By D. Michelle Thompson
Purposeful fun is how I describe my time along with fifty other SCCE conference attendees on Saturday, October 3rd at Three Square Food Bank in downtown Las Vegas. Founder, Eric Hilton’s heart was moved when the only food bank in Las Vegas closed its doors in 2007. This inspired him to start Three Square which is now the fasted growing food bank in Feeding America network serving over 28 million meals annually.
Before beginning our ‘purposeful fun’ project, volunteers received a private tour from Hilton’s nephew, Anders Hansen, of the 50,000 square foot facility designed for food bank services in only 111 days by local volunteers. As we toured, we were met with Three Square’s core values; Compassion, Collaboration, Innovation, Stewardship, Transparency, and Urgency at every turn. They were brought to life through quotes on the walls, “If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.” Anders’ authentically teary-eyed testimonials of the stories of families’ served, the innovative self-sustaining enterprise model the food bank employs to rent the facility for special events.
After the tour it was time for our ‘purposeful fun’ project where SCCE volunteers from Brazil, Nigeria, Arizona, Ohio, Nebraska, Mississippi, Texas, Washington and many other places were assigned tasks to build grocery bags and fill food bins. Some good ethics and compliance thought leaders, I won’t name anyone, re-worked instructions to ensure we were lean, efficient and delivered the job with excellence. This yielded bags of groceries to serve over 8,000 meals to families in Nevada. All of this in a little over one hour. As they say at Zappo’s, WOW!
Speaking of ‘wow,’ I must admit I first looked at this volunteer opportunity as a great way to give back locally, before becoming consumed with getting information to take back globally. I never expected this ‘purposeful fun’ to turn into my biggest key takeaway for clients and colleagues. When the statistic was read that in the United States 40% of food is trashed, I saw everyone pondering the role we each play in that 40%. In that moment, I saw our similarities beyond titles and roles to see each other at our core, our hearts.
This moment became my first and biggest key takeaway, ‘first seek to unite hearts, then agreement, alignment, and compliance come naturally.’
I look forward to learning from SCCE’s purposeful fun next year.
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