DurhamCares

Want to know how the idea for DurhamCares came about? Want to know how the idea developed? Well, this section is for you and we look forward to sharing the story. It’s a very personal one and we’ll apologize in advance for the length, but we do hope that it does a good job of telling you of what we’re trying to do and why.

This page is divided into 6 sections:

1. Where the idea came from and the early stages
2. What in the world telecom sales might tell us about serving God
3. Lessons from the Parable of the Good Samaritan
4. Helping Durham’s charities to tell their story
5. Survey Says
6. Where we are now

Where the Idea Came From and the Early Stages

The idea for DurhamCares was born out of a small group study on the subject of calling about 6 years ago. During the four or five months that we explored this concept, God spoke to me, Henry. No, it wasn’t as if he appeared in a bush, or that an Angel came visiting, nor even a vision during a dream - although I’d very much welcome any such direct intervention! Nonetheless, the message was dramatic, and I had clarity, focus and direction on what I was to do with my life in a way that was very powerful. I’ll share a bit more about that clarity, but let me first provide some context.

My wife Kimberley and I moved to Durham in 2001 from New York City via Chapel Hill. Just a year earlier, my business partner David Morken and I had founded Bandwidth.com, a business communications provider.

In the months after the study on calling, it became clear to me that David and I had an opportunity to use all that God had given us: our time, the lessons we’d learned in business and our profits, in a way that more directly glorifies God in our local community. We chose Durham (as opposed to the Triangle as a whole) or maybe Durham chose us. While I make my home there with my family, Durham provided a much greater draw than that. It doesn’t take much research to learn about Durham’s storied history as the entrepreneurial capital of the country - a time when black and whites both were at the top of industry. And while its history is unparalleled, so is its present. Durham is 45% white and 45% black, it’s a city of both conservatives and liberals politically, it is made up of Carolina, Duke, and Central fans and alumni. It’s a place where these different people with different experiences and perspectives work together, play together and increasingly worship together. Durham is also a city on the move, from the growing creative class and the DPAC to the 4 star restaurants and local taco trucks to the Durham Bulls and the Full Frame Film Festival to Southpoint and the Farmer’s Market. Durham is in the beginning stages of a renaissance that includes and touches so many. It was clear that there was no better place to concentrate our activities. David wholeheartedly agreed, and we embarked on a study to see how we might apply the lessons that we had in life and business to more directly join this renaissance and bless the city.

What Telecom Sales Taught Us About Serving God

In growing Bandwidth.com, David and I had learned how a great website could be used to disseminate information in a scalable fashion. We learned that by providing our customers with accountability and transparency that they would trust and be inclined to buy more services from us. We learned that selection across carriers and products, a one stop shop marketplace if you will, was well received by buyers that wanted to partner with a neutral intermediary that could give the straight scoop on carriers like ATT, Verizon, Sprint and others. We also learned from our investors that they liked to see us establish well reasoned goals and objectives at the outset of the year and loved when we accomplished them. With time our success and ability to hit our goals rewarded us very well. So knowing that our success was to God’s glory, how might we re-direct some of this success to an initiative that was dedicated more directly to Him?

DurhamCares has borrowed liberally from Bandwidth.com through our use of a website, an emphasis on accountability and transparency from our partner organizations, selection, and an initiative to reward success in setting and achieving goals.

Lessons from the Parable of the Good Samaritan

DurhamCares may be partially inspired by our experience at Bandwidth.com but it is completely inspired by God’s word and Christ’s commands and lessons, particularly the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We’ve taken two main lessons from that Parable through DurhamCares are working to apply them.

1. The Broader Definition of Neighbor
   Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. When asked in the book of Luke about who a neighbor was, Jesus offered up the Parable to provide a definition. This definition of neighbor would have been shocking to his audience, and it begs our attention today, and challenges us to apply it in ways that will probably make us all feel stretched and challenged.
   
   As many of you know, the hero of Jesus’ parable (the Samaritan) was the hated enemy of the Jew. The word Samaritan may bring up positive connotations now, but at the time of the telling of the story it was exactly the opposite. Samaria was an entirely different land than Judea and Samaritans were the Jews’ hated enemies. Yet it was the Samaritan, the Jews’ hated enemy from a foreign country, which rescued the traveler in the ditch. Jesus used the picture of an “enemy” to illustrate the definition of neighbor.
   
   It doesn’t take much of a stretch to understand that the parable tells us that our neighbor is not just the person who lives next door to us or the one that lives on the other side of our community center.
   
   Our neighbor, your neighbor, lives on the corner of N. Driver and Holloway in North East Central Durham, he lives on St. Marks Road in Hope Valley, and she lives in a dorm room at Duke or NCCU. Our first priority is to know and love these neighbors, next door and across town, but we also hope that beyond this we might realize that our neighbor is also across the world in a slum in Mumbai or in Soweto and we need to know and love them as well.
2. The Concept of Physical Love
   Jesus used the Samaritan to broaden the definition of neighbor, but he also used the picture to show us a broader picture of love as well. Surely the Samaritan did provide financial assistance to the traveler in taking care of his hotel stay, but what is remarkable is the length that he went to engage with the traveler and to provide physical care for him. He anointed him, bandaged his wounds and gave up his donkey to the man. For us, physical love is the second great lesson from the parable, and maybe the most important one. Jesus shows us that providing care for our neighbors (including our enemies) is much more than financial aid.
   
   In Marvin Olasky’s book, “The Tragedy of American Compassion” he describes times in America when we did a great job of providing aid and charity to those in need. Those were times when we took people into our homes and truly cared for them. This type of intimate involvement allowed us to best understand their needs, to encourage them and to challenge them as we helped them to get back on their feet. Somewhere along the way we lost this imperative and government agencies took over and in the process we’ve insulated ourselves from the needy, and we would actually also argue that we’ve become less effective at taking care of those who are in need. In the process, I think that we’ve denied ourselves and those we might help a great opportunity to really give and receive love. It’s easy to love our close friends and family. But it’s in taking care of those beyond that circle that helps us actually stay in touch with the true needs and allows those in need to feel valued as they are loved.
   
   What does this mean for us? It means much more than writing a check to a charity. It means getting engaged with our neighbor - knowing who they are and how they are doing, knowing the challenges they face and sharing ours, volunteering to help one another, picking up inner city kids and taking them to football practice, tutoring to help a homeless man or woman receive their GED, offering time and expertise to charitable organizations to manage their financial books, taking a homeless person to lunch and endeavoring to understand their challenges. It means all of this and so much more. We’re only limited by our lack of knowledge and creativity. In the process we’ll be challenged, but we’ll also be blessed. We rob ourselves of a deep personal enrichment when we simply write a check. We need to give our money and ourselves. We’ll know life from a different perspective. We’ll be given a sense of appreciation and most of all we’ll be obeying some of Jesus’ greatest commands.

Helping Durham’s Non-Profits to Tell their Story

Over the years David and I have been to many fundraisers for different non-profits. They all seemed to be run by good people, who were doing good things, but it was hard to differentiate them, and there sure seemed to be a lot of them - something like more than 1,100 operating in Durham alone. During the fundraisers we heard stories about how these organizations were impacting people in Durham, but we didn’t always hear to what end, or how well, or how many and for what cost? At the end of each fundraiser we seemed to come away with more questions than answers. Sure, we gave them some money, but it was never a lot. And to be frank, not the amount that we might have if we really understood the non-profit - understood more about their addressable market, understood more about others that work in the same area, understood more about their outcomes and how they compared with past years, and finally really understood more about how much it cost to provide their service.

David and I wondered what it would look like if we took a selection of some of the best non-profits we had come across and worked with them to help them with their planning and with telling their stories to the community at large. What would happen if we created an organization that desired to match those in the community with marketing, financial, legal and fundraising expertise and experience with the charities that were in need of those skills? What would happen if we actively encouraged and challenged Durham’s citizens to give more of their time and their money while we actively encouraged and challenged Durham’s charities to be worthy recipients of this money? Would giving of time and money increase? Would we all have a richer, closer community? Would the enablement of Durham’s citizens to obey Christ’s commands to take care of our neighbor result in a friendlier, more stable society with less crime, racism and suspicion?

Survey Says

We realized through our first year of planning that it was one thing to feel that we weren’t giving enough money to local charities and volunteering the way that we could. It was yet another thing entirely to know that empirically. If we were going to be so bold as to state that we had a long way to go as a community, we’d be much better if we had some sort of empirical, rather than anecdotal, evidence. So, we commissioned a research study. What we discovered wasn’t surprising, but having the numbers in front of us brought a new degree of urgency and resolve than we had before. We found that those making more than $100,000 a year give less than 1% of their income to local charities and just 2.4% in church tithing. We also found that 65% of Durham’s citizens have never volunteered.

There was and is much work to be done before we are all engaged in helping one another the way that we are capable. How might DurhamCares play an active role in making an impact in giving and volunteering numbers?

Where We Are Now

And that brings us to today. We’ve launched the site with 8 fantastic non-profit partners, and we are well on the way to bringing on several more. We’ve also brought together two innovative services in the volunteer matching and success grants. We hope you will use both. We also hope that you’ll encourage others to do the same. In addition, we are offering trips locally and across the world. We hope you will join us on one of them to meet and start to get to know your neighbors across town and across the world.

Please know that we know we don’t have it all figured out and that we continue to refine our website and our program. There are many more great non-profits run by superlative and dedicated folks that aren’t a part of the DurhamCares Success Grants yet. However, we are matching volunteers with many more organizations than the ones we have listed here and we will be glad to learn about more. We also haven’t done extensive due diligence on each non-profit. However, each one has gone through a thorough application process, and we have visited with the principals of each more than 3 times and have known each of them for more than a year. With this understanding though, we encourage you to contact each non-profit to learn more about them. When you do that, and when it impacts you, please consider giving them both your time and your money to show that you appreciate their work and their excellence.

We do hope that this site gives you a good format with which to review other non-profits that might interest you. And we hope it allows you to understand their outcomes and how you might get involved. When you find them, please let us know. We have a limited staff and budget and never move as fast as we (or others) might like, but we’ll do our best to check them out and as it makes sense we will be glad to include them in our success grant and volunteering programs.

We hope that you’ll join us in supporting excellent non-profits locally and that you will give generously of your time and your money, but if we had to choose between the two, we’d take the time all day long. And when you do roll up your sleeves, engage, and get to know these organizations and your neighbors that they serve, we firmly believe that you’ll find the experience very rewarding. In fact, we bet it will be as rewarding for you if not more so than those that you seek to serve.

May God bless you and may God bless this amazing city of Durham.

Henry and David