Share Our Strength Day of Service Volunteers at Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, DC

See a video here

There are many ways that you can use social media to take action against childhood hunger.  For example, last week on Blog Action Day noticed that Pundit Mom launched a "make a comment on this blog and I'll donate $1 to Washington DC Capital Area Food Bank."  Last month, in Austin, Texas, social media  mavens like Connie Reece, Mike Chapman, and David Neff joined forces with Lisa Goodard Austin Texas Capital Area Foodbank to organize a "Tweet Up." 

Ed Nicolson who writes Tyson Food's Hunger Relief blog, posted a challenge: the company pledged to donate 100 pounds of protein products for the HAM-up for every comment they received on the blog post. Ed estimated that 360 comments would be needed to fill a truck and it might take over a few weeks of intense online activity.   They reached their goal in a few hours and days later

over 40,000 pounds of protein products were donated to the Food Bank. You can a good look at the actual delivery at Tyson Foods Gift of Protein 2008 flickr page.

On Sunday morning, I got up at 5:00 am so I could catch my flight down to Washington, DC and the Sharing Our Strength Conference of Leaders Day of Service along with almost 200 conference participants at two partner sites, the Capital Area Food Bank and Friendship Public Charter School. The Day of Service, sponsored by Tyson Foods, provide an opportunity for conference to give back to organizations in the host community.

I was part of a group of volunteers, a social media capture team, that was documenting the event to get the word out about hunger issues. The Team included Suzi Twohig, Jeff Wiedner, Beth Kanter, Ed Nicholson, Michael Clark, Eric Herboso, and Andrea Sherwood.   We documented the event with flickr photos, live blog posts,videos, tweets, and even some live streaming.

I started my Day of Service experience at Friendship Public Charter School at the Southeast Elementary Academy in the school cafeteri where volunteers were hard at work painting two murals.   Both murals illustrate the idea of nutritional eating.   I met both of the artists and did live stream interviews with them.  I also talked to the volunteers about why they were so passionate about the issue of ending childhood hunger.

Latoya Middleton, photographed above, shows off her design while volunteers were busy painting in the design. The mural depicts mother earth who gives life and food next to a healthy selection of fruits and vegetables. Latoya was thrilled to her design come to life before her eyes.

 
Mural Artist Alex Volkonsky

I also met Alex Volkonsky who design depicts whimsical vegetables and fruits as well as a milk cartoon (emphasizing the need to children who need to drink their milk everyday for healthy bones).   I interviewed him about his work on qik.

I met Michael Farver one of the volunteers. Michael is a founding director and President of End Childhood Hunger. He is also a trustee of The Farver Foundation, a charitable foundation supporting hunger relief, child nutrition, education and community development, and helps oversee the distribution of over $400,000.00 in grants to more than fifty charitable organizations in Michigan and South Florida each year.

Michael also uses different social media strategies to get the word out about childhood hunger in America and spoke about why it is important for activists to incorporate a social media strategy.

Here are my flickr photos from the mural projects in the cafeteria.

In addition, our goal was also to create a living case study for a session on Monday about using social media to fight hunger at the conference.  Many participants left the session inspired to try out using social media as part of their eforts to educate people about the issue childhood hunger.  During the session, one person asked  what if you don't the time or skills do something like this - where can I find volunteers? 

So, maybe if you have some special social media skills -- whether it be blogging or creating videos - why not help out a local hunger organization help fight hunger with social media?

Beth Kanter, BlogHer CE for Nonprofits and Social Change, also writes Beth's Blog