I knew long before Friday that I don’t naturally think big ideas. The audacious doesn’t come easily to me. I’m much better at launching an idea than coming up with it. Pragmatic in implementation and relational in communication, that’s me, and I like that role. So, this exercise of thinking about bold and audacious mission and vision stretches me in a good way, and it is part of the reason I’m excited about the new adventure at DurhamCares.

Some specific things resonated for me in our conversations: 

1. To find yourself you must lose yourself. That’s audacious, bold and frankly a little crazy sounding. It’s not original, but it is true. Jesus said it back in the day. How do we help people believe that losing themselves and giving to others is really the way to find yourself, and can you really invoke that if you are losing yourself in good things but not losing yourself in Christ? Or are we just offering a “noble idol” at whose feet to worship?
2. I may not easily come up with big ideas, but I do know I want to be part of them. Something different or something new connects with me and I’m ready to join in. I don’t want to do something that’s already been done in the same old way or be involved with mediocrity. I suspect that’s true of most of us. So, we’ve got to nail something that resonates and truly engages not only us but others to join.
3. I can’t underestimate my need to pray through this process. Maybe it seems too obvious to actually say it, but I need to. It’s easy for me to think that the most important work in this process is sitting in a conference room, hammering through ideas and words to funnel a clear and understandable mission and vision, and then set up an organization to move people to action. No doubt that’s important, but the reality is the most important work here is for us to humbly seek wisdom through prayer and trust that God is sovereign and involved - not only in our process but in the hearts and minds of all those people who may in some way connect with DurhamCares in the future and bring glory to Him (whether they know it or not).
4. This process takes time. Even when other people come up with the big ideas it takes time for me to process them. What do I really think? Why? How is my opinion informed? I need to spend some significant time turning over in my mind all the things we’ve talked about in the past couple of weeks. Admittedly, I’m kind of tired of talking about it, and I’m ready for the pieces to come together. But the reality is that I know I need to sit with this stuff and let it form because the implementation will be so much easier and the work so much more effective when it’s anchored.

The value for me of this exercise was in a continued, lively discussion on how we really want to transform Durham in a way that truly glorifies God.

Here is what really resonated:

1. "Love Thy Neighbor". That statement is right on, and for good reason. As we know, the greatest command is to Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your Mind, and the second one is like it: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself" We know that we want to use these 3 words in our vision. More importantly, we know that we want the vision and mission of DurhamCares to be completly in sync with this concept.

We want to help folks, all of whom have almost, without fail, heard this commandment, to understand it, make it easy for them to apply it, and just as importantly to work hard to make sure that living out this commandment is a joyful one.

2. It is better to give than to receive. We all agreed that we want to articulate the feeling of the mutual blessing that occurs when someone loves their neighbor. In effect the giver receives, and the person who receives gives. This point was driven home for me last night when I attended the Durham Rescue Mission fundraiser that featured a number of testimonies...one from a volunteer who talked about how much he had been blessed by Alonzo, the person that he was teaching how to read. I think that God wants us to be happy, and that it truly is "better to give than to receive". We at DurhamCares want to work tirelessly to ensure that the donors and volunteers are indeed blessed, just as those who they help are.

3. We want to be Bold. When David and I got together to launch Bandwidth.com almost 8 years ago and I asked him what our mission was...he told me it was to "change the world". Wow, I thought at the time, this guy is over the top. But you know what, I've never forgotten it, and it's challenged us to make sure that Bandwidth.com is indeed something very special and successsful. We want to work our hardest to make sure that DurhamCares is just the same.

4. We want our vision statement to give someone a powerful mental picture of what Durham is like when DurhamCares acting in accordance with God's plan is successful in transforming Durham. We want people to hear the vision statement and get it AND want it.

5. We care. We've wrestled a bit in the past with the word "care" and what it means to our mission and to our name. After much dialog, we've decided that it stays. Why? Because it means two things: a. We care....as opposed to we don't care, or apathy b. We care in the sense of the word where care is an active doing word. So, if we are married to Care as a part of our name and getting folks to care, in both senses of the word, is our goal, then we have to use "care" in our vision statement.

Lastly, we all agreed to ask our friends, neighbors and pastors about what "Love Thy Neighbor" meant to them so that it might help refine our thinking about how to best articulate this concept as a part of our vision statement.

We're just out of a lunch session to further refine our vision statement. We've each come away with the task of summarizing our thoughts in a blog format so that we can share it with whoever reads this blog and have it for posterity, but also knowing that the exercise of summarizing all our thoughts will be good for the process and the organization. We actually thought that by the close of today's session that we would have breezed right through the vision and mission statements and made our way through the drivers, strategic objectives and functional imperatives that make up the nuts and bolts of a plan, but........ we were wrong. What ensued instead was a lively conversation for 2 hours about just the vision statement! None of us felt that the current one,

"To transform Durham into a community of people who truly live the value of "Love Thy Neigbor," meaning that they generously give of their time and resources to helping each other"

really cut it. It isn't/wasn't edgy enough for all of us and the words didn't seem to inspire anyone. Not that it was bad, but we all knew that we didn't want just another vision statement full of platitudes that would make folks gloss over.

The strange thing is that after 2 hours we're actually further away from having a vision statement than when we walked in, BUT that we all feel that we've made great progress in understanding what our organization will do and how we all feel about it. We'll be interested to get your take. What follows next is my take of that, and in the following blogs you'll see the take of Heather, Mike and Chris...............David may even weigh in with some of this thoughts as well)

Sometimes it's just fun to share cool things, but not in that "forward an email to a million people or you'll have bad luck for 10 years" kind of way. More in the "this is totally worth 2 minutes of your time" kind of way. So, here it goes. . .

The Extraordinaires aren't live with their service yet, but I'm intrigued enough by the idea that I'm sure I'll sign up to see how it works when they launch. And who knows, maybe DurhamCares and the groups we work with can utilize some "mobile volunteering."  

Mostly though, I'm enjoying the way in which I connected to them - via a blog link and a youtube video. Sure getting information this way isn't unusual in 2008, but I graduated from Carolina just over 10 years ago without owning a computer and without having ever sent an email. I did own a mobile phone, but if memory serves me correctly it was in a giant bag, had a cord and barely fit underneath my passenger seat. There's no question that in a short period of time we've totally changed many of the ways we communicate, interact and connect with one another.

So, that really begs the question about ways that we at DurhamCares communicate, interact and connect with all of our Durham neighbors right?

How can we intelligently and artfully wield the Web 2.0 tools at our disposal? Right now we're using Facebook and this blog but we're not really promoting ourselves yet. Regardless those are clearly the tip of the iceberg, and just like any technology if you don't use it well it can be more of a burden than a help.

What about you - how do you connect, communicate and interact these days? Can you point us to cool things that worked for you - a video, a blog, a website, a facebook page, a twitter feed or an iPhone app? Why did it connect and why did you watch, read, surf, post, follow or download?

As readers (or reader...thanks Mom) undoubtedly know by now, we're working on our business plan so that we're always at the ready to describe succinctly our vision/mission, our strategic objectives and the functional imperatives that come from them here at DurhamCares. Chris Chuang, Bandwidth.com's VP of Strategy, has been very gracious in donating his time through this process, and it truly has been a great one. We've been around for a year, and have always had a good sense for what we wanted to do, but the process of getting the 4 of us around a table to work on a formal plan....the kind that Bandwidth.com has, has been illuminating and much more thought provoking and in the end beneficial than I ever thought it would be.

There have been times that I thought the wrangling over the use of one word or words has been a bit overdone until I heard a story during breakfast from Lee Wheeler-Berliner, a Fuqua student who shared an experience that he had while working with a Habitat for Humanity Chpater that he used to volunteer with. As you'll see this story proved helpful for my perspective on the power of word choice AND in how we wear our Christian badge (mentioned in past blogs).

He talked about how the group discussed for more than an hour whether to use the word "but" or "and." You see, this chapter had previously stated that they were a Christian inspired organization BUT they also worked with non-Christians. After this wrangling process they made a significant change when they replaced the "BUT" with "AND"........if you do the same, you'll see that it makes all the difference in the world.

And that is exactly how we want to present DurhamCares. We are a Christian organization and we should feel great about telling folks that AND that we DO help non-Christians too. The word "BUT" amounts to an apology or covers up something that we're signalling that we're embarassed about. Here is to lots more "ANDs" in all of our collective dialogs when we talk about our faith, and no more "BUTs"!

We've made some great progress around here in thinking through our mission and vision. At one level, we've always known what we wanted to set out and do, and had a mission statement as well. But it never was as formalized as it should have been and as I've mentioned before, we've set out as a group to commit DurhamCares to the same type of rigorous business planning exercise that we expect from the charities we work with. I'll talk in future entries about the latter stages and completion of the business planning process but for now I'd like to answer the question posed in the title as it's become apparent during our discussions internally.

We haven't completely wordsmithed this yet, but the vision that we have for DurhamCares is as follows:

To transform Durham into a community of people who truly live the value of "Love Thy Neighbor" meaning they generously give of their time and resources to helping each other.

To do this we seek to:

1. Encourage and Challenge Durham's CITIZENS to give of their time and their money to causes that better the human condition in Durham

AND

2. Encourage and Challenge Durham's CHARITIES to excel in their core missions at the same time they would become more attractive to potential donors and volunteers.

It's in this second point that lies the answer to the question posed above. That's not to say that the way we approach working with Durham's citizens will also have some unique characteristics.....for instance the way in which we do high touch volunteer matching and follow up, the way in which we do promotion and outreach etc........BUT what is very unique is the way in which we are working with charities to help them communicate that they are WORTHY RECIPIENTS of Durham's citizens time and money.

You see, we think that folks will feel compelled to get involved not just because their neighbor encourages them, a co-worker challenges them or the Bible tells them to do so, BUT because they can (much more clearly than they can today) see the impact that the charity makes in the community AND does so in the language that donors and volunteers understand.

Here's how we're going to do this:

We're going to ask each charity that we work with to submit a plan for 2009 that includes operating metrics......measurable goals that they seek to achieve in the coming year. In turn, we're going to publish those goals both subjective (roll out a new program, increase training for our volunteers, etc.) and objective (serve x# of kids, shelter y# of homeless, etc.) on a new tab on the site called "Projections" that will be placed right along side the current tabs entitled "Investment" and "Return".....see we're trying to talk in the language that donors expecting a return will best understand.

When a charity is successful in achieving these goals we're going to do the following:

1. Sing their praises from the rooftops. PROMOTION is, of course, one of the key benefits that we bring to citizens and charities alike. Our general thought is that fewer than 2% of Durham's citizens have ever heard of organizations like the Durham Eagles and that less than 1/10 of 1% have ever given money to them. We seek to change that.

2. Give them MONEY. We will be setting aside a minimum of $5,000 for each charity (and in several instances, $10,000) to serve as a DurhamCares challenge grant. They achieve their goals, they get the money.

3. Enlist others to match and/or add to DurhamCares challenge grants. We'll have a feature on each "Projections" tab that will allow donors to pledge either MONEY or VOLUNTEERing time if the charity hits their projections.

We're hopeful, though, that the chief benefit for these organizations will be the INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS that they'll see as they go through the planning process. We've already received great feedback from BigBrothers/BigSisters and others that this process has been a good one for them...something that's very encouraging for us.

So in conclusion, while there is and will be much that is unique about DurhamCares, it's in the way that we work with charities to be worthy recipients of Durham's citizens time and money that is most unique, and more importantly, will be most effective as we seek to transform Durham into a community that gives freely of their time and money as they "Love Thy Neighbor"

As DurhamCares, and other organizations, work diligently to encourage and challenge Durham's citizens to give of their money and their time, a fair question arises: Is Durham ready for a marked increase in volunteers? As with questions about a topic as large as volunteerism in an entire city, the answer is "it depends". I'll suggest the unpacking of this frustrating answer in 3 parts: 1. the challenging 2. what's good 3. the work ahead.

First the challenging:

I have heard of several folks that have showed up for volunteer opportunities in Durham that have been less than rewarding. Some times the charity personnel hadn't been told to expect them from the "volunteer coordinator," in another instance a family showed up to deliver an ice cream party to 15 residents of a homeless shelter, only to find that not only were they not expecting them, but that there were 45 folks there...........some creative ice cream rationing ensued. Stories like these, albethem anecdotes, cause us to have concern.....fortunately I think that it's concern that can be mitigated, more on that later

what's good.....I want to make sure that folks understand that there are a number of great charities, many of them listed on this site that ARE ready for volunteers and have the systems and processes in place to support them. Most importantly, of course, is the need among the population that they are trying to support. There are several examples of this, but I'll list the most compelling: BigBrothers/BigSisters of the Triangle has a waiting list of more than 100 boys and girls that are waiting to be matched with "Bigs". BBBST has a great track record, as many of you know, and their CEO Kim Breeden was named CEO of the Year. They are ready for more volunteers at several different commitment levels and you can be assured that they will work hard for both the "littles" and "bigs" in their program.

The work ahead....Durham charities need to welcome volunteers and share with them the structure and purpose behind their volunteering efforts to make sure that the experience is rewarding for the charity AND the volunteer. If they don't, the charity stands to lose that volunteer forever, and forget about any chance to convert the volunteer into a donor. This would be a bad thing for that charity, but an awful thing for Durham. I can't help about thinking about a prototypical 24 year old, who has been finally convinced to volunteer with a promise that it can help the community (which it does) and that it will change their life for the better (as it most assuredly can and should), having a poor experience and saying no to volunteer opportunities in the future.....opportunities that could have lived up to the promise that the first one should have delivered.

To avoid this, I think that we need to work with the charities to make sure that they have:

1. A volunteer coordinator. Someone who knows the charity and the population it serves inside and out. Someone who is just as comfortable saying "no" to volunteers as "yes".........not every volunteer opportunity is perfect for every volunteer.

2. A process to welcome the volunteer.....be waiting for them to come, give them a tour of the facility, an overview of the operations, and a brief history

3. The ability to communicate a contract of sorts with the volunteer: what is expected of them, and what the volunteer can expect of the charity. As with so much in life, it's all about communication and management of expectations.

4. Wherever possible: pair up a new volunteer with an experienced one.

5. Follow up. It's rare to hear of a charity following up with volunteers to thank them or to ask them about how their volunteer experience was or how it could be better.

I'm confident that we Durham charities CAN and WILL be ready to handle a major uptick in volunteers.....for Durham's underserved SURELY NEED them.

After spending some time this  with Chris Chuang (Bandwidth.com VP of Strategy, Heather and Mike), I think that I have a little bit of a clearer idea on how to answer the question raised in the blog of the other day. I think that it comes down to our sense of mission within the greater context of transforming Durham. 

About 6 months ago, I spent some time brainstorming about DurhamCares with JD Greear and Brad O’Brien about how we might all be involved in God’s plan in Durham. We agreed we’d like to see a complete transformation of Durham and that would include mercy ministries and the spread of the Gospel. So that under the wider umbrella of Transforming Durham there would be 2 sections, 1 would focus on ministries of the word, and the other would be focused on ministries of the deed. DurhamCares would focus on the latter. There would need to be close affiliation and cross pollination of the two, but that they would be separate, and that it was right that they were.

So, in this context, Child Evangelism Fellowship, Reality, Young Life, Church planting groups and other ministries would be best handled by the Ministry of the Word segment of a larger group of folks that would transform Durham. This articulation and focus might best serve the wider Christian Community leaving matters of ministry best to the theological and doctrinal experts while charity outreach would focus on not for profit organizations.

I think that it will be good to articulate this in our written materials. I think that it’s also good to keep the Christian focus in the About Us Section. What to do, though, about the logo, bible verses and tag line?

Let me see if I can frame this quandary that I find myself in as I try to understand how to best position my (our) faith within the context of DurhamCares.

Maybe it's best if I take this back to how this all got started. The idea was to apply the lessons learned at Bandwidth.com to more directly glorify His Kingdom. These lessons included: 

1. using the web to promote selection and accountability/transparency among different suppliers,

2. using operations metrics to measure success within our company,

3. charting out a business mission/vision/strategy to best accomplish our goals to more directly glorify his Kingdom.

4. using the web to scale an organization

What to do with this calling came just about as clearly as the calling itself. From what I could see having been a Durham resident for several years was that people as a whole didn't give money to local charities and rarely volunteered their time. Adding to the problem, or possibly creating it, there seemed to be hundreds of charities all vying for the same donor dollar and it wasn't clear which of them, if any, were deserving of it.

So, DurhamCares was created to be a part of the solution to dual problems of a citizenry that appeared to be on the sidelines and a largesse of organizations, most of whom weren't run with the types of sound business principles that allowed them to be very effective with their core missions and in attracting donors and volunteers.

Maybe it's easy to understand DurhamCares through the lens of a sample person that DurhamCares hoped to serve. I thought of folks that had moved to Durham, had a heart to give of their time and money, but didn't know where to start. Absent some clear direction and information on what were the best charities, they'd be inclined to continue to give their money to national charities and to do other things (golf is really good around here) with their time.

DurhamCares would then exist effectively to ENCOURAGE and CHALLENGE Durham CITIZENS to give of their time and money to needy causes

On the other side of the equation, DurhamCares would seek to find EXCELLENT CHARITIES.........or at the very least good charities that were on their way (potentially with our help) to become great charities. These charities would have a well established track record, strong leadership, an independent Board of Directors, an understanding of the key operating metrics that drove success in their organization, and perhaps most importantly, a plan on where they were going and how they would get there.......a plan that would be laid out in line with targets on further improvements on the key operating metrics.

So, to summarize DurhamCares would seek to:

ENCOURAGE and CHALLENGE Durham CITIZENS to give of their time and money to causes that better the human condition in Durham, and

ENCOURAGE and CHALLENGE Durham CHARITIES to excel in such a way that would cause them to better at their core missions at the same time they would become more attractive to potential donors and volunteers.

There are some other goals too, including establishing a template that can be replicated in other markets, but lest I distract the reader any more, I'll save those for later.

Now here's the challenge: How best to represent the Christian badge in our work?

So, a bit of perspective.......I feel CALLED to do this work, I'm not saying that I actually heard the word of God on this, but something very strong inside me (that I attribute to a Divine calling) has compelled me to get it going.

It's the Parable of The Good Samaritan (expanding the definition of neighbor) that I see as the clearest mandate for us to get involved. On the flip side of the CITIZEN/CHARITY scale: it's the Parable of the Talents that I see as a mandate for charities to be excellent stewards of the resources given them.

So Calling and Scripture are already essential parts to this organization. Furthermore, I feel that it's essential for Christians to live out their faith. Not that we're saved by good works, but that a faith without taking care of those in need around is an empty faith. The Bible commands us to take care of the poor with our time and money; it's as simple as that. I'd like to think that DurhamCares can play a role in helping Christians to act on their faith.

What does this all mean? Well, here are some questions that have come up recently that illustrate the struggle about how best to honor God in all of this while staying focused on our mission of increasing volunteering and donations while we help charities go from good to great.

There are 4 different levels of question about how we live out our faith through the context of this organization:

We make it clear in the About Us section about the inspiration for DurhamCares

We currently have a Bible Verse on our home page, a halo as a part of our logo, and "Serving Him as we Serve our Community" as our tagline

We have been approached by some Christian ministries (who unlike organizations such as the DurhamRescue Mission whose mission is to end homelessness, or PSS whose mission is to counsel pregnant single mothers....both of which are seen as mercy ministries by the broader population, are focused principally on the spread of the Gospel)

We currently have a halo as a part of our logo, and "Serving Him as we Serve our Community" as our tagline. Does this interfere with our mission? One camp within the organization prefers to leave the Christian inspiration as a part of our About Us Section.

When I think about how the forces of evil might attack any success of DurhamCares, would he undermine its efforts to increase volunteerism and donation, or would he seek to dilute the recognition that the Holy Spirit would receive from any success?

According to David Aikman, in order to get into Harvard from 1637 to 1837 you had to have a credible profession of the Gospel and Harvard actively sought to glorify the Christian God........they then abandoned this need, and in less than half the time have seemed to move to the opposite end of the spectrum. Similar examples could come from the YMCA and maybe even Habitat for Humanity. Is God glorified in these organizations? I suppose that on one level all good things (both secular and Christian) come from God, but what pleases him the most: 10 units of good done in the name of a secularized institution or 5 units of good done in the name of an overtly Christian one?

Here's how this quandary has come up with DurhamCares. I'll title this section: 2 Different Christian Approaches, Both Good, or is One Better for DurhamCares?

1. Change the logo and tagline and go for a broader appeal. Keep the Christian faith in the About Us Section, Be ready to talk to all in one on one conversations, and press interviews about our Christian inspiration. Have only evangelicals on the Board and among all full time employees Say no to Christian (or other faith based ministries) where the spread of a religious doctrine is the primary focus of the group. Change the logo and tagline and go for a broader appeal.

2. Keep the logo and tagline, welcome in Christian ministries like CEF, Young Life and Reality.....continue workplace outreach but be cognizant that we'll have better success with Churches. Workplace outreach that failed in its Christian message could be focused more on replicating the BandwidthCares concept (where Bible verses don't show up).

Heather, Mike and I met with the key full time leadership of the Durham Public School Systems today. At our lunch were Carl Harris (Superintendent), Terri Mozingo (Chief Academic Officer), Deborah Pittman(Assistant Superintendent, Student Services), Kay Williams (Executive Director, Public Affairs), Steve Toler (Consultant to DPS) and Sheila Miglarese (Volunteer Services Coordinator).

This is the 2nd time that we've met with Dr. Harris. The first time was back in August when we discussed two things:

0. funding and sponsoring an initiative along with www.donorschoose.org to encourage private funding of individual DPS teacher initiatives; we committed at that time to fund $20,000 for a matching program to encourage public participation - and I'll talk more about that in another post later
0. the needs and opportunities for volunteers in DPS so that we we can work hard to promote awareness of volunteering programs from among the 5 outreaches of DurhamCares (website, workplace, churches, schools and neighborhoods).

Today was the follow up meeting to this initial conversation. Dr. Harris arranged to meet with us and the folks listed above, and it was a productive conversation.

It's our hope that we can ramp to a target of 1,000 new volunteers in DPS by next Fall. That sounds like a lofty goal, but it's a function of getting the word out. The stakes are incredibly high. DPS teaches our kids, the leaders of tomorrow. The question is whether they will be future gang leaders or future Durham community leaders. Which side will win? Well, we're hoping that we ALL get a chance to stack the odds in favor of the second. Stay tuned to the website to find out how about RIL and AVID and other great volunteering programs with DPS.

Have ideas/thoughts yourselves? We'd love to hear them.