Lift Up Your Local Community

Support your community. At the base, this means respecting business fundamentals so that you maintain profitability sufficient to prosper for the long term. You can’t serve your customers and employees if you close your doors.
     Beyond this base, always have in mind ways you can lift up your local community by contributing. For the past couple of years, Panera Bread has been doing this with a group of pay-what-you-can cafés. Panera is not alone. Another model for what are being called “community cafés” is JBJ Soul Kitchen in Red Bank, New Jersey, which opened last October. According to the Detroit Free Press, more than twenty community cafés are operating around America.
     From an organizational psychology perspective, here are keys to making programs like these work for you:

• Set clear objectives. As examples, the Panera Bread objectives might fit your community support projects. The retailer wants to cultivate gratitude in all the customers and from the local community. Panera wants to project a caring business personality, but also an uplifting personality. The objective is not to be a permanent respite, but instead to help people through tough times. Signs in the cafés read, “We are not about a handout. We are about a hand up for those who really need it.” At JBJ Soul Kitchen, the objectives include serving healthy food to people who might not have it easily available and encouraging customers to socialize. As a project of the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, a primary objective is to break the cycle of community poverty.
• Enforce clear policies. At the Panera cafés, patrons are expected to have no more than one free meal a day. At JBJ Soul Kitchen, diners are expected to either donate at least $10.00 per meal or volunteer time to work in the kitchen. Note that the policy to be enforced is for all those present to have the expectation. Nobody is refused a meal for a failure to adhere to the expectation.
• Know when to stop. As a business person, you’ll want to see return on your investment. How will you know when the job has been done? When has the project outlived its usefulness? Set time limits for achieving the clear project objectives or for checking on the degree of achievement. Check all around that the managers assigned to the community project don’t perpetuate the program mostly in order to perpetuate their employment.

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