Tag: Diakon

The good we do beyond the good we set out to do

Somewhere along the line I came up with the phrase “the good we do beyond the good we set out to do.”

While that almost makes that “secondary good” seem unintentional, it’s not. “Doing good”—that is, having a positive impact on society beyond direct service to people in need—is a special and significant responsibility of nonprofit organizations, particularly in lieu of certain taxes. Doing good beyond what we set out to do through our service programs and senior living communities is something of which we are very proud.

That positive impact is called community benefit.

We began calculating Diakon’s community benefit for the first time six years ago and are now readying our sixth community benefit report, this time for 2018. Typically, Diakon’s community benefit amounts to approximately $20 million.

Community benefit is quite different from annual reporting. We don’t count people served or provide financial summaries of what we spent during the prior year. Rather, we look at such factors as offering free meeting space to community groups, providing mentoring or other support to students in the health care or social services fields, donations of unused medication to help people in need and support groups we offer the public free.

Community benefit also includes the subsidized service we provide, so that we can help many people with limited financial resources.

Part of me dreads this time of year because, based on national guidelines, calculating community benefit can be, well, math-intensive.

In the case of free meeting space, for example, I have to know the cost-per-square-foot-for-maintenance of a Diakon facility, the size of the room in which an outside group held its free meetings and how many hours the group was there during the year!

You get the picture. It’s calculator time.

But another part of me truly enjoys the effort, calculations and all, because doing so underscores the amazing impact we have on society—the good we do beyond the good we set out to do!

You can view our 2018 Community Benefit Report by clicking here.

 By William Swanger, MA, APR
Senior Vice President
Corporate Communications & Public Relations

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Milestones for the mission

Last year, I celebrated my 10-year work anniversary at Diakon. As the social media and digital communications manager, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much my job has evolved over the years. When I started here, Facebook was just gaining momentum, my phone wasn’t “smart” and faxing was still common!

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is my enthusiasm to work for an organization that serves so many people. What’s even more important and humbling is the fact those sentiments are shared by staff throughout Diakon. We recently implemented a new way of recognizing staff anniversaries, asking staff members to discuss their experiences being one of Diakon’s Many Hands, guided by One Heart of compassion and care:

“Simply put, Diakon’s mission is to serve. One thing I find neat about Diakon is that we serve two different populations. We serve children through [such programs as] adoption and foster care and then also serve older adults. Additionally, I have great admiration for all the charity care Diakon gives, and the fact no one has to leave what is their home due to [financial challenges]. These two aspects make Diakon stand out from other facilities and make me, as an employee, glad to say I am a part of helping Diakon fulfill its mission. Reminding myself of these exceptional services … and that I am a part of fulfilling this mission to serve … has helped me push through any tough times during my 10 years with Diakon. It also helps me to continue to give back the highest quality of work I am able to perform to ensure this mission continues to be fulfilled.” – Amanda Reinhard, Luther Crest, 10-year anniversary

“I wear many hats here at the Diakon Ministry Support office, but my favorite is overseeing the benevolent care program. I enjoy working with residents and families when the resident no longer has the funds to pay privately for care. It’s a great feeling to be able to tell the resident or family that they do not have to leave their facility just because they can no longer afford to stay. As long as they meet all of the criteria for the program, they can remain where they are …. In addition, everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. By everyone, I mean our residents, family members and co-workers that we see every day and those that we interact with only occasionally. I do everything I can to treat others as I would like to be treated.” – Vonnie Hinds, Ministry Support, 5-year anniversary

“A favorite aspect of my role is developing relationships with children and families. I feel honored to help those in need and I’m proud of the work that I do.” – Kelly Smith, Diakon Adoption & Foster Care, 15-year anniversary

As you can see, Diakon’s mission truly does inspire the work we do each day. And that is one more reason, as you’ll note, our anniversaries are not just of one or two years but very often of 10, 15 or 20 years … or even more.

By Melissa Kindall
Manager, Social Media and Digital Communications Manager
Corporate Communications & Public Relations

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During two anniversaries, a different type of looking back

Three for the price of one. That is, three beginnings to this single blog post.

Here’s the first:
The fire scanner squawked across the newsroom. I was on city desk that night and, knowing the lack of fondness my reporter-comrade had for covering fires, I decided to head out. Pretty significant house fire so I never got back to write the story until about 2 a.m.

The next morning I had to make a more-than-one-hour drive to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, for a 9 a.m. interview for a public relations position with Tressler-Lutheran Service Associates. I was barely awake throughout the interview.

Somehow, I was offered the position and, after having spent nearly two weeks driving family and friends crazy with my indecision, I accepted it.

Forty years ago.

Here’s the second:
“Bill,” said the ED at one of Diakon’s senior living communities, “forty years—you should write about that, especially this year, as we celebrate our 150th anniversary.”

“Nah,” I said in return.

But here I go.

And the third and final start:
“You are going to have to be like Yoda,” the Rev. Mark Wimmer, Diakon’s vice president for church relations and ministry partnerships, said to me.

What, I wondered? Small and green?

“Whenever anyone wonders about our history,” he continued, “you will just have to pop out of thin air and tell us about it.”

Okay. I’m game for that. Do I get force?

* * *

Mission possible

My alarm went off at 5 a.m. and I hit snooze. It was still dark outside and I wondered how on earth I would get these teenage girls up and out the door by 5:45 a.m. I flipped on the light after warning them with a 3-2-1 count and then I ran to get in line for the bathroom we shared with about 20 other females in the area to which we’d been assigned in a church.

Thankfully, I had to remind them only once to get up. They knew they had to get to breakfast in time to eat and pack their lunches before heading out to our job sites. The earlier we left, the sooner we could finish before temperatures became unbearable.

This was our morning routine during a youth mission trip to McColl, South Carolina, where about 20 adults and 60 teenagers volunteered to repair broken homes and, while doing so, also fix some broken hearts.

This trip, taken in late June, was my first mission trip with my two younger daughters, who are 16 and 14. I had received approval to use Diakon’s Love of Thy Neighbor fund to assist with the trip; the fund provided extra paid vacation days, as well as some grant money to use toward travel expenses.

After reading stories from co-workers who did mission work and learning how much they helped others beyond what we do during our typical work days, I wanted to do the same thing.

I am not what you would call a “skilled worker” when it comes to any kind of home repair. I thought maybe I could stay behind to prepare meals or oversee teens doing some painting.

Nope.

I was assigned to put a metal roof on a double-wide trailer for an older woman named Mary. My team did not actually include my daughters, but consisted of a jewelry-store owner, a biochemist and several other teenagers. I didn’t know any of them before that week and none of us had ever done roofing.

We basically learned about roofing and one another as the week went on. And to make the situation even more challenging, Mary had a plumbing problem so her water had been shut off. We borrowed water from a neighbor’s hose as we needed it.

As the week progressed and temperatures rose, we became roofers. We shared lunches, tools, stories and sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen. We joked that we would start our own roofing company when we got back to Pennsylvania called Close Enough Roofing because as the day wore on, the measuring tape became a little more subjective.

We never got to meet our homeowner because even though we arrived between 6 and 6:30 each morning, she was already at work. She left her back door unlocked for us to go inside—where she had her window air conditioning units turned on full power for us. It felt like heaven when we stepped inside to take a break.

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On our last day we had to request help from another group that had finished a different roofing project close by. Our roof was 80% covered in metal at that point and the heat index had risen to 104 by the afternoon. Moreover, we had reached a point on the roof where the final section required more-extensive repair than simply screwing on metal panels to the fascia boards we had installed. We needed someone with a little more roofing experience.

About 2 p.m., the other group showed up—and its leader happened also to be a professional roofer. It was like seeing the cavalry ride in! The group dropped off additional volunteers to stay with us and because leaders knew we had already put in a full day on a hot metal roof, they yelled up to our group, asking who wanted to leave.

Nobody left. The mission was too important.

We had become too invested in our team and that roof to abandon each other for the showers, dinner and air mattresses awaiting us at the air-conditioned church. We would work until dark if we needed to but we weren’t leaving until the roof was finished. Thankfully, about 10 hours after we had arrived, we pulled out of Mary’s driveway, having completed the project in time to be back for dinner.

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We never did get to meet Mary, but I did get to meet her sister during our last night there. She was a member of the church that hosted us and she had added Mary’s name to the list of those in need of some much-needed home repair.

She hugged me and cried, telling me we were an answer to her prayers. I thought to myself, God is quite creative. He picked me, a jewelry-store owner, a biochemist and some compassionate teenagers from Pennsylvania to answer the prayers of a dear older woman in South Carolina. And because of that strange, but perfectly orchestrated encounter, my life has been changed, too!

Many of the people our group helped that week could not understand why we would take a week to travel 10 hours to help their community. I couldn’t help but wonder why wouldn’t we do it?

We certainly gained as much as we gave that week: Fresh perspectives, friendships and a better understanding of God’s faithfulness.

I can’t wait to return next year.

By Melissa Kindall
Social Media and Special Communications Project Manager
Corporate Communications & Public Relations

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‘Snow’ many opportunities to help others

My 14-year-old daughter randomly shared this thought with me while we were driving last night….

Mom, isn’t it amazing how one tiny snowflake that falls from the sky joins with all the others and creates these huge piles of snow? It’s just amazing.

I agreed with her and then jokingly said, “I’ll bet there’s a life lesson in there somewhere, but I’m too tired of all this snow to think what it might be.”

Later that evening, the lesson dawned on me. Throughout the last few days I’ve heard stories of people joining forces to help others during and after the massive snowstorm that hit our region. Many of those people are my coworkers. Alone they could do only so much, but like those snowflakes, they combined their efforts and the results multiplied into something amazing. Just a few examples: