you think they’re thinking to themselves, “I didn’t actually mean that, you cheap bastard.”
Remember that “little bit” is relative. And so [...]

Save Reagan High School, continued

Reagan High School, St. John neighborhood

Remarkable Austinites who just happen to your need help getting food

Sarah Andrews of Meals on Wheels and More wrote me last week with lots of great news about this longstanding organization. First the biggest news was that it is going to be the recipient of the money raised by next year’s Capital 10K race, which last year raised more than $180,000 for University Medical Center [...]

Guess whose blog posts made Blog Action Day 100 Best?

Ha. No, not mine. Mando’s.
Armando Rayo, like a lot of nonprofiteers, sees nothing but possibilities. And even better, he acts on them. When he told me he was going to take advantage of Blog Action Day on poverty and post the whole day, staying awake for 24 hours (which turned into 42 hours), I first [...]

BLOG ACTION DAY: Mando’s videos bring new voices to the conversation about poverty

There are people who talk about poverty every day in Central Texas, and there are people who live in poverty every day in Central Texas, and for the most part they are not the same people. They don’t even look like the same people.
All that is to say what I think lots of people don’t [...]