12. Increasing your impact on Giving Tuesday

Join Central Florida Foundation's Laurie and Sandi as they talk about a variety of ways to increase your impact of Giving Tuesday!

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• Sandi's role with the Foundation
• The Thrive Framework
• 3 Ways to increase your impact on Giving Tuesday
• and get a refresher on the Giving Map. (Watch a quick video on it HERE!)

Visit the First You Talk website.

Visit the First You Talk Podcast on Instagram.

Visit Central Florida Foundation's Instagram.

As our region’s community foundation, Central Florida Foundation serves as a launchpad for high-impact philanthropy. Championing the collective power of head, heart and dollar, we coordinate the commitment and investment of philanthropists, nonprofits, and community partners to target today’s most critical challenges and those on the horizon to truly transform our community. The Foundation also offers expert giving advice, a personalized approach to managing charitable funds, and the capacity to convene collaboration across sectors. Learn more at cffound.org.

Transcript

Increase your impact on Giving Tuesday

Transcript

00:00:05 Laurie Crocker

Welcome to Central Florida Foundation’s First You Talk podcast. Here you'll gain a better understanding of society's toughest issues at the end of each episode, we'll summarize the main points and offer deeper dive options. If something piqued your interest. So ready to demystify a complex issue and up your knowledge.

00:00:24 Laurie Crocker

Game. Let's get started.

00:00:28 Laurie Crocker

Welcome to a new episode of the First You Talk podcast. This episode is more of a timely episode. We typically tackle big, huge problems, and those can be listened to at anytime. However, this episode is actually going to focus on a particular day that's coming up and we.

00:00:48 Laurie Crocker

Have Sandi with us today. Hi, sandi. Hello.

00:00:52 Laurie Crocker

And Sandi typically is the voice that you hear giving great background, context, history, or sharing how Central Florida Foundation has been involved with a particular issue area before. But I also wanted to take a moment today to talk to Sandi about her role. So she has a really fancy title, super fans.

00:01:13 Laurie Crocker

It is Vice President of Community Strategies and Initiatives and that I understand what that means because I work with Sandy every single day, but I don't think that it always resonates outside of our office. So I was wondering, Sandi, if you could just take a second to explain what that title means and what do you do on your day-to-day.

00:01:30 Sandi Vidal

Sure. Thanks.

00:01:33 Sandi Vidal

Really what I do in my role is I have a small team that works on grants giving money to organizations, either through different initiatives that we have different strategic.

00:01:49 Sandi Vidal

Things that we're working on could be through our hundred women strong or other things, or through donor advised fund holders. A lot of different ways that we get grants into the community, but we work on giving grants. We also work on scholarships. We have 14 different scholarships, and then we.

00:02:09 Sandi Vidal

Are in a role that we call Community leadership and community foundations as a whole are really that place in the Community where people go to when it comes to working on the philanthropic side of complex social issues and so.

00:02:28 Sandi Vidal

So what we do in that is a lot of different things. One is gathering a lot of data, learning about those different issues that we have in our community. We also attend a lot of different community meetings. Some of those we lead some of those, we sit around different tables learning and participating in the process of trying to.

00:02:49 Sandi Vidal

Move forward on those issues. You probably heard the term. Move the needle, which is not my favorite we usually use.

00:02:55 Laurie Crocker

Oh, Sandi, you. Yes, go ahead. Go ahead. Sandi is the one that had us change. Move the needle. What did you change?

00:03:01 Sandi Vidal

It to to incremental change, moving the needle just I don't know to me.

00:03:07 Sandi Vidal

It seems like just jargon, and so being able to say, you know, we're trying to make incremental change, which means change over time in our community. We want to see things going into a positive direction. We also do things like writing white papers. We also put together a bi-annual.

00:03:27 Sandi Vidal

Assessment of the community that we call the Community landscape that really looks at what are the challenges in our Community, those are the things that we need to work on.

00:03:38 Sandi Vidal

And then what are the opportunities for us to do things in that space? And when I say that space generally, the nonprofit space or whatever, that social issue is, but we're looking at what are already what's already being done. So not starting everything from scratch.

00:03:59 Sandi Vidal

And it will give you the aside on this that you know, and I've said this, I think in podcasts before.

00:04:05 Sandi Vidal

I'm not opposed to reinventing the wheel when it needs to be reinvented, but I also think we need to build off of what's already happening in the community.

00:04:14 Laurie Crocker

Yeah. And I think that goes also fits in with what you're often talking about. One thing that Sandi says frequently is, and I'm going to get the order wrong. I always do accelerate.

00:04:25 Laurie Crocker

Scale pilot and fill gaps. Did I? I didn't get it right.

00:04:27 Sandi Vidal

Yeah, it's pilot scale, accelerate and fill gaps, not that the order really matters. But you know what we're talking about there is in piloting. We're looking at how do we invest in new ideas, new things.

00:04:41 Sandi Vidal

That are coming to the market or that are being tried out, we don't have necessarily a proven model in our Community and so we're looking at how do we invest in things that are essentially start up. It's it's trying something new.

00:04:57 Laurie Crocker

And and can I interrupt you just for a second? We do a lot of talking internally at least about venture philanthropy. And from my understanding, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

00:05:07 Laurie Crocker

Venture philanthropy is often philanthropy that has some risk involved because you are investing it into charitably investing it into something that maybe doesn't have proof of concept. But it needs philanthropy to power that proof of concept in order to move.

00:05:22 Sandi Vidal

Forward, I think that's exactly what it means. It's it's really about.

00:05:27 Sandi Vidal

Taking that chance to try to prove something right, or in some cases fail quickly and then be hopefully nimble enough to switch gears and look at really what went wrong in that situation and how do we reevaluate it and move forward.

00:05:46 Laurie Crocker

Yeah, and and oftentimes, you know, it risks scares people. But at the same time, you should see Sandi's digital library of data. I mean it's very anything that the foundation is even looking at really has to be backed up with some sort of research or data that shows that.

00:06:05 Laurie Crocker

Yes, there's a good likelihood that this.

00:06:07 Laurie Crocker

Will work out, it just needs that charitable capital to to actually show that it can.

00:06:13 Sandi Vidal

Work. I'm kind of a little bit of a data nerd in that I collect reports and articles and academic papers and.

00:06:22 Sandi Vidal

Anything that can I think, inform the foundation and inform me in my work and my team around what are the things that we need to be looking at? What are the things that we need to consider, what lessons have been learned by others in other communities and how can we kind of.

00:06:42 Sandi Vidal

Leapfrog over those lessons learned to be able to move forward in the process a little quicker. And so when I put things together like our Guide to Thrive as an example of looking at how we came up with the framework that we came up with that we work in that you hear about.

00:07:00 Sandi Vidal

But also the lessons that we learned along the way are in there. Not all of them, because it was written a couple of years ago, but it's something that hopefully will help others who are exploring doing the type of work that we're doing when it comes to scaling and accelerating, those two terms are really about.

00:07:20 Sandi Vidal

Making work that is working, things that are going right.

00:07:26 Sandi Vidal

Making those investments in in things that we can make bigger in the Community, so giving an investment into a nonprofit to expand out their program so that they can reach more people, do more good work, solve more problems is where scaling comes and accelerating is about.

00:07:46 Sandi Vidal

Bringing something to market faster and so oftentimes that could mean something like building the capability of an organization to do more of what they're already doing, it may mean.

00:08:00 Sandi Vidal

Changing in technology that's going to help them to be able to do something faster than they were able to do it before, or even bringing new nonprofits into the community that are filling the gaps that we're looking to fill, and then that gap filling is really trying to address the things that are not oftentimes.

00:08:20 Sandi Vidal

Addressed by other funders, where oftentimes we're looking at.

00:08:26 Sandi Vidal

Programmatic things that are either already in existence or expanding a current program to meet the needs of more people, but there may be some things that are needed that are things that are not addressed and an example of that would be investing in Community health workers through our.

00:08:46 Sandi Vidal

Healthcare work group. We did a lot of research to look at what are things we could do right now. What are things we could do over the longer term, what requires policy change, but where do those gaps exist? And one of the things that we found was there was a gap between people who had.

00:09:04 Sandi Vidal

Left emergency room services and then actually getting to primary care or specialists or following up, sometimes struggling in getting the equipment that they needed. If it is, you know things from crutches to wheelchairs to specialized beds or other equipment to getting their prescriptions.

00:09:24 Sandi Vidal

Getting appointments for mental healthcare providers could sometimes take weeks, and so for somebody who's not educated in that space, or somebody who is working full time and doesn't have the time to sit on the phone trying to make 100 phone calls to find somebody that can see them.

00:09:41 Sandi Vidal

That is something that a Community health worker can help fill those.

00:09:45 Laurie Crocker

Gaps. Got it. Yeah. And even I don't want to say a smaller scale to minimize it, but in our recent conversations on the foster care system, two or three of the conversations I had identified the fact that a lot of foster care children.

00:10:01 Laurie Crocker

Don't get their drivers license, so they you know, you might not think of it. It probably doesn't draw a lot of attention. And who's going to even be talking about it and that that that I think is where a lot of the gaps.

00:10:12 Laurie Crocker

Happened. And so something as quote UN quote simple as getting your driver's license was something that that was a gap within that fuller system, right? Yeah.

00:10:22 Laurie Crocker

OK, so now we're going to pivot a little bit. Well, first of all, I guess, Sandi, you, you do it all, that is what Sandi's title means. She she's a guru when it comes to community knowledge. But I know that she doesn't do it alone. She has.

00:10:35 Laurie Crocker

Partners and colleagues, I mean, if rolodex's were still a thing, Sandys would be incredible. So now we're going to pivot to related but different topic and what we're going to be talking about today in the second-half is giving Tuesday, which is coming up.

00:10:55 Laurie Crocker

We are recording this a little bit early, but it right now it's November 15th. So we have a week and 1/2 until giving Tuesday.

00:11:04 Laurie Crocker

Happens and the foundation often aligns with proactive philanthropy philanthropy that happens after you kind of stop, pause, think, and kind of plan out what what your impact is, your charitable goals, and how you're going to to accomplish that. Now, Mark our President and CEO.

00:11:24 Laurie Crocker

Has often talked about the giving map or the giving spectrum, and on one side we have proactive philanthropy where it is that kind of thoughtful philanthropy where you stop and think and plan while on the other side of it, we're talking about reactive philanthropy.

00:11:39 Laurie Crocker

Disclaimer there's no wrong way to give and there's a space for every single type of giving, and we all deeply believe in that. But reactive philanthropy is more: you give one asked. So if you're heading into a grocery store, if you were giving at checkout, or if somebody just purchased at you and says, hey, I, I would like you to attend this event and it's a fundraising event. That's all.

00:12:00 Laurie Crocker

Reactive philanthropy and again nothing wrong with it, but there's less thinking time in between the ASK and the give. Typically when we think about giving Tuesday, oftentimes it is reactionary philanthropy. It's giving Tuesday. I feel compelled to give, I'm going to give, I give, and that's usually it.

00:12:18 Laurie Crocker

This conversation really is going to be around ways to take that approach to giving Tuesday and push it a little bit more toward the proactive giving space where you put a little bit of thought in. We're hoping to get this out a week before giving Tuesday. So we have, we are giving you 7 days to.

00:12:38 Laurie Crocker

Hopefully consider giving Tuesday, but we're going to talk about a few different ways. You can kind of stretch out your impact so it doesn't just end on Tuesday and it keeps going and hopefully into the new.

00:12:51 Sandi Vidal

Year we'll just thinking about giving Tuesday in general it's, you know, the Tuesday after Black Friday.

00:12:56 Sandi Vidal

And so I don't know why we call it Black Friday. Well, I do. It's about when retailers would go into the black. So it's Black Friday, right? Businesses are no longer in the red. So, you know, the idea is people are going out and they're spending money and buying gifts. Some of them will be super appreciated. Others.

00:13:02 Laurie Crocker

Yes.

00:13:04 Laurie Crocker

Yes, yes, they're no longer in the red, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:17 Sandi Vidal

Not so much. But you know, really, it's that retail holiday. And so, you know, the thought behind giving Tuesday was let's encourage people to give back and to give in to their communities for the.

00:13:30 Sandi Vidal

Needs that happen within the community, and so you know, I think the idea of it is great. It follows Cyber Monday, so hopefully you still have money after Black Friday, Cyber Monday shop local Saturday, you know all the different things that we've come up with to add to our calendar, the things that.

00:13:50 Sandi Vidal

I would encourage you first and foremost is.

00:13:54 Sandi Vidal

As Laurie had mentioned, there's no wrong way to give giving out of your heart. Giving out of your time, giving out of your talent is really a beautiful thing. And so I don't want anybody to ever think that retail or you know reactionary giving is wrong. It's not. And giving to an organization.

00:14:16 Sandi Vidal

For operations, is crucial and important. The way that we've set up the nonprofit community to rely on charitable giving and rely on the goodness of others, it's important for them to get dollars to be able to do that work and to deliver services in the.

00:14:32 Sandi Vidal

Community. But when you think about it from the more strategic or proactive giving standpoint, that's a little bit more about investigating those things that you find are important and looking for who's doing the work that is providing solutions for people in the community.

00:14:55 Sandi Vidal

And again, you know, I say often we outsource our biggest problems to nonprofits.

00:14:59 Sandi Vidal

Under resource them to do the work, and if they are receiving government funding, it's oftentimes being reimbursed. And so we're asking nonprofits to really do a lot with a little, and they are wonderful at it, many of them.

00:15:13 Laurie Crocker

Yeah, two questions. Can you clarify because I didn't know this until I was in the nonprofit world. What does it mean operating to to fund operating or give operating funds?

00:15:27 Sandi Vidal

So oftentimes you'll hear people say I don't want to give to salaries. I don't want to give to the rent. I don't want to give to utility.

00:15:33 Sandi Vidal

These, you know, the things that you need to actually be able to deliver the programs. There's many people out there that think that, you know, everything in the volunteer in the nonprofit world should be volunteer. And the reality is nothing will get solved if it's only with volunteers and good intentions.

00:15:53 Sandi Vidal

It just won't, and so the nonprofit world is really an industry in itself. It is a business model where the difference is a few things. One is the.

00:16:07 Sandi Vidal

Structure, But the other is that there's a heart component to it in a normal for profit business, you're not going to see people think about, oh, is this going to benefit all of the constituents we have all of out here, all the consumers? It's really more, is it going to impact our bottom line?

00:16:26 Sandi Vidal

So that's that's a different.

00:16:28 Sandi Vidal

And So what I would say when it comes to thinking about giving when it comes to giving Tuesday or any other time that you really want to invest in either the problem itself or the nonprofit to be able to work on that problem is 1 to really research what are the organizations that are doing work in that.

00:16:48 Sandi Vidal

Space and maybe you're giving already to a food pantry or to a homeless organization. You know, do you really know about that organization? Do you know who serves on their board? Do you know what their financials look like? Do you know what their mission is? And what all of their programs are and where those dollars are going to have the most impact? And that's where we have.

00:17:11 Sandi Vidal

A database called Nonprofit Search

00:17:13 Sandi Vidal

and it's nonprofit search.org, and that's an access point where you can see all of that information. You can see who's on their board, how long do they serve? Does the management report to the board? Do they get reviewed on an annual basis? What kind of documents do they have as an organization?

00:17:33 Sandi Vidal

Are they?

00:17:34 Sandi Vidal

Planning for their fundraising? Do they have a strategic plan? What are the things that are important to that nonprofit when it comes to their mission and vision, but also the strategies that they have to be able to meet the needs that they are providing for in the community? And it also gives you access to their 990s and so.

00:17:55 Sandi Vidal

The 990 is real.

00:17:56 Sandi Vidal

Really, the way that you can see how a nonprofit is performing based on where their dollars are going and what programs they're doing. And so I think it's a great opportunity for people to be able to research a little bit more about those nonprofits.

00:18:10 Laurie Crocker

Yeah, I think that's the first step and it and it only takes your time, you know, you go online to, and this is for local Central Florida nonprofits, nonprofit searches for our seven county region.

00:18:23 Laurie Crocker

Now, there are other national ones. If you're interested in looking past our community. But inside Central Florida, you can go to nonprofit-search.org and I'll link it in the show notes too, but that's going to start building your own knowledge base, which is really, really.

00:18:43 Laurie Crocker

The first step in becoming a more strategic giver is operating from a from a position of strength. Knowledge is strength, so making sure that you do your own due diligence and just looking around now, there's a lot of information on nonprofit search and not all of it might be.

00:19:02 Laurie Crocker

Important to you and that's OK. You don't have to look at their tax documents. If that's not what you care about, maybe you care about who's serving on their board and you want to make sure that those are people that you believe in. Or maybe you want to just look at their their service areas. So there's also a map feature where you can see the counties that the nonprofit serves. So maybe you just want to.

00:19:24 Laurie Crocker

You know, look at nonprofits that are serving in Seminole County or Osceola County. You can do that. So building your own knowledge of the organization, whatever organization it is, is probably your first step in making it a little.

00:19:38 Laurie Crocker

Bit more strategy.

00:19:39 Laurie Crocker

Project and and building a relationship with the nonprofits that you want.

00:19:43 Sandi Vidal

To support and the other thing is, I think looking at the Community landscape which Laurie can link, it's it's really that overview of the five areas that we call thrive which are economic stability, education, health and well-being, community and social connections.

00:20:00 Sandi Vidal

And livability, which covers arts and culture, public safety and then environmental issues. We've really taken a lot of time to put that together. And so we'll be doing an update in early 2025.

00:20:14 Sandi Vidal

But you'll be able to see kind of where the statistics are in different things around the community and what works being done. And part of that is looking at who is doing the work in the community and maybe looking further into that work and whether or not you want to invest.

00:20:31 Laurie Crocker

In that. All right. So as we think about.

00:20:36 Laurie Crocker

Different ways to make giving Tuesday more strategic there are.

00:20:42 Laurie Crocker

Places out there that you can actually invest in and become kind of part of an initiative or part of a membership of people. Can we talk a little bit?

00:20:54 Sandi Vidal

More about that way. Yeah, there's a a concept that we have embraced over the last many years.

00:21:02 Sandi Vidal

Since 2006, I believe called a giving circle and we actually had a couple of giving circles. One of them has now become the Rally Social Enterprise accelerator and that started as a small giving circle of a few.

00:21:19 Sandi Vidal

Successful business people who had kind of moved on in their careers and wanted to give back. And so they started investing in both for profit enterprises and nonprofit social enterprises. With this idea that both of those had the opportunity to do social good.

00:21:39 Sandi Vidal

And so there's rally, which is the social enterprise accelerator. We have 100 Women Strong and that's the organization that we started back in 2006 with the idea of really teaching women in, in the Community to be strategic philanthropists. And they have a model who?

00:21:56 Sandi Vidal

Where they really put together research, they recently did a white paper in the healthcare space about their approach to healthcare, looking at access to healthcare, mental health and maternal health. And they are focused on mental health this year in their grant process and probably by the time you hear this, they will have voted on their grant.

00:22:18 Sandi Vidal

It won't have gone to the board yet, so I can't say what it could be, but that will happen a little bit later this year, but.

00:22:26 Sandi Vidal

To get to the point of that grant, they did research. They wrote a white paper there. The grants and Research Committee did. Then they talked to subject matter experts. They looked at the data they talked to subject matter experts again as they continued to funnel down the ideas of what they were looking at. And then they formulate a problem statement.

00:22:48 Sandi Vidal

And look at how can we invest in solving that problem? And you know, at scale, they're not going to solve World Peace, but they certainly have had.

00:22:59 Sandi Vidal

A ripple effect throughout the community in many of the initiatives that they've done, including the circle of security, which was a parenting model that they repurposed into childcare centers, and that movement started. The K Ready community, which is focused on.

00:23:20 Sandi Vidal

Helping to make sure that all the children in our community are ready for kindergarten when they start, and so it's an it's a really nice place to plug in, especially if you're just getting into that idea of venture philanthropy and want to learn more about how to be strategic and that.

00:23:38 Sandi Vidal

That initiative, you can either get as involved as you want, or we have what we call happy check writers, which is more that reactionary. But yet investing in something where you know that people are doing research and and really looking at solutions.

00:23:52 Laurie Crocker

And also the idea of collective giving feels more impactful too. You know, you're one person maybe writing a check and then you kind of lean out for the rest.

00:24:02 Laurie Crocker

The year. But that one check is going to a pool of many other checks, and therefore it's making a larger financial contribution as well. In fact, one of the episodes, and I can't, are you a philanthropist? We had Renuka Sastri on, and she was a past chair of 100 Women Strong. And she just really resonated with that idea that her.

00:24:23 Laurie Crocker

A smaller amount of charitable gift was going to be compounded so many times by all the other women, so it's a way to make a larger impact than maybe just investing on your.

00:24:37 Laurie Crocker

And then with, you know, Rally, they have a way to charitably invest, called a Rally Maker. And these are those when you were talking, you're going to do a better job of explaining this than me. So I'll.

00:24:50 Laurie Crocker

Let you do it.

00:24:50 Sandi Vidal

But it's it's mostly people who either are currently now in the business community and want to.

00:24:59 Sandi Vidal

Be able to provide expertise. Their mentors is what a rally maker is, but there is a contribution that they give. They're giving into the overall.

00:25:10 Sandi Vidal

Social enterprise accelerator. And then they're giving their time. So they're giving dollars and time into this enterprise. And what happens is people come into rally as fellows and they get to really test out their theories and put together a pitch deck.

00:25:30 Sandi Vidal

Hopefully be able to accelerate and scale their businesses into the community to do greater good.

00:25:37 Laurie Crocker

Yeah.

00:25:37 Laurie Crocker

And we worked a lot with the last cohort and they're all focusing on some impact area. They looked the sustainable development goals that also linked to our thrive buckets that we have for the Central Florida community. And you know they always remind me, I I like to explain them as business with hearts.

00:25:57 Laurie Crocker

However, I've been told by the entrepreneurial community that it's business with really a double bottom line.

00:26:03 Laurie Crocker

And and yes, they all have heart with what they do, but it's a sustainable business model paired with positive social impact. So or positive social change. So that's more of a route if you are an entrepreneurial soul who loves investing and just seeing what the new cool innovative things are going on in the community.

00:26:23 Laurie Crocker

So.

00:26:24 Laurie Crocker

There are way more options than just those two that we just shared with you, but finding an initiative or a way to invest in in a giving circle model, but there are many giving circles out there and they all follow their own sort of way to go about things. Hundred and strong definitely leans way more into the strategic grant.

00:26:44 Laurie Crocker

Taking side of things, but yeah, finding, taking that, that dollar amount that you wanted to give.

00:26:50 Laurie Crocker

And becoming part of a group that also wants to charitably invest and give their time, talent, treasure into a a particular interest area is another way that you know, if you invest now into that, you've got all of 2025 to lean into that and learn more.

00:27:11 Laurie Crocker

And see where you want to get more involved and giving Tuesday could kick it all off for you so.

00:27:18 Sandi Vidal

Absolutely.

00:27:18 Laurie Crocker

So thinking about what if there's a person who wants to give?

00:27:26 Laurie Crocker

Doesn't really have a particular organization that they have in mind, but they do have passion areas. Maybe it is animals because there are many animal lovers out there. Maybe it's healthcare, maybe it's the arts. What would you tell that person? Obviously first recommendation. Go on nonprofit search and see if there's a nonprofit there that might.

00:27:47 Laurie Crocker

Match your interest area and you can actually filter those nonprofits by interest areas so you can also look at it that way. What would be the next step to determining what what you can?

00:27:57 Sandi Vidal

So there's other organizations that are kind of.

00:28:00 Sandi Vidal

The feeder organizations to the larger nonprofit communities where You can invest there at the foundation, and of course, I have to give the plug for the foundation and the.

00:28:11 Sandi Vidal

Work.

00:28:11 Sandi Vidal

We're doing, but we have, we have the five thrive areas. So you know again economic stability, education, healthcare.

00:28:12 Laurie Crocker

Yes.

00:28:20 Sandi Vidal

And community and social connections, which really looks at.

00:28:24 Sandi Vidal

How we're engaging in the community, so things like civic engagement would fall under that category and then also the livability, which is arts and culture, public safety and the environment. So it's making your community a thriving and livable place. There is an opportunity to invest.

00:28:45 Sandi Vidal

In those impact funds, through the foundation and what happens with those dollars is really very similar to what happens with 100 Women Strong. It's about research. It's about identifying.

00:28:58 Sandi Vidal

Seeing what are the things that we can focus on scaling, accelerating, filling gaps. But it's also an opportunity to really dig deeper into what are the ways that we can invest that will cause a ripple effect in our community and really looking at.

00:29:18 Sandi Vidal

Things that we can do right away, things that require systems change and those are longer term investments and we're really deeply exploring a model into 2025 where we're looking at working with some community leaders, probably nonprofit leaders within.

00:29:38 Sandi Vidal

The communities that are maybe a little bit more of an area of struggle in our community and so those might be the lower to moderate income areas where there's more incidences of crime or there's lower educational attainment or.

00:29:58 Sandi Vidal

Lower access to health or lower access to nutritional foods such as food deserts.

00:30:04 Sandi Vidal

And working with leaders in those communities to do a project within their community. And so we're in the process of putting together what that looks like. We're going to be doing some listening tours to just really understand from those community leaders what's going on and what are some things that they would like to see in their.

00:30:22 Laurie Crocker

Communities. Yeah, I wasn't sure if we were allowed to talk about what you're talking about.

00:30:26 Laurie Crocker

But it's really exciting. Sandi just shared with a couple of our internal teams about this project that her team is working on.

00:30:35 Laurie Crocker

But just to kind of connect to all back. So thrive is our framework that is based on the sustainable development Goals, but also the social determinants of health which stay tuned. We actually have an episode in the works on the not that one social determinants of health.

00:30:52 Sandi Vidal

Social determinants

00:30:54 Laurie Crocker

I tell you all I'm learning with you. So thank you, Sandi.

00:30:59 Sandi Vidal

Yeah. And where where the framework comes in and where it matches up with those two sets, the the Sustainable Development Goals and and the social determinants of health is.

00:31:09 Sandi Vidal

Really looking at the Sustainable Development goals and you hear us talk about those every once in a while, they were an agreement of all of the nations around the world, 153 of them agreed on goals and they agreed on targets for those goals and then they agreed on indicators and the.

00:31:30 Sandi Vidal

Indicators are how do we know if we're going in the right direction? So when you go back to that move the needle make incremental change, you want to be able to see progress in a community. And oftentimes that progress is over time. Sometimes you have to look back over years to see are we actually making changes so.

00:31:49 Laurie Crocker

There's no wrong way to do giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity after all of that retail exhaustion that you feel maybe after Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, which is admirable in and of itself. It's a great way to get small businesses in front of the community.

00:32:09 Laurie Crocker

But then there's Cyber Monday, and then we get the last day we get giving Tuesday, yeah.

00:32:14 Sandi Vidal

And and one other thing I would add is, you know when you're thinking about giving gifts, we.

00:32:20 Sandi Vidal

Sometimes don't think about giving gifts that are a little bit less intangible, and so you can always make a donation to a nonprofit in somebody's name if you think that's something that they would appreciate.

00:32:32 Laurie Crocker

Absolutely. Yeah, that's that's a great idea too. I think that there are many ways to incorporate organizations.

00:32:41 Laurie Crocker

Into your holiday giving and then also just a side note, I know that this is we're going into the giving season.

00:32:49 Laurie Crocker

But remember that you know, with volunteering. I think a lot of nonprofits get flooded with volunteering in December, but then come January and beyond, it gets a little dry. So just remembering that that spirit of generosity and the spirit of volunteering, really, if you go in June.

00:33:09 Laurie Crocker

In February, they might need your help a little bit more. During that time from a volunteer standpoint, so.

00:33:18 Laurie Crocker

I hope this helped. I hope that this gave you a few different ways to consider giving Tuesday and Sandi any parting words.

00:33:28 Sandi Vidal

Just go forth and give.

00:33:30 Laurie Crocker

Go forth and give. We'll leave you on that note today. Happy, almost giving Tuesday and we will talk to you again soon.

00:33:40 Mark Brewer

Thank you for listening to the podcast. First You Talk as an engaged listener of this show. We encourage you to check out our podcast website at cffound.org/podcast to learn more about the complex issue. There you'll find more context.

00:33:59 Mark Brewer

And the voices that you've heard today links to any supporting materials mentioned during the episode and resources to help you explore additional perspectives to draw a fuller picture of the issue at hand, through curiosity and collaboration, we can all make our community an even better place to call home.