The Benefit Restaurant™ Project
A video introducing our project:
Summer Quarter Theme: Active Engagement
Our theme for the third quarter is "Active Engagement."
During the Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters we focused on helping nonprofits fighting poverty through Hunger Relief, Fighting Homelessness, and Improving Education. We will cycle back to addressing poverty through Hunger Relief in October, but our summer focus is less about the specific causes we fight for, and more about the ways we choose to do battle!
When one considers how to actively engage in an initiative for social change and the common good, three broad approaches come to mind: One can give money to an established effort or organization [Philanthropy], one can give time [Voluntarism], or one can form a new organization to make a fresh effort to solve a social problem [Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation].
August 2010 Beneficiary:
Is there a better model for voluntary service than City Year?
City Year Boston is focused on helping end the dropout crisis in America. Corps members are uniquely positioned to help accomplish this goal as diverse, near-peer role models who have graduated college or are on their way to graduate college.
Corps members are in-school from before first bell until after last child leaves after-school. They create positive change by improving attendance, behavior and course performance in English and math – the three proven indicators that a student will not graduate high school if they are off-track in any one of these areas.
City Year Boston has created a scale plan to reach more than 50% of the Boston Public School students who are off-track to graduate before they reach 10th grade.
City Year was founded in Boston in 1988, and now has 20 US sites as well as sites in South Africa and London.
Corps members provide academic support, a positive school climate, after-school programs, and weekend service projects.
This year, 140 City Year Boston corps members will serve full-time as tutors, mentors, and role models in Boston Public Schools, where they reach more than 5,400 children.
Quarterly themes, monthly beneficiaries
We commit our efforts to a quarterly theme. For three quarters we are committed to addressing aspects of Poverty. We began with Hunger Relief from September-December 2009, followed by Fighting Homelessness in the first quarter of 2010. Last quarter our commitment was to Improving Education. Our summer quarter is dedicated to exploring the ways we can each engage in the fight for the common good: philanthropy, volunteerism, and social entrepreneurship.
The first month of each quarter a benefit restaurant commits to a charity or non-profit organization [NPO] operating in the city or town where the restaurant is located. Months Two and Three are committed to an NPO in the restaurant's region.
For our first Benefit Restaurant™, The Elephant Walk in Waltham, Month 1 is always committed to Waltham and Months 2 is committed to Greater Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
A new program: Monday Benefit Dinners!
It is absolutely part of our mission to make a Benefit Restaurant™ as useful as possible. One significant limitation, of course, of the monthy beneficiary model is that there are only twelve months in a year. With more requests from potential beneficiaries than we can fulfill, we were challenged to figure out how we could do more.
In an effort to accommodate more organizations, including those that don't fit within our Hunger Relief > Ending Homelessness > Improving Education quarterly themes, we've added Monday Benefit Dinners to the Benefit Restaurant Model.
Under the Monday Benefit Dinner Program, the Benefit Restaurant™ donates half [50%] of the food and beverage price of a group event to the host's designated nonprofit organization. - The first Monday Benefit Dinner, held on April 19, 2010, raised nearly $750 for Buddy Dog Humane Socierty in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
Visit The Elephant Walk's Monday Benefit Dinner Program page for more information.
Our first theme: Hunger Relief
Helping fight hunger is a natural choice for restaurants interested in philanthropy. It was for us the right place to open our flow of funds to charities and non-profits dedicated to solving fundamental social problems confronting every society.
When we think about our basic needs, we tend to rattle off the first three in this order: food, clothing, and shelter. - Imagine going without food? Even in America, the "richest nation on Earth," we have many millions of people in poverty [39.8 million in 2008, according to Feeding America].
But even MORE people - in 2008, 49.1 million Americans, including 16.7 million children - lived in what have come to be known as "food insecure" households. Food insecurity, as defined by the Hunger Task Force, is "a condition in which people lack basic food intake to privide them with the energy and nutrients for fully productive lives." These are astonishing, daunting statistics. It didn't take long for us to choose Hunger Relief as our first theme.
We embarked on our mission in September 2009 with the Bristol Lodge Kitchen, followed by Project Bread and the Walk for Hunger in October, The Greater Boston Food Bank in November, and Feeding America in December. [Our normal giving cycle is the calendar quarter; having started in September, however, we elected to commit our first four months to Hunger Relief to complete the calendar year.]