“Ever since I was little I loved Oprah….One day I asked my mom what Oprah did and we looked on the internet and the first thing that came up was she’s a philanthropist. That was one of the first words that stuck with me. So each time I would write papers I always had the word somewhere in my room. So every time we wrote essays or career day I would say I want to be a philanthropist. We have papers from the 3rd and 5th grade about wanting to be a philanthropist. On career day I would say I want to be like Oprah. People came dressed up as lawyers, doctor’s with a stethoscope, and I would wear a suit”-Tashieka Truitt
BCG: Where did the name donate love come from?
Tashieka: “It was soooo random. My grandma passed away and she taught for like 38 years and I wanted to do something that would make her proud initially. I was thinking of a scholarship fund but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was watching TV one day and this lady had given her kidney away, and they were talking about how she donated a life to somebody. For some reason I had an epiphany. It was powerful, to donate life to somebody. Let it marinate, donating a life. That stuck with me for a while, and had nothing to do with starting a non profit or anything.
So I was in business school and I was thinking about starting up a business. I wanted to start up a non profit because it was a low start up cost. It was a great way to impact other people. It was socially involved, community giving, and I was pondering upon a name. For some reason I kept thinking Donate Life, that is so big. I knew it was going to be with little kids becasue I worked with little kids since the fifth grade. I have little brothers and I would tutor them and they played baseball so I would help their friends and in college I worked at a YMCA all four years. I thought what can kids give and how can I help them be a greater influence since as a little kid I had so many opportunities. It just dawned on me LOVE! What more do we have? I don’t know if I heard a preaching or something but I kept hearing about love. One day I was sitting on the kitchen counter at my mom’s house and I said ‘” I got it!!!!!”‘ “‘Donate Love”‘ and then I said it ten times and she was just looking at me. She asked me “‘what does that mean?”‘ and I explained to her about the idea of starting a non profit working with kids. I thought what more do they have than giving love? They may not have money to give but everybody does have some love in them.
So I reserved the name the very next day. We went through the whole process and registered the non profit in December. I spent all December planning projects. We had our first project in February project around Valentines day but it was cancelled because the snow was really bad around then. So we had it the next week. We played bingo at an assisted living community and gave away prizes and ever since then we were on a roll”‘
BCG: Where do you find the kids?
“‘I would recruit the teenagers from the YMCA I worked at. I worked in the pre-school but I knew the older kids. I sent out letters to their parents and I would go to their after school programs to speak and give them a form. My mom is a school teacher so I went to her school and had an assembly program and talked to them. I went to a couple of the YMCA’s in Atlanta outside of where I worked at. I went to my high school and talked to some of my cool teachers to see if they would let me come and talk to their class. Whoever I could think of who had something to do with kids. We had one big interest meeting. After that it was word of mouth. The kids would want to bring their little kids from school or let me bring my neighbor. After that we had over 50 kids participating”‘.
BCG: Any difficulties?
“‘After we grew larger in numbers it became a problem to have the kids volunteer because at some places you had to be a certain age to volunteer. If you go to a shelter you have to go to all these screenings or you might have to be over 16, so I had to start creating our own projects or do some deep research on where we could go without restrictive limitations. The goal was one service project a month and we did 13 or 14 projects”‘.
The Gala
Tashieka:”‘ We had a gala in February. We had our first service project in February and a year later we had a gala. It was really cool. We had a motivational speaker and gave the kids awards. The owner was a A&T alumni and he gave me a really good price plus I didn’t have a (real) job at the time because I was in business school. We had a 8×10 program booklet. I sold ads to the community and that’s how I raised over $1,000. I graduated in 2009 so I sent out emails to my graduating class and their donations cover a full page worth $250. My family and friends donated and people in the community bought a whole page to recognize their child. It was way more than I would have ever expected.
Then I got a full time job so we cut it down to doing quarterly projects instead of every month”‘.
BCG: Now that you guys are doing quarterly projects what is the next event your doing?
Tashieka: “The next event we’re participating in is Breast Cancer Awareness coming up. We’re going to do the walk. I haven’t decided where we’re going to go but I want to go to a hospital where people have cancer. Then we’re going to do the holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We did a back to school event with United Way. It was nuts, over 2,000 book bags. We worked with Children’s Restoration Network. What my kids ran all of the booths for them I bought some of the snow cones. It was a community event program. What they do is they get all the different shelters in Atlanta to sign up, and they let you know how many children they have at those shelters and they give the book bags to them. The book bags were donated in part from Kroger’s. I got all of my co workers involved and they donated book bags.
I suggested Good360.com as a source she ought to consult after hearing about them at #BCGThrive Atlanta.
Charlinda Parker, Q’s wife helped me out a lot, a lot. She showed me tricks of the trade and introduced me to people, she introduced me to Ryan Cameron. Ryan would give me tips because he has his own non-profit too, the Ryan Cameron Foundation. I told him about my highway while we were getting our nails done together and four months later he got his highway. Every time he see’s me, he says I owe you everything. I have this highway with my name on it all because of you.”
For our third year we could do a fashion show, what ultimately would be a community involvement for the youth to let them know there’s something out there for them to get involved. To show them you don’t have to be a certain age. You can impact people right now in your age, where you are, in your grade. Of course we could raise money so we could do this on a larger scale not only in Atlanta but to start traveling a little bit. Try to do projects in other states or in other countries if we can. That would be the ultimate goal.
Tashieka Truitt is vigilant in her efforts for her non profit for the sole purpose of progressing and helping kids. There is no doubt in my mind that she will exceed all of her goals as she did in the organizations first year by hosting 13 service projects although she set out to host 12. The 2,000 book bags she donated to homeless children living in shelters in the Atlanta area, not to mention that she stuffed the book bags with calculators and that long back to school list of school supplies that is required of students annually. Donate Love offers services to the elderly, children, communities, while developing our youth at a critical time in their development. Tashieka told me about how Donate Love helped one of her volunteers come out of their shell. Now she says she runs around helping everybody and talking to people, her parents were grateful for how donate love instilled some life in their little girl, kind of like that random donate life show or as I call it divine intervention.
