I have a request and a challenge for our blackberry enabled, tiny living room we call the ediscovery community.

We have the fastest grapevine in the world.  Will you help me use our grapevine to feed our hungry neighbors and collectively achieve a huge goal?

Sometimes in the electronic discovery world, we get so stressed out by how much we have to do that we forget about people who have no work, or very poorly paid work.

I have been honored to work with a group of leaders to give back.  The BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) we chose back two months ago when we started with our group of 17, was to reduce hunger for 500K people, locally, nationally and globally by July 31. July 31 of this year.  Our formal group has expanded to 42 ([1] you’re invited) and the countdown is here.  We wanted to do it without raising funds.

We are, at this writing $7,000 from our goal. Yes, we are raising funds.  But just for about 36 hours.  Donate [2] here.

We can quantify meals for over 100,000 people.  We generated a lot of publicity and outreach (one student leader generated hundreds of emails to organizations on the ground) for the Summer Food program.  There is an abysmal 20% participation rate in this no paperwork, federal fully funded, locally administered lunch program. Children hungry for no reason except their school lunch location changed.

We worked with the Food Bank.  We encouraged buying [3] Whole Food Feed Bags as gifts, like the ones I gave [4] Monica Bay, and co-chairs [5] Tamara Bigford (Goldberg Segalla) and [6] Susan Ippoliti (Function 5 Forensics) at the [7] National Federation of Paralegal Association’s Technical Conference last week.  (Monica’s convention coverage, [8] here.  Thanks for the kind words, Monica.)

A local restaurant, [9] Burgerville, created a special product and donated 20% of the gross for delicious strawberry shortcake.

Some of the things we did have longer term impact or were too speculative to quantify.

So last week, we took a deep breath and scoured for the right organization to leverage dollars for the final 400,000.

Second Harvest moves 20 lbs of food for every dollar donated.  At a half pound per meal*, that is 2.5 cents per meal.  They supply the food banks and hunger programs like your own local food bank, or the banks in New Orleans and Iowa.  (In contrast, Feed Bags are .30 per meal)  That’s the leverage we need for this project, and leverage when the economic news feeds a feeling of hopelessness.

If you’d like to be part of this audacious collective community achievement, [2] donate to Second Harvest via this link before Thursday. (Donate early and often, and to be counted here, donate Wednesday!)

If you’d like to be part of the team and see our trial and error, complete with national hunger resources, join our [1] ning group.

If you just want to do your own thing tomorrow to reduce hunger and contribute without being part of the team, report whatever you’d like in [10] here.

If you are so inclined, pass this on as your contribution to the ediscovery grapevine.  Many thanks.

*the USDA estimates 1.28 pounds per meal and that sounded high–half pound sounded right to us, but you are welcome to help us stretch to reach the USDA metric.