The year is drawing to a close, but one Charlotte woman is just getting started. Less than a month ago, Melissa Mummert launched Second Helping, a Charlotte nonprofit that fosters jobs and entrepreneurial skills for women who have recently been released from prison.
At the centerpiece of the program is the Second Helping Coffee Cart, which sells fresh coffee and healthy snacks at the downtown Children and Family Services Building. The cart is run by two former inmates who are looking to turn their lives around. Mummert hopes to set up more carts around Charlotte in the year ahead and help more women earn a living wage as they reinvent themselves.
It's a modest venture that uses creative earned-income strategies to serve its mission in one of the toughest fundraising climates of the past 20 years. And Second Helping is not alone in this approach. In fact, North Carolina is teeming with social entrepreneurs like Mummert who are spotting problems and tenaciously pursuing solutions. Their collective experience offers a valuable holiday gift of sorts - lessons for those of us inspired to follow in their footsteps.
The first: Passion for a cause is an absolute requirement for success. There are many needs in this recession-ravaged state, but we shouldn't commit ourselves to one of them solely because it seems like the right thing to do. Rather, the relentless drive to make a difference often emerges from a deeper calling.
For Mummert, finding ways to help inmates rebuild their lives is core to her identity. When she was a child, her father spent six months in federal prison for peace protests at a military base. Now a Unitarian Universalist minister, Mummert did a seminary internship at a women's prison in California 10 years ago, cementing her commitment to the cause. She also made a documentary film exploring the challenges of women incarcerated under mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Many of them, she says, got caught up in drug trafficking rings. Once they have served time, they often can't get the intensive help they need to start anew. "This work is my cog in the wheel," says Mummert. "I feel very fortunate that I know what I'm supposed to do in the world."
Once having found a passion, we should heed a second piece of advice: Start small. A couple of years ago, Don and Kristy Milholin became aware of a problem at the Greensboro elementary school their two daughters attend. Many students came from low-income families that were chronically short of food. Moved by this plight, the Milholins started filling backpacks with food that children could take home on the weekends for themselves and their families.
The couple did not begin with grand ambitions. Indeed, their goal was to support 10 families, relying in part on food grown in their own garden. Word about their work began to spread quickly. Many other families jumped in to help, donating food and packaging it at the Milholins' house. Two years later, their Out of the Garden Project has grown into a vitally important social service for the Greensboro area. It serves more than 600 children and their families annually at 31 schools, and required the Milholins to move the operation to a large warehouse.
In the Triangle, Christopher and Latoya Toller are demonstrating a third and crucial key to effective social entrepreneurship: resourcefulness. In December 2008, their son Aidan died three days after he was born from a brain malformation that left him unable to breathe on his own. A year later, they began selling music and books from their personal collection via an Amazon.com store and contributing the proceeds to nonprofits that serve infants and their families. Soon they formed Aidan's Angels as their own nonprofit.
After depleting their personal supply of media, they shifted their focus to creating baskets of helpful goods for parents with children in the neonatal intensive care unit at Duke Children's Hospital. This year, they raised about $1,000 toward those baskets, which they distributed on Dec. 16 - what would have been Aidan's third birthday. With an increased focus on fundraising, they hope to expand their services eventually to other hospitals in the region.
"We haven't raised thousands of dollars, and we're a very small operation," Christopher Toller says.
"Our hope is to make a small difference for families who are experiencing circumstances similar to our own. This has been a helpful way to deal with our grief and a way to honor our son and others."
In this season of giving, what better way to exemplify the spirit of hope?
Christopher Gergen is CEO of Forward Ventures, overseeing Bull City Forward and Queen City Forward, a fellow with the Fuqua School's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University and co-author of "Life Entrepreneurs." Stephen Martin, a director at the nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership, is author of the forthcoming book "The Messy Quest for Meaning" and blogs at www.messyquest.com.
