New Office!
In the midst of planning for our Third Annual Summer Institute, Institute Banquet, and (ok, I decided not to try and list everything we've been up to -- trust us, we've been busy), we took pause to change offices.
Many thanks to Jim Kitchen, one of our newest Board members, for his lead on the space, and to Neil Bagchi and Doug Cook for their help with the lease and negotiations. Rent is cheaper, the location is closer to the UNC campus (makes getting interns easier), and we butt up against the Franklin Business Center, a sweet little incubator for recent college graduates starting ventures. The only problem we faced with the new space (in addition to having lots of stuff to move into it from our old office) was the condition of the place. It was a bit of a mess.
Thankfully, one of our new neighbors, Sweeps, is a start-up that hires out hard-working college students for a very reasonable rate. After a day or so of hauling out junk and painting, we are now the proud tenants of a beautiful space.
The impact of a new office may seem pretty removed from combating global poverty, I'll admit, but let me take a moment to explain its significance. At the end of the chain is a community abroad that, this summer, right now, has just been empowered with greater access to what it needs to support its members (clean water, a new cottage industry, etc.). That community empowerment arose out of a Partnership between a team of Nourish International students and a community based organization abroad, which included a donation of both financial support and labor for the project. The student team, in turn, was the result of a year of planning and running revenue generating Ventures by a Nourish Chapter on a U.S. college campus. Finally, the existence and continued success of that campus chapter, and 24 others like it, has roots in the work of our National Office. Our weekly one-on-one mentoring phone calls, Summer Institute, and other forms of support we provide help make the movement possible. No office space = no national office, and the rest of the chain I just described gets placed in jeopardy. Capacity building work is, by nature, a step or two removed from the actual work on the ground of combating global poverty. It is, though, incredibly important. Like leaven in bread dough, just a little investment in capacity building can make the whole mass rise.
