Ba bing! Here. Have $1,000. Your lucky day. But there’s a catch. You have to give it away and do it soon, within a week.
Three hundred audience members at Oprah Winfrey’s television show in October got the chance to do just that. Each one received a debit card worth $1000 to donate to the charitable cause of their choice. It was her Pay It Forward Kindness challenge. Oprah called it the chance to experience “the best gift ever”.
One thousand dollars. It has such a positive ring. You can go on www.oprah.com and see what people did with their money.
To carry it right into my own back yard, for Interfaith Emergency Services in Ocala, Florida, $1,000 would buy 800 jars of the 16-ounce size of peanut butter.
Gary Linn, executive director of IES, confesses he is crazy about peanut butter.
“It is nutritious. It is protein. Every kid loves it. Put it together with jelly in a sandwich and it is the perfect food.”
Go ahead. Laugh. But I think Gary is onto something. We’re talking families who have fallen between the cracks, the people Interfaith serves – the last, the lost, and the least. If the Food Pyramid landed on the sidewalk next to them they wouldn’t know how to make it happen financially.
Protein, high on the pyramid, doesn’t come their way every day. Think meat and chicken and fish. Not happening. Peanut butter is protein. Personally I don’t think you are ever too old for a PB & J sandwich. Peanut butter. We we’re talking a food that people will eat with gusto.
Another program is Food4Kids. These are backpacks that go home with schoolchildren on weekends. Volunteers fill backpacks with food not only for the children carrying them but their brothers, sisters and parents. These are families identified by school authorities.
The cost is $12 to fill a pack with food. That $1000 you have clutched in your hand would fill 83 packs.
And you want to know something scary? The numbers keep going up. Forty families a day are showing up at Interfaith’s food pantry looking for food.
Often these are middle class families with both parents working and two paychecks don’t cover gas, food, rent, mortgage, car repair, clothes, doctor, dentist or heaven forbid, an emergency. Four hurricanes hit Florida two years ago. Some people whose houses were hit are still paying the repair bills. Others are Katrina refugees trying to make a new life somewhere else.
Every day is a trade off. So they ask for help with food and hope to have enough money for the mortgage payment.
A roof over one’s head doesnÂt’ come cheap. The Housing Wage needed in Florida to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment is $16.35 an hour while the typical renter is earning $11.94. The math doesn’t add up. Something’s got to give.
Steve Hoesterey, executive director of Brother’s Keeper, an outreach of Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Ocala, would take the entire amount and deposit it in the bank for something called Project Hope.
“I would invest it. Make it the start of Project Hope, a transitional housing for families and children and other persons. It will also provide a pavilion for overnight shelter. The $1,000 will earn money and work year after year, making it not just a one time thing.”
Do you have $1,000 to give? Brothers Keeper is at 5 SE. 17th Street, Ocala, Fl. 34471 and their phone is (352) 622-3846. Interfaith Emergency Services is at 450 NW 2nd Street, Ocala, Fl. 34475 and their phone number is (352) 629-8828.
Oprah showed the way. You can enter the kindness challenge any day of the year with any amount of your time, talent or treasure. Start in your backyard, your community. Of course, you won’t have your stories on television, like her audience did after they gave away $1,000, but you’ll get involved and trust me, you’ll feel a whole lot better about life.
Pay for someone’s gas at the pump. Write to the troops in Iraq. Go to the local soup kitchen and volunteer. Visit a neighbor who doesn’t get out much. Change lives by changing yours first.
Open your heart and pay it forward. Your heart will become two sizes bigger. Say, didn’t that happen to somebody named Grinch?
Lucy Beebe Tobias is a freelance writer, artist and photographer in Ocala, Florida. © 2006 Lucy Beebe Tobias.