The Thinker's Party Blog

With the holidays approaching it’s a time when people are hypersensitive to their communities.  Charitable donations increase, and food drives become ubiquitus in many places.  Particulalry in a year like this one when the number of jobless and homeless people is on the rise and food pantrys are hard hit, it’s important to preserve and reinforce this tradition.

Despite that, hunger doesn’t exist exclusively during the holidays, and the demand on food pantries is likely to increase as the recession continues.  So, now that food drives are on your mind and you’re likely to have some time off work in the near future, begin planning a food drive for March.  Contact your employer to get their support.  Visit your local food pantry and find out what they need.  Though it’s hard to collect in a food drive, fresh produce is often particularly valued at food pantries.  Come up wtih a way that will allow people to donate fresh produce and your drive will be particularly helpful.

To help you with your food drive planning, take a look at some of the following links:

St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance’s food drive tips

Feeding America (fka Second Harvest)’s Hunger Action Center

United Way tip sheet

Today marks the passing of a month since the official founding of the Thinker’s Party.  We’ve been busy in that month, and we have a lot more planned for the upcoming month.  Let’s take a look at what we’ve accomplished and we we’re working on.

In November

• Created the Thinker’s Party blog.  This was the first announcement to the world of our intent and purpose, and contains lots of good information about who we are and what we do.
• We created the Thinker’s Party Facebook page, putting us out making us findable on one of the most popular social networking sites on the internet.
• The creation of the official Thinker’s Party website.  Complete with forums, this solidifies our web presence.  We own thinkersparty.org now, so we’ll always have a reliable home on the internet.  (Or at least until we don’t renew our domain registration)
• Began commissioning artwork for the website.  Scouring the internet for images available to decorate our web page is great, but half of being taken seriously is looking serious.  Improvements to the visual appearance of our page will do that for us.

Planned for December

• Continue to improve thinkersparty.org
• Formally organize the Thinker’s Party board and draft position descriptions.
• Begin the process of registering as a non-profit organization.
• Reach out to community organizers and people already working on projects similar to the ones the Thinker’s Party wants to sponsor.

Planned for January

• The first official Thinker’s Party salon (more details on this event coming soon).
• Register thinkersparty.org and thinkersparty.net and set up redirects to thinkersparty.org
• Finalize look of thinkersparty.org
• Begin advertising to groups potentially interested in participating in Thinker’s Party projects.

Longterm Plans

• Fundraising to enable us to support projects financially.
• Networking with other community-based organizations.
• Collecting materials and guidelines for developing community solutions to social problems and developing a means of effectively distributing those materials.
• Developing a group of “Thinker’s Party members” who are responsible for the development of the Thinker’s Party in their region.