A New Year’s Challenge

By Sarah Warren, MBA

Note: The following article was previously published in Chamber Connection (December 2010), the monthly newsletter of the Ruston Lincoln Chamber of Commerce.

It’s mid-December as I write this month’s Chamber article, and, because the year is quickly coming to a close, I have been reflecting much lately on the events and relationships we (that is, my husband and business-partner, Brian, and I) have encountered in 2010.

Though there have been up and down moments through it all, the year can be summed up in a single word… amazing! In our (hectic) personal life, we welcomed our second daughter in late 2009, and mid-year discovered we’ll soon also welcome our first son. Then on the professional side, our business has grown to a point where “positive net income” is no longer some fanciful, fictional notion. It’s not a large number at this point, mind you, but at least it’s black!

One of the greatest blessings that came with increased cash flow and financial stability in our business this year was the ability to provide more pro-bono work to a few local non-profits, recognizing that much of the burden of “community improvement” lies with non-profits.

So, for this month’s article I digress a bit from the assignment of providing marketing “how tos,” and instead provide a little spotlight (or marketing, if you will) for a few of the organizations that we’ve been fortunate to work with this year.

Having had nieces and a nephew participate in their programs and having had the opportunity to discuss fundraising on and off with the staff, we have long been fans of Boys and Girls Clubs (BGC) of North Central Louisiana. So we jumped at the opportunity for Brian to become a board member earlier this year, allowing us to upgrade our casual advice into hands-on assistance.

As a white, middle-class kid, I never even knew dropping out of school was an option. I was raised that you get good grades (or else!), graduate high school and then go to college. Period. The only choice I had was what I would major in, but that was a wide open choice. I genuinely had the opportunity to be anything I wanted to be when I grew up.

But that’s not the case for most BGC kids. For many, their days are consumed with making it through that day. Forget college. Forget high school graduation. They are thinking about whether or not they’ll have electricity and food at home tonight.

BGC gives kids a safe place to go after school and provides support like tutoring and mentoring. More significantly, BGC encourages kids—who will one day be among the adults in our community—and guides them along the path to becoming positive, gainful members of society. I literally cannot stress enough how strongly I believe that BGC is at the forefront of directing the very course of these kids’ lives.

The work of Life Choices of North Central Louisiana, a crisis pregnancy center here in Ruston, also falls along those lines.

Having had babies on the brain for the better part of the year, I collaborated with several friends last spring to host a baby shower (i.e. diaper fundraiser) for Life Choices, an organization I previously knew little about. Following that event, I decided to become more involved and agreed to help with some other fundraising activities. Along the way, I was amazed to learn that nearly half of the babies born in Lincoln parish are to unwed mothers and that almost 14% are born to teenage mothers.

As a mom myself, I can only imagine how unlikely it is to be a “normal” teenager following a pregnancy. And the likelihood that a young mother would have the energy and drive to go to college or pursue a career is just as doubtful. It’s so easy for a young woman in this situation to fall into (or remain in) a life of poverty, and statistics show that a child born into poverty is not likely to rise out of it.

Life Choices is there for these girls and women to provide much needed compassion, information and support during the scariness and challenges presented by an unplanned pregnancy.

The points of compassion and support bring me to the third and final organization I’ll mention, Share International (SI) , which is an evangelical missionary group reaching out to the Turkana people of Kenya, Africa. SI’s Director, Sammy Murimi, just so happens to live in Ruston and attends Christ Community Church, my church home.

Just yesterday I was editing content for SI’s end of the year newsletter and had to double check with Sammy to be sure I was reading an article correctly. In it he had written that since roughly 2006, through all the various programs that SI operates, 18,831 people have given their lives to Christ… 18,831 people in about four years! Following Sammy’s confirmation, my next step was to look up the population of Ruston… which I learned to be just barely over 20,000.

At that point, I sat back in my chair and marveled that SI, an organization that most people in Ruston have probably never heard of, could have such an astonishing impact. What’s even more amazing is that SI grew from a simple (ha! simple!) inspiration that hit Sammy and his wife Mary, Kenyan nationals themselves, to follow the verse, “share the gospel… (and) our very lives (1 Thessalonians 2:8).”

The stories and missions of these organizations—and others like them here in Ruston—are so inspiring and encouraging to me. And they are proof that we, both as individuals and as a community, can make an impact so monumental that it could literally change the world as we know it.

And with that, I challenge my peers in the Ruston business community to resolve this New Year to adopt an organization, a church, a school, a family or even a single, individual person and see if we can’t make the world—or Ruston at the very least—a better place in 2011.

Sarah co-owns Emogen Marketing Group, a full service marketing firm in Ruston, LA and can be reached at sarah@emogenmarketing.com. You can learn more about the organizations mentioned above by visiting bgcncl.org, lifechoicesncla.org and shareint.net.