Join us four Wednesdays this Fall in Madison, Wisconsin for this fantastic series focusing on Transformational Leadership! We have some amazing local facilitators for the workshops and each workshop will be at the new Threshold building on Atwood Ave. The building is definitely worth a look-see.
The nonprofit, Box of Balloons is getting ready for their first annual Birthday Bash fundraiser on November 7th. This event is a family friendly event enjoyable for adults and children alike sponsored by Summit Credit Union, with support from many community businesses.
All funds raised during this events will go directly towards sponsoring a birthday celebration for children who would not be able to have a large celebration on their birthday. The organization works directly with local school social workers and community leaders to help identify deserving children and provide them with an awesome birthday party celebration. To date, between all 11 chapters housed in six different states, over 278 total birthday parties have been donated.
Sunday, November 7th 2015
625 Heatherstone Ridge
Sun Prairie, WI 53590
$2 for adults
$6 for children
Here is a video to also share what Box of Balloons does.
We hosted a workshop at Madison Nonprofit Day this year titled, ‘Sustainable Business Plans for Nonprofits.’ While there are some amazing ideas on how to make nonprofits less reliant on grants, taking action to accomplish this is going to take some time. We must change our frame of mind from, “We need support and assistance” to “We offer greatness to everyone and our business is better than just measuring success.”
The workshop focused on using the expertise in the room. We all know that no one really knows the scene better than the people working in it. They just sometimes need some love, support, and space to think about what else is possible. Here is a list of resources we wanted to offer to them and figured it should be shared with everyone.
Sustainability References
Nonprofit with a For-Profit Business
Forming a For-Profit Partnership or Subsidiary
Miscellaneous
Additional Notes From Workshop
By Sara Alvarado, Co-Creator
Step Up: Equity Matters in the Workplace is a newly created organization that provides a community and has become a movement for people to learn and focus specifically on creating equity in the workplace. The Step Up team offers workshops and a book club with the promise of diving deep and being real. That means we agree to be vulnerable and keep our minds and our hearts open.
The creation of Step Up came out of a group of people that wanted what didn’t exist. They wanted the environment to grow and learn about what needs to change in the business community. Using Dane Buy Local as a base for reaching out and Sustain Dane as a catalyst for bringing it all together, Sara Alvarado, Amy Kesling, Tania Ibarra and Haywood Simmons joined together on a path that has expanded beyond their imagination. The reach is far and wide and the meaningful connections and impact are a direct result of people showing up with the willingness to change.
The goal is to increase diversity in our workplace, the board room, the executive and leadership teams and find solutions to create an inclusive, welcoming and thriving work environment for all. It isn’t just teaching people about cultural competency and inclusivity, it is about creating a company culture that embraces diversity in all aspects of its operations.
The Step Up community in Madison, WI, is a movement for change and when you join the community you will get invitations to the various workshops offered along with a book club invitation and updates from other members that showcase success stories, learning moments and resources. If you are looking for the real deal, read this pledge and hopefully you will feel the tug to be a part of the change.
Diving into the process you will learn to create and engage in conversations about inequities in the workplace and our communities. You will learn how to listen with your hear, use empathy and focus on the importance of finding common ground while challenging each other to identify biases within ourselves and each other in a loving, non-judgmental manner.
This is an ongoing practice of communication and engagement. It is crucial that we become conscious, confident, and humble to create lasting changes.
This is the STEP UP community!
There is no one easy solution to the massive racial disparities in our community. If there was, we’d have figured it out by now and we wouldn’t be here. But we are here, still, and we are not okay with that. Change doesn’t happen overnight, as we can see. Change isn’t happening fast enough. But change IS happening and you can be part of that change. You can make a difference. Join the Step Up movement to experience the change.
***The next Step Up event is Friday, September 19th, 2015, 8:30am-10:30am at the Urban League of Greater Madison (2222 South Park St). Here is more information on that event and the link to their Facebook page.
Find out more about Step Up at www.stepupforequity.com.
Project Kinect is working with Let’s Eat Out! for it’s final event of 2015. This season finale event will feature 20 local food carts (offering food options at $4 or less), Capital Brewery beer & great local music including the Tony Castaneda Latin Jazz Sextet on Sunday, September 27th at Burr Jones Field.
The Fall Food Cart Festival kicks off at 12pm.The event is in partnership with the Mad City Bazaar, an urban popup flea market, which takes place at the Fiore Shopping center, next to the park. The MadCity Bazaar opens at 10am with food and beer sales beginning at noon.
The series is a fundraiser for Let’s Eat Out! with all proceeds benefiting the group’s charitable work including its neighborhood dinner program and food cart internship program. Over the past summer, LEO was able to bring communities together and provide over 4000 meal subsidies in local food desert neighborhoods.. The 2015 internship program, which matched at risk youth with food cart owners for an intensive 8 week learning experience just concluded, with plans for expansion in 2016.
by Stephanie Riedel
While you probably recognize, “that’s what she said!” as a joke, here in Madison it’s also a show that’s changing lives. Thought up in 2011 by Molly Vanderlin of The Bricks Theatre along with friends Miranda Hawk and Karen Saari-Pausch, they imagined a show where women could come together to find strength and share stories of their lives on stage with an audience.
Every show starts with a theme such as resolution, mother-load, lie or perfection and a group of six to ten women. Rehearsals start with a meet and greet where the women discuss the theme for that show and read what they have started writing. For the next month the cast breaks up into smaller groups that meet once a week to workshop what they’ve written with Molly leading them.
The whole process is emotional, powerful and sometimes extremely difficult. Even the most benign stories can lead to some pretty powerful places as the women explore them, which is exactly what makes this show so special. Past stories have included buying your first house as a single woman only to find you’ve got a roommate: a mouse; starting new Christmas traditions after your old ones were torn apart by divorce; that time you were in college and ended up working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club; having your first orgasm at fifty while coming to terms with a marriage that brings you both joy and absolutely no sex; coping with migraines that seek to destroy all the relationships around you; and being an adoptive mother trying to maintain her place in her child’s life as they meet their biological mother for the first time in India. Stories are unique to women, but reach out and transcend gender, race and age.
The women who perform are always from the community. Some of them have experience in performance, but not writing, others are writers, but not performers, still others have never done anything like this in their lives. The one thing they have in common is they are all terrified and they are all brave.
This August is their ninth show, themed Crave and marks the third year in the That’s What She Said run and this show may be the most important one yet with stories of addiction. Rehearsals start July 13th and the show runs August 20th-21st with eight women performing at The Brink Lounge (701 E. Washington Ave). Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at the door, or at brownpapertickets.com.
***For more information check out the group’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TWSSBricks, or call (608)358-9609.
On Monday, June 29th, Project Kinect’s founder, Gregg Potter, produced a program on WORTFM to illustrate the organization and have a conversation about positive social change and community engagement. He invited Sara Alvarado from the Alvarado Group, Amy Kesling from Sustain Dane, and Tariq Saqqaf, from the Madison Mayor’s Office to have an in-depth discussion on, ‘What positive social change looks like on an individual level?’ These change agents will discuss different definitions of positive social change and how each of them identify as an agent of change. The goal of this open dialogue is to build capacity to agents of change in Madison in the diverse life roles we play.
In a city like Madison, we must celebrate our social change and always remember how individually, we all make a difference.
You can listen to the show now on WORT’s Website.
Let’s Eat Out! has some amazing things coming up!
Let’s Eat Out! has asked Project Kinect to assist in a four part pilot summer concert series at Burr Jones Field in Madison, WI. The series will be three concerts in June 21st, 28th, & July 5th and a final concert, the “Fall Food Cart Festival”, on September 27th. The concert series would include the presence of local bands (3 bands for each date), six food carts representing LEO!, A beer trailer representing a local brewery, a sponsored children’s area, and a specific nonprofit benefactor for each event. Project Kinect’s role with the concert series will be to assist logistics for the events while outlining the process for giving donations to local nonprofits. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please check out the Let’s Eat Out! sponsorship page.
The Let’s Eat Out! Internship Initiative, in partnership with Briarpatch Youth Services, will target youth between the ages of 16 and 18 from economically challenged communities around the city of Madison who are seeking unique skills related to food service and entrepreneurship. The internship will not only provide a steady summer job (at $9 per hour), it will also provide external correlated training and the potential for long term job and entrepreneurial development.
In addition to providing valuable work experience and other training, the Let’s Eat Out! Internship initiative will also provide mentors for youth. Food cart owners will serve as mentors for their interns and offer an up close and personal look at what it takes to manage and operate a small business.
Unlike other internship opportunities where interns often work at the bottom-rungs of the company, Let’s Eat Out! interns will be trained through day-to-day interactions with the owners of the businesses they’re working for. The business owners will provide valuable guidance and insight on all aspects of small business management. Additionally, interns will be involved in labs each week that will assist to strengthen and add to their skill sets.
If this is something you would like to support financially, then here is where to donate.
If you want to volunteer, here are great volunteer opportunities provided by Let’s Eat Out!s weekly dinners.
Project Kinect is so happy to call Madison, Wisconsin home for so many reasons. One of the biggest reasons however, is because Madison is filled with forward thinkers and positive social change makers. One of them is Rebecca Ryan. She is the founder of Next Generation Consulting, is a futurist, an author, and a public speaker. And basically, she rocks. A couple weeks ago, she published a little piece on her Facebook page, “I am a Liability to the Status Quo” that we found brilliant. Here it is in the entirety:
I am a liability to the status quo.
Last night, I was having drinks with the executive director and the chairman of a board I serve on. They shared another board member’s response to my strategic ideas: “You know,” he said hesitantly, “Rebecca’s a fighter. And she’s W A A A Y out there…” He was pointing to the future, or the edge of his vision. I’m not sure which.
I felt a little guilty about this. I wondered if I’d put our chairman or ED in a bad spot with this other board member.
So I slept on it. And I’ve come to this: if you want to preserve the status quo, if you don’t want to stretch your vision, I’m gonna make you uncomfortable. And I’m willing to fight mightily for a future that benefits all of our children. Here’s my secret: in every meeting, I imagine a row of chairs occupied by kids I’ll never meet, people who will be born long after I’m dead. And I think about what decisions I can make today that will benefit them.
That’s not “out there” in the future. That’s in here. (I am pointing to my heart.)
So screw anyone who wants to judge me because of their lack of comfort with the future or their discomfort with conflict. Future generations aren’t going to look back on us and say, “Thank you for maintaining the status quo. Thank you for continuing with your consumptive, environment-killing, selfish ways. I know that’s what made you comfortable, and I’m so glad you valued your comfort over my future.”
Hell, no.
I’ll continue to be a liability to the status quo. And I’ll work my face off to help others do the same.
If you want to see a little more of Rebecca Ryan’s brilliance, here is a video. It is a few years old, but still embodies her forwardness, honesty, and greatness.
Project Kinect is working on a food access initiative in Madison, WI. We have a lot moving in the right direction but we have a ways to go. Tulsa, OK on the other hand is already succeeding at this type of initiative. They have the Food on the Move Initiative that is kicking butt with using mobil food trucks and mobil grocery stores. The Food On The Move, mobile food initiative, is a collaboration of food and health experts and community partners to mobilize good quality food into hard to reach economically challenged areas, helping combat hunger in Tulsa and Oklahoma in a new way. What they’re doing should be, and can be replicated through out the country. Great job Tulsa!
Check out the Food on the Move website to see a great video about what is happening.
