Off The Beaten Track: Ron Klabunde and The Story Behind Generosity::Feeds

In the spirit of the holiday season and a fresh new year, we feature a guest post from Ron Klabunde, our own personal hero. You'll find out why he's become our hero in just a moment, but to give you some background, Ron, his wife, and three children live in Northern Virginia. They are active outdoor enthusiasts with a passion for life. Apart from their work with Generosity::Feeds and inspiring others in expanding generosity, relationships, and faith, they enjoy rock climbing, skiing, camping, and biking as a family. 

“How do we build sub-economic communities that thrive in the context of a larger economic community that is failing?”

I first began wrestling with this question four years ago with no idea where the answer would lead me and how many people would ultimately be served. It’s like putting together a puzzle without the box cover. Yet, one-by-one, people are being linked across the country in a movement of generosity to help end child hunger in America.

It all began after a meal packaging event where 450 volunteers gathered in Sterling, Virginia, to pack 40,000 meals for children in Haiti. This first event took place in partnership with an international humanitarian relief organization. Following the event, I celebrated the accomplishment with a friend. After applauding our success, he asked, “So what are you going to do to feed children in our community who are going hungry?” This question bugged me. I couldn’t get it off my mind. And I knew the answer would help bring clarity to my much larger question of how to create sub-economic communities that thrive in context of a larger one that is failing.

A year later, we launched our first Generosity::Feeds event, where 600 people from Northern Virginia assembled at a local high school to package 40,000 meals for children in our community. The food was donated to local schools to distribute to children in need. Within weeks, people around the country were contacting us to find out how to bring Generosity::Feeds to their communities.

Recently, we held an event in Bluefield, West Virginia, in which 100 percent of the children are on the free and reduced lunch program. Most of these children live with food insecurity. This means, outside of school hours, they don’t know when they are going to eat or how they are going to get the food. A church in Bluefield envisioned feeding these children, and we partnered with the church to mobilize the community at large to address the issue. When the media got wind of what this small church was doing to serve the community, they provided free advertising. On the day of the event, 10,000 meals were packaged and plans made to run another event. Many of the children and families who helped pack these meals will receive them in the coming months as a healthy solution to their food insecurity.

Generosity::Feeds is now a year old. In this time, a core leadership team has been assembled to facilitate meal packaging events across America. We have also partnered with Jason Strickland and ITL Productions out of Hollywood to bring in celebrity endorsements. In summer 2013, ITL Productions is hosting a Celebrity Generosity::Feeds event in Los Angeles. It will involve a red-carpet photo shoot for the celebrities as they come and work side by side with the community to package 100,000 meals to help feed children in L.A. who live with food insecurity. We are now in the process of identifying local and national sponsors for this growing movement.

When people hear that 10,000 or more meals are packaged in a single hour, they often ask, “how is that possible?” It is actually quite simple.

Prior to an event, we order ingredients in bulk for the meal to be packed. For our Garden Vegetable Soup, for example, we order powdered garlic, powdered chicken broth, dehydrated soup blend, and noodles. Each ingredient is placed in a bin around a funnel. A person stands at each bin with the correct size measuring scoop and pours a leveled scoop of their ingredient through a funnel into a food bag. The bag is then heat sealed and boxed for distribution. Our meals are all-natural and contain no preservatives. This enables us to provide children with a delicious and healthy solution to food insecurity.

This is just the beginning of the story. We understand that charity is only as good as our ability to sustain the recipients’ dignity. In the coming year, by setting up partnerships with established companies and new entrepreneurial businesses, we are working to help families find transitional employment to enter back into sustainable lifestyles.

An incredible picture is forming as people find their place in a growing movement of generosity to help end child hunger and create sustainable futures for families across America. These are just a couple pieces necessary in creating economic communities that thrive through generosity.

I would like to tell you that my wife, children, and I are an ordinary, middle-class family. But apart from a middle-class income, very little is ordinary. Early on in our marriage, we decided to live with margin in our finances, time, relationships, and emotions. This has enabled us to live extraordinary lives. By living below our means, we expand our capacity for generosity. This lifestyle has provided an incredible incubator for developing our family’s relationships, generosity, and faith in God. These core values now overflow into the life of our community and nation. We hope it will have a further ripple effect around the globe.

What do you work for beyond putting food on the table? How can you make 2013 a better place for all of us?

Note: If you would like to bring Generosity::Feeds to your community or have Ron speak to your organization, contact him at Ron@generosityfeeds.org. 

A Virtually Perfect Revolution

There’s a Bollywood megastar who’s famous for removing his shirt on the big screen to show off his well-sculpted torso. Today’s piece is not about him but about someone who shares his name – Salman Khan – and who could soon become a household name in his own right (so we hope) for his incredible, and very different kind of work on the small screen.

This “other” Salman Khan goes by Sal and was born in New Orleans to immigrant parents from Bangladesh and India. Sal grew up to be a brilliant student – not only was he valedictorian  of his high school, but he earned three Ivy League degrees (in mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard). He went on to become a hedge fund analyst in Silicon Valley until a few years ago, when he did a small favor for his cousin that led him to his true calling.

It started in 2004 when this young cousin, back in New Orleans, needed help with her math homework. Sal spent time tutoring her over the phone from California and used Yahoo Doodle notepad to give her a simple online visual of the math problems he was explaining. Soon other cousins wanted to join the discussion and learn from their helpful older cousin, this MIT graduate with a math degree. But teleconferencing up to six cousins per call got complicated, plus they wanted to bring their friends in on the free instruction, so Sal had to get more resourceful. He began recording his tutorials – using the same simple black backgrounds and colorful, chalk-like fonts – and overlaying them with his calm, gentle explanations. He then uploaded them to You Tube and watched as they received, say, six hits per lesson, then 14, and soon 20, and so on.

At a certain point, it became clear his cousins and their friends weren’t the only ones clicking on these links. Sal soon began receiving emails from students of all ages and, get this, from all over the world to thank him for helping them pass their math class or else making one of their least favorite subjects interesting. See where this is going?

Two years ago, Sal walked away from his lucrative hedge fund career to revolutionize education. As he told one reporter, with minimal effort on his part, he can provide free education to empower anyone, anywhere. Today, the Khan Academy channel at You Tube offers 2,300 free, online lessons in mainly math, chemistry, and economics, with plans to expand to history and biology next. These lessons have been viewed more than nine million times.

As a true testament to Sal’s vision, Bill Gates (who supports the academy through his foundation) says he uses the You Tube courses to teach his own kids. In 2010, Google gave the academy $2 million to create more courses and translate its library into 10 of the world’s most spoken languages. The same year, Sal made it on Fortune’s prestigious “40 Under 40” list. The academy is now working on programs to take free education to parts of the world, such as isolated parts of Asia and Africa, where it's least accessible.

In the meantime, the next time your child struggles with his or her homework, you know where to direct them – not only for, say, math guidance but to inspire them with this powerful testament to the difference one individual can make.