Reject Sameness!

There is an article in today's Toledo Blade [Sunday April 5] with the headline; 'Charity cuts ties to food distributor'. If you read the article you know the charity is Cherry Street Mission Ministries and the food distributor is the Toledo Northwest Ohio Food Bank [TNWFB].

The headline should have read; Food distributor cuts ties with Charity.

Cherry Street has had a very long relationship with the TNWFB - well relationship may be putting too fine a point on it; they sell food and we buy food. However, in the past two years the leadership of the food bank has engaged in direct mail marketing that is misleading to what the food bank actually does - sell food.

The direct mail campaigns they've conducted suggest that if you send them a certain amount of money, they will be able to provide families who are hungry, a certain amount of meals. This is a lot like a grocery store suggesting they serve meals.

Do they? Does a grocery store serve meals to families? NO!

Grocery stores do however provide the community a place to shop for food. The community then goes to their places of residence and makes meals from the food the grocery store sold them.

After numerous attempts to reach the leadership of TNWFB to discuss my concerns, and having received no return contact I instructed our Food Service to cease providing the numbers of meals we were serving.

On March 24th our Food Service department was told by TNWFB that we would no longer be able to purchase food from them until they received our meal counts. That being the proverbial straw, we officially severed ties to the food bank.

Even though there may be trouble for taking a stand, what trouble may come is dwarfed by the slow and steady erosion of hope summed up in; 'same old, same old. If we are to be a challenge to this darkness, then we will need to possess the virtue of indifference toward those who promote sameness in our community.

It's time to reject sameness!

Allow me to suggest, that if the world around you seems to be the same, day after day - you may be a candidate to take a stand for something. Rather than wait for the world to change, you change the world. Each of us have within us the ability to be nation and generation changers.

In a world where integrity is at a premium, right will often be at a premium as well.

Dan