I got hooked on his WeCanEndThis.com campaign for no other reason than Okie loyalty. Currently, Oklahoma and Vermont are in the lead in this virtual canned food drive to receive truckloads of food for local Feeding America food banks courtesy of Tyson Foods. The drive continues through March 18th, so there’s still time for you other states to catch us if you can. (The top 10 states will each receive a share of enough protein for 1.5 million meals.)
But there’s a bigger goal. They’re not just giving people a fish, they’re trying to reinvent the fishing pole all together.
On Monday, whether you’re in Austin or not, you can participate in one of two sessions that will focus on ideas. Practical and rose-colored; immediate and long term; logical and wildly improbable. Any and all ideas that might just lead to a solution. People are hungry, what can we do about it? They’ll be pondering three central questions.
How do we:
- Design the hunger-free community?
- Humanize hunger using data?
- Accelerate local action?
According to the website, “participants in the room at SXSW will use GoodZuma to create and capture their ideas during the daylong session. At the same time, people nationwide can join the brainstorm to edit these ideas or upload their own. After the brainstorm ends, our charity partners will review all the ideas and use the money raised thru WeCanEndThis.com to implement the best ones.”
Gosh, they’re going to think of stuff and then do something? That’s just crazy talk.
On the other hand, this could be your opportunity to participate in finding a new path to ending hunger in America. No one understands the power and reach of the internet the way SXSW Interactive participants do. No one has harnessed online charitable giving and engagement the way they have. No one wants to solve a problem more than they do. So this is it. This is one of those rare moments in which right place, right people, right opportunity all come together. You can be part of it. You can say you were there when a new way was born to make sure kids don’t go to bed hungry ever again.
C’mon, now. You don’t want to miss THAT.
I was perusing the web this morning, searching for more info on folks collecting comestibles for food drives. Oops. Many of them ended this week. In part, because once the food is gathered, organizations need time to sort, box, and distribute in time for Thanksgiving. But, of course, being the pushy broad that I am, I encourage you to force feed the food banks (via 
