Episode 148: What Does It Look Like When Non-Profits Truly Work Together?
About the Podcast
As CEO of Bluffton Self Help, Courtney Hampson leads the organization’s mission-focused efforts to empower and advocate for their South Carolina Lowcountry neighbors through education, training, and basic needs support, working to close the gap from surviving to thriving. Her approach is what dreams are made of!
About Courtney Hampson
As CEO of Bluffton Self Help, Courtney Hampson leads the organization’s mission-focused efforts to empower and advocate for South Carolina Lowcountry neighbors through education, training, and basic needs support, working to close the gap from surviving to thriving. A decorated marketing and operations professional, Courtney has more than two decades of experience in strategic communications, branding, community building, public relations, programming, and business development in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. In her free time, Courtney is also a freelance writer and a communications instructor at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. She lives in Bluffton, SC with her firefighter husband and chocolate lab.
Discussion Takeaways
- Bluffton Self Help is a 37-year-old non-profit providing basic needs assistance, including food, clothing and financial help, to ensure their South Carolina Low Country neighbors are warm, safe and dry.
- Bluffton Self Help began to notice that many neighbors were receiving basic needs services on an ongoing basis and began asking themselves and the community, how is this cycle broken? They began to make the connection between lack of education and the inability to make a living wage as contributing factors to neighbors needing ongoing basis need support. They began to shift their focus toward resource coordination and education in an effort to launch neighbors toward self-sufficiency.
- A few years before COVID, Bluffton Self Help completed a Community Needs Assessment—in conjunction with other local non-profits. Unanimously the needs assessments revealed their community was in crisis.
- 60% of households in Bluffton Self Help’s community were not earning a livable wage.
- 36% of homes in the community were suboptimal
- After absorbing the results of the Community Needs Assessment, Bluffton Self Help realized the community needed to provide services differently. Despite there being over 100 non-profits in their area, the needs of the community were still so great. Bluffton Self Help made the decision to lead the charge in providing holistic care to their neighbors and working synergistically with other non-profits to better coordinate care.
- In order to provide holistic care, Bluffton Self Help began creating a network of other organizations that were caring for the other pieces of the puzzle that Bluffton Self Help was not. They were already providing food, clothing, basic needs and education, but they began to consider other factors that were creating barriers for their neighbors, like transportation, childcare, physical health, mental health, jobs providing livable wages and housing, etc.
- Education is a key pillar of their work, having almost 400 adult learners taking classes such as ESL, GED and Citizenship classes.
- When neighbors start their journey with Bluffton Self Help, they begin in the “living room,” where individuals meet with a Client Advocate (a social worker or highly trained volunteer) and are then partnered with this Client Advocate who can connect the individual with helpful services, get to know them and champion them, checking in and following up in personal ways.
- By reimaging and reconfiguring their programs to be more personal, the success rates of their programs have exponentially increased.
- Asking “what do you need” and “what are we missing” to the people you are working with is a vital question to ask.
- In recent years, Bluffton Self Help initiated the “Red Apron Alliance,” to improve resource coordination and client advocacy in their community. The alliance brings together non-profit partners, employment partners and corporate partners who agree that their community is in crisis and agree the community needs to do better to support their neighbors. The goal is to work together to make a tangible impact within 10 years. Non-profits are signing MOUs to work together and coordinate resources, while employment and corporate partners are making commitments to pay livable wages and provide benefits, among other agreements and shared visions.
#1 tip to improve access to healthy food
Only when there is collaboration, instead of competition, will tangible and lasting improvements be made to our communities.
Each week on the Food Dignity® Podcast, the Food Dignity® Movement's Clancy Harrison hosts a wide variety of hunger experts and other people making changes on the frontlines. Join us as we dive deep into conversations that will change the way you think about food insecurity.
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