83. Using the Power of Community to Serve

Service is a great tool for building a sense of community…and we can also use our communities to serve in big ways. In this episode I’m sharing some ideas I’ve seen from different organizations and people and how they use the power of gathering people together to serve and lift  in many beautiful ways. I also give my thoughts on why using this power of community to serve with our families is a good idea too. Listen and you might hear an idea that could help you, your family, or your own nonprofit.

Links mentioned in the episode:
News article about 'tip a server' group
Episode 26: 100 Women Who Care
Episode 60: Midwest You Can Foundation
Episode 9: Ironman Q Foundation
JustServe.org

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Transcript

Melissa: Service is a great tool for building a sense of community and we can also use our communities to serve in big ways. In this episode, I'm sharing some ideas I've seen from different organizations and people and how they use the power of gathering people together to serve and lift in many beautiful ways.

I also give my thoughts on why using this power of community to serve with our families is a good idea too.

Listen and you might hear something that could help you, your family or your own nonprofit.

Welcome to the Do Something More podcast, a service oriented show where we highlight the helpers who inspire us all to do something more. I'm your host, Melissa Draper. Thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to this episode of the podcast where we're going to be talking about service and community.

Both of those are so interchangeable and as we use them together, they allow us to really serve in good and even powerful ways.

So of course we can use the power of community to serve in big ways, either through donations and money or through gathering a large group of people to do something big together.

Right. Those can be great ways to use community to do service, but at the same time, service is a powerful tool for creating community.

And I love that idea of using service to create community.

And how is that? Why is that? Well, most people call me Pollyanna, but I really do believe that most people have a desire to help and give back. This is proven over and over again with my guests on the podcast and the many small ways and situations where they themselves are having opportunities to give back or people that come in touch with them and the good that they're doing.

Most people have a desire to help and give back. It's really most the time all they need is some direction and some ideas for how to do that. And also, service is good at creating community because it's universal.

Many times it transcends politics or religious beliefs or ages and stages of life, or all the many different ways that we choose to categorize ourselves as humans. Service just takes all that away.

We can come together for good causes and to help with good things that we care about.

And also, service just generally always brings good feelings with it. And it's impossible to not have those feelings replicated with the people around you that you're serving with. You just, you all feel good together and you all feel that sense of serving and helping together.

So those are just some reasons why I think service is such a powerful tool for creating community. So if you're wanting to create community, service can be a great way to do it organizing a service project, organizing a donation drive, bringing people together for a variety of different causes.

And we've talked on this podcast many times about the website justserve.org that's exactly what it does. It kind of brings all these nonprofits together into one place. So you can see ways to get involved in these different ways.

But on this podcast, I really wanted to dive into using that sense of community. So once you've been able to build the community, or maybe you already have a community, using the power of that to serve in a big way.

And the idea for this episode originally came when I read an article several weeks ago from the St. George News. And it was about this group of women that get together annually.

So they do this once a year. And they've called their event tip a server. So they come together, group of about 20 women, they go out to eat somewhere, but then they all have donations that they add and pool together so that they can leave their waiter or their server wherever they go.

A huge tip.

And I just thought this was such a great idea. So they said last year, this event or the one that they just did, the tip came to $1,730.

And they had two servers. So they split it into two payments of 865. And many times they do this at random. They just get together, they pick a restaurant and they just wait to see what will happen.

And then they present these servers with their tip at the end of the meal. So they have no idea that these women are going to tip them like this. And as I read this article, I just thought, what a fun idea.

It's using that sense of community, group of women that want to come together and have lunch together, and then they're all going in together on this cause of tipping and giving money to the waiter, the person that's serving them.

And how fun to sit there and have lunch or dinner with a bunch of your girlfriends or a group of women that you love and respect. The anticipation of that, of what's going to come, and being able to see what will happen when you present your tip.

I just think that's so fun. And that's a simple way to use that sense of community to serve. I had never heard of this idea, but I read in the comments of that article that there's people that say they do that work, or the people that they're co workers with, they'll go out to lunch together and do that maybe once a year again or at different times, or people that have done that with their Families or in different ways.

So that's just one idea. And while we're on this idea of donating and using money, I, of course, want to mention one of the nonprofits that I featured on the podcast and I am now a member of called 100 Women who Care.

And. And so basically, the idea behind that is, again, kind of this crowdfunding idea is we come together four times a year. We have three nonprofits present to us, and then we choose one to donate our money to, and everyone donates $100.

They pool that together, and then they also have some matching donations from other companies. So we end up being able to give this nonprofit 10 to $15,000 each quarter. And that's been such a great thing to be a part of.

You get to feel like a philanthropist a little bit, even though you're just giving a small amount. But it's using that power of all of us coming together as women and being aware of the nonprofits in our community as well.

So those are some more unique ways of using the power of community to donate and to bring those donations together. And I want to share that it's not only with money.

There are powerful ways to serve with community beyond money. Although money is great, and every nonprofit will tell you they appreciate so much those donations, but there's lots of other different ways to serve.

One that came to mind, as I thought about this episode, was the nonprofit Midwest you can foundation and the founder of that, Meg Boozing. I featured them almost a year ago.

Well, it's not quite been a year on the podcast.

She has epilepsy herself. And so the whole point of her foundation is to build encouragement and a sense of community for those that are navigating epilepsy. And one of the things that I love she does is she holds monthly online meetings for women with epilepsy.

So people can join these meetings through a zoom link all over the nation. And I love that idea that she is building a sense of community. And that's another way to use community to serve.

Many times, as people are navigating things or struggling with things, it can feel like a lonely road to walk. And it doesn't have to. They don't have to feel alone.

And Meg has very much experienced that herself. And so I love this idea of her having these zoom meetings for these women to come together. You don't have to do that in a big, fancy way or have a nonprofit to do that.

You can create something like that through just organizing a simple mom or dad playgroup and giving people the chance to gather while your kids play together.

I've seen it done with Facebook groups. People have created many different types of Facebook groups to help people navigate different things that they're going through in their lives, or to just ask questions, or again, to just not feel alone.

So I love that idea of using the power of community to serve in that way, to remind people they're not alone, to give them a place to come together, to talk and to connect with each other.

Another idea that came to mind was from the Ironman Q Foundation. So they were one I featured on the podcast. Really early in the beginning, I talked with one of the founders, Lori Muir.

Her and her husband established that foundation in memory of their son who passed away from cancer. And. And she shared, I love this story that she shared that there was one December where they were on this Facebook group.

Again, Facebook group could be a great way to build community and connection. She was on a group with other angel moms that have lost a child to cancer, and many of them were sharing how Christmas was such a hard time and all the feelings that come up.

And she read through those and was thinking, oh, yeah, that's so hard. It's too bad that we can't kind of get together and do that, or it's too bad someone can't create that.

And then she realized, wait a minute, I can be that someone. I can create that. And so, even with her own busy schedule and her own grief that she was navigating, she decided to kind of create a little retreat with some of the funds they had there for their foundation and invited those that could come to come together for a weekend and to talk and to share and to uplift.

So I loved that idea. Again, using that sense of community to serve and finding a way to bring people together.

So there's lots of different ways that you can do this. But basically, again, the idea is that when we come together, there are so many things that we can accomplish, either as we are working together to donate, working together to serve, or working together to help people feel that they're not alone and the challenges that they navigate.

A final idea I wanted to share is using this sense of community to serve with your family in a big way. Our families are a place that we're often wanting to create this sense of community.

Whether it's your family right there in your home or your extended family, we want to create that sense of community. And family is a place where we have community and we can come together and use those opportunities to serve, to serve together.

I shared this back in November on my social media that in October my family had the opportunity to go serve at a care center here near our home. We did a little family night with them and we told stories and sang songs and it was just a great experience and a fun activity for my family.

And it was good for my children to have those opportunities to interact with the individuals that are there at that care center as well. And it just again made me think that, well, however you feel about your family, wherever you're at in those relationships, whether you're excited about doing something like that with your family or not, doing service together can really be a great way to strengthen our relationships and enjoy our time with our families.

We want to enjoy that time, so don't use it talking about politics. It's just going to make everybody angry. Go on justserve.org instead and find a project that you all agree on or a group that you all want to serve with and use that power of service and community to bring your family together.

Serving and giving back again are universal. It's something most people can agree on and it really is a great way to bring any family or any community together.

Thank you so much for listening today and hearing these ideas. I'm going to leave links to some of the episodes that I mentioned. The nonprofits. I will leave a link to that article about this awesome group of women that do this tip a server event so you can read more about that and learn about what they do.

And I will leave a link to Just Serve because I mentioned that a couple times in the podcast so you can go and learn more and just really think about this idea of using the power of community to help you serve in a big way.

And as a friendly reminder, please if you enjoy this podcast, follow it Wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a review. I would love some more reviews, especially on my Apple podcasts and I know I can see in my downloads I've got some regular listeners.

So any of you that have listened to several episodes and they brought joy to you, I would love to have you go on and leave a review there. Or you can share this episode with a friend.

And as always this week, I hope you can find a way to do something more to help lift, inspire or make a difference.