I would like to use this space to acknowledge the work and the simple, effective grassroots approach of the Box Project to helping rural families in the southeast/midwest United States. People and families sign up to be matched with a family living with an income below the U.S. government’s poverty level. Many families have several members who work full time, or who may be elderly or disabled…and sponsors continually comment on how strong, resourceful, and uncomplaining the rural families are.

People send periodic boxes of gifts…dishes, towels, socks, canned food, etc…things which would help out a family with few resources. And some families have gotten more education/better jobs and no longer need the boxes, but still value the friendship and letter exchange.

I’m spotlighting this organization as an example of a group which came out of a real, observed need ‘on the ground’ in the back country areas of the United States, and which has a practical, simple solution. Also, the low-cost grassroots aspect of this has worked well for them, as has staying adaptable (incorporating some aspects of long-term disaster response, focusing increasingly on education and school supplies, etc.) The relationship building and cultural exchange parts of the program…where people in different areas of the U.S. can educate each other about their locales and cultures also helps to educate people as we have a large, diverse country.

I know many of Synchronized Chaos’ readers come from outside the United States, and I spotlight American programs mostly because I am more familiar with them, but am very open to hearing about interesting humanitarian or other ideas elsewhere. We here try to uncover interesting models for getting things done which seem to be working and put them out there as possibilities to see if they might also work with some changes in other cultural contexts.

If people are interested in learning more about the Box Project’s approach, their website is available here: http://www.boxproject.org/index.html

They are also fundraising by selling lithographs from a Maine artist…so maybe some of the visual artists here might be interested in seeing if they could use more donated artwork.

Interesting commentary, taken from a featured letter from a family who sends boxes regularly: The kids’ schools are doing drives for food, clothes, hats, gloves, books, stuffed animals…you name it. The principal told the kids in an assembly that some of the things they donated would be used right here in our community. Later, some of the kids were talking to the first grade teacher and said that they didn’t know any poor people. My son said HE knew some poor people, and told about packing these boxes. He became the class expert, and he expounded on how some people are poor, but others are poorer and can’t even afford enough food or clothes, and that people are not poor because they don’t have money, they are poor because they don’t have opportunities to make enough money. Then he told them that once you have one kind of problem, you automatically get others along with it, like if you don’t have enough money to buy meat and vegetables, you eat a lot of cheap spaghetti and gain weight and get sick and then you can’t work anyway and you can’t afford a doctor and it gets harder to find clothes that fit and other things. He’s six, remember. I thought that was a pretty interesting understanding of poverty!

His teacher told me that the class was totally awed by the concept that it was possible to become poor, that poor people could be victims of circumstance and not just lazy people who didn’t want to get a job at McDonald’s or maybe people who weren’t born into poverty. The idea that you could become poor threw them for a loop, I think. One of the kids asked my son why our match family just couldn’t all go work at McDonald’s and get free food, too. So my son said there weren’t any McDonalds around them. When asked why, he had to think a minute, then he said “because no one can afford to eat there, so McDonald’s just built them where there were people with enough money to eat there.”

I didn’t tell them any of this stuff (well, not in so many words!), so you can just see how much they’re learning.