How to be a Digital Volunteer

August 16, 2011 in Blog with 1 Comment

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It occurred to us a while back that our biggest barrier to doing all of the good we can is simple obscurity. Most people do not help us because they do not know who we are. We need your help to overcome that.

Below is our guide for being a Love Wins digital volunteer. The main thing to keep in mind is this: We are limited by how many people know about us. The more you post links to our stuff, like and +1 our stuff, comment on our stuff and forward our emails, the better it is for us.

Thanks so much for your help!

Our Content

The Blog

The official blog for Love Wins Ministries is updated about weekly. Here are the big things you can do:

  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed. If you don’t know what RSS is, you can learn more about it here.
  • Or, you can sign up to get an email when we update the blog. We won’t share your info, but we hope you will forward the emails you get from us to friends who will be interested in them.
  • Comment on our blog posts. The more comments we have, the more love we get from Google, so more people see our stuff.
  • Link to our blog posts in your blog posts, and write your thoughts. You don’t have to agree with us – just get the link right. :-)
  • Share links to our blog posts on social media sites. (See below)

The Newsletter

Sign up for our e-newsletter. We won’t share your info with anyone.

  • Every edition of our newsletter has its own URL, which we tweet. So, share it on all the social media sites you participate in.
  • Our newsletter comes monthly via email. If you think it would be meaningful to a friend or people in your church, please forward it to them.

Social Media

Facebook

There are three big things you can do for us here:

  • “Like” our Facebook page.
  • Post links to our blog posts on your Facebook page
  • Click Like on our posts on our Facebook Page. The more you like them, the more people see them.
  • Comment on our posts on our Facebook page

Twitter

On twitter, we need you to

  • Follow us on twitter.
  • Retweet our tweets .
  • Tweet links to our blog posts and newsletters to your followers.

Other Sites:

There are lots of other sites out there – MySpace, Google+ and so on. But they all work pretty similarly, in that we need you to share links to our content. So, post links to our stuff. Please?

Your Sites

The big thing we need from you is links, links, and more links.

  • An easy way to do this, if you are a blogger, is to put a link to our blog (http://lovewins.info/blog) in your blogroll (which is a list of links in your sidebar to sites you like)
  • Slightly more work is to write a post on your blog about something we have written, and link to the original post. Or, write a blogpost about our work and link to our homepage.

Join our alerts list

Go here and join our digital volunteer list. This list will be used only when we have an “important” post going online somewhere, and we have a special need for links, tweets, comments, etc. You are probably looking at less than one email a month.

Donate your time

We have no office staff. Go here to sign up to be notified when we need off-site administrative help. Typically, this is stuff like data-entry, transcription, etc.

Donate your money.

Not to be crass, but this stuff ain’t free. We can only do our work with your contributions. Click here to become a financial donor.

 

 

Wedding Bells

July 25, 2011 in Blog with 5 Comments

Cake top

Danny is a 39 year old ex-con, with a few piercings and jail-house tattoos. Shelia is a 42 year old blond with a sweet disposition, but no job skills. Over the last three years, I have watched them date and then break up, watched them float in and out of housing – never very stable housing, but housing none the less – and watched them struggle with the daily stresses that come with trying to stay together despite the pain and stigma that comes with being homeless in the US.

Call me a romantic if you want, but they are ridiculously cute together. He always carries her bag for her. She wears flowers in her hair he picked in the park. He asks her opinion on big (and small) decisions. They are, by any definition, in love with each other.

Back in May, they went to the courthouse and got legally married. For the next week, they showed that marriage license off like it was the holy grail – they were so proud of it.

Shelia comes to me a few weeks later and asked me if I would do her a favor. “All little girls dream about their wedding day”, she said. “I was wondering if you could help us get married in a church, with music and walking down the aisle and everything”.

Which is why this Thursday night, thanks to the hospitality of Hillyer Memorial Church, Danny and Shelia are getting married, with music and walking down the aisle and a preacher (that would be me) and everything. Our good friend (and associate minister at Hillyer) Allison took Shelia shopping last week for a wedding dress – they got one at Goodwill that was over the top with acres of lace and full sleeves. Shelia called it a “princess dress”.

After the ceremony, we are throwing a reception for them here at the Love Wins offices, with a wedding cake, butter mints (a special request), cupcakes, and punch. And, if we can swing it, a few nights at a decent hotel for a honeymoon of sorts.

The swinging it part is where you come in. You can make a strong argument that this is not going to help anyone long-term and thus is not worthy of your support. But if that is your argument, then you have missed the point of what we are doing out here. Things like dignity, respect and love are damned hard to find out here – some days they are completely hidden. So when we find them, I want to encourage them any way I can. And if that means spending a couple of hundred dollars to make sure a couple who has the entire deck stacked against them have a few days where they feel ridiculously loved, I am willing to do that. I hope you are too.

If you are local and want to help us put the reception on or help with the wedding, email me and let me know. And if all you can do is send us a few dollars, I hope you will, because we need some financial help to make this happen.

If you want to help us pay for this, please go to our donate page or click on the donate button below. And if you can’t do anything but pray for them, go ahead and do that – they are going to need it.

# # #

We are only able to continue doing this work because of your donations. Would you click here and partner with us financially?

 

Thanks From Tony

July 16, 2011 in Blog, newsletter with 0 Comments

This email went out to our list of supporters and interested folks on June 16th of 201. We send something like this out most months – if you would like to get on that email list, please go here and give us your email address. Of course, we won’t share your info with anyone, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Tony was introduced to me by a formerly homeless man whom I had helped several years ago. “Tony is a good guy,” my friend said. “He just doesn’t have anybody.”

After meeting Tony, I did not have high hopes. He was living in a half-way house that has a reputation for not being particularly well run, he was six weeks sober and was a convicted felon.

We agreed to start meeting on Thursday mornings at a local coffee shop. On our first meeting, he told me he wanted to die, because he saw no way out. That was four months ago.

Every week, he tells me about the stress that comes from living in a house full of addicts. We talk about the endless search for a job that will ignore his felony record that came from a petty drug charge. I show him coping methods to help manage his stress. We drink good coffee (which you pay for) and he shows me pictures of the ex-wife and kids he drank out of his life.

While I am the one sitting in that coffee shop with Tony, you are the one who makes it possible.

Over the last four months, a few times you have helped him make the $98 weekly rent it costs him to stay in the halfway house. When we met, he had a prepaid cellphone that cost .60 cents a minute to use. He was spending over $100 a month to stay in touch with potential employers. You bought him another phone that offers unlimited minutes for $35 a month.

When he got a part time job unloading produce trucks in an un-air-conditioned warehouse, you bought him a monthly bus pass so he could get to work. Tony is fifty years old and has poor circulation, so when the doctor prescribed a medicine to help with his circulation, you paid the $5 to get the prescription filled. Oh, and it was a prescription he had carried around in his pocket for a week, because he did not want to ask for help yet again.

Last Thursday, Tony asked if I could run him up to the dollar store, so he could buy the one dollar package of detergent to wash his clothes. When we got there, I saw him eying the toiletries, so I convinced him to let you pay two dollars for a pack of razors and a new deodorant stick. He counted out his pennies and nickles for the detergent, however.

When we get back in the car, he is silent. When I press him, he tells me that he is filled with overwhelming gratitude. I try to wave him off.

“No,” he says. “It is a big deal. When I met you, I wanted to die because I was convinced no one cared. Please tell the people who give you this money that I am so grateful. That I could not have made it this long without you guys. And that while it may not seem like a big deal to them, it has changed my life. Hell, it probably saved my life.”

I agree. A big reason Tony has stayed sober these six months and stayed housed and stayed sane has been because of the work you people pay me to do. Yes, you paid for his toiletries and bus pass and helped a couple of times with his rent, but you also paid my salary that lets me spend two hours a week with a felon in a coffee shop.

If you are one of our contributors, Tony and I both thank you. If you have not yet decided to help support our work, I hope you will, because I know lots of Tonys.

Tasha’s Overdose and Eric’s Murder

July 16, 2011 in Blog, newsletter with 2 Comments

This email went out to our list of supporters and interested folks on March 30th of 2011. We send something like this out most months – if you would like to get on that email list, please go here and give us your email address. Of course, we won’t share your info with anyone, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

“Tasha overdosed “, were the first words out of Ramone’s mouth when I answered the phone.

Ramone is one of our most fervent volunteers, who checks in regularly with one of the homeless camps near his house. He often brings me up to date on the latest. I could have gone all day without hearing this.

Tasha is 19 and frustrating to no end. She has been on her own for the last three years after running away from an abusive home. She quickly discovered street smarts she did not know she had, enabling her to morph from popular 10th grader to crafty street urchin.

It does not hurt her cause a bit that most men think she is beautiful.

Unfortunately, along with not finishing high school, she also picked up a drug habit with no means to pay for it. So, she swaps sex for drugs.

Her drug of choice is heroin, but occasionally, like she did this time, she speedballs, mixing crack and heroin. And like most users, she can look you right in the face and tell you whatever you want to hear.

Like when I went and visited her in the hospital. She hugs me and, with a tear in her eye, tells me she almost died.
“I don’t want this life anymore,” she says.

I want to believe her. But I don’t.

I want to believe her because, with her poor judgment and track record, she is a sure candidate for HIV or Hepatitis C. Or ending up with a bad trick. I really wish she wanted to quit. But she doesn’t.

Honoring people’s choices is hard. Loving people when they choose poorly is even harder.

Four days later, she leaves the hospital against medical advice because she is healed, she tells me on the phone the next day. She thanks me for the shampoo and snacks I brought her in the hospital, and asks me to pray for her.

She refuses to go to NA meetings. She says they are for losers who want to whine rather than take control. Instead, she tells me she has quit on her own. Willpower, she says.

I want to believe her. But I don’t.

# # #

A lot of you have heard about Eric’s murder in Moore Square a few weeks ago. For those who haven’t, the short version is that we were serving biscuits when another man walked up to Eric and stabbed him. Eric died and the police arrested the other guy. I wrote a blog post about it here, and NBC17 interviewed meabout our response.

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Speaking of the blog, if you go here and give us your email, you get an email whenever we update the blog. (This is a separate list than the one you are on for this email).

Office Space – Things We Need

June 15, 2011 in Blog with 2 Comments

Thanks to a partnership with Trinity’s Place (a small faith community here in Raleigh), Love Wins was able to score some awesome office and programming space for very little money.

Acquiring space is scary for us, regardless how cheap it is for us to get, but the benefits overruled the cost. We now have close to 1000 square feet of open space to conduct trainings, allow volunteers to sort donations and to allow us to add programming.

I am currently moving from my previous office to the new one, so things are a bit chaotic at the moment. Once we get it up and going, maybe we will have an open house so you can come see what we are doing with the space.

There are several things we need to make being there better – if you have anything on the list and want to donate it to us, we will be very appreciative. Just leave a comment below and I will get in touch with you asap.

Furniture

4 office cubicle partitions
armchair
1 four drawer file cabinet
3 small trashcans
1 large trashcan (30 gallon or better)
floor lamps
Office Supplies

reams of printer paper
color or black and white printer cartriges for HP Deskjet D1520
Potted plants
Staple’s gift cards
Computer Equipment

2 flat screen computer monitors
1 flat bed scanner or scanner printer combo
Digital projector
Audio equipment (speakers, portable mike/speaker combo, etc.)
CompUSA giftcards


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