Nine months ago my life changed in every way. Cash Mobs was launched and we have never looked back. Over these last few months we have worked to draw awareness to the importance of shopping local and getting involved in the community. It truly has been amazing to hear the responses from so many residents about how they had never thought about shopping local. It was never something they thought about as they went about their day. Now, many of our residents pause to think before they pull in to a coffee drive-thru. shop at large corporate stores or log on to do their purchasing online. Thank you, and our local business owners thank you as well.
Many businesses have shared that customers have walked in saying they heard about them on our Facebook page or that a neighbor encouraged them to shop local and to keep their money right here in town.
From Cash Mobs we ended up creating a local business website so that people could start to learn about our local businesses, owners and products. As we did this we also started talking to our residents, business owners and city officials. What we heard over and over was that until our residents can have their social and cultural needs met they are struggling to stay in the community and support businesses the way that we would like to. Business owners shared that they struggled with how to effectively reach our residents and even tell them that they exist. City officials shared that they struggle with bringing in social and cultural opportunities that our residents are craving. So, we have taken our next step forward, and its a very exciting and a large step if I do say so myself.
We have launched a nonprofit called Pull Together. Our nonprofit’s mission is to develop and assist those dynamic forces in the Maple Valley and surrounding areas that can bring about planned social changes, enhancements of cultural opportunities, and a sustainable economic infrastructure that can support positive growth.
Pull Together is designed to do just that – pull our community together. Our focus is our residents and the role that they play. We understand that in order to have a sustainable economic infrastructure we need to provide the residents what they are asking for: social and cultural opportunities right here. Most of our social and cultural opportunities require volunteers. Volunteers come from our residents. See the pattern? Our residents matter.
We have many things going on in our community but we struggle to communicate what we have. This is where we want to help. We will pull together our community in multiple ways with events, free business marketing and monthly meetings so that we can start talking to each other. We will share where volunteer opportunities exist, we will fund the creation of social and cultural programs that our residents are leaving town to obtain and we will work together. We fully understand that this is a large undertaking and these changes will not happen over night. We will start with items that are quick and easy to fix and/or create. Pull Together will always have five different areas that we are working on. As we check one off the list then we will add another. But, we do not know all the needs. We need your help. We want to hear from you. We want to support your thoughts and ideas.
If you would like to be part of building a stronger foundation in our community we would love to have you and here is where you can get involved. Please attend our battle of the bands and silent auction 6 p.m. Nov. 23 at Tahoma Middle School. All money raised will go directly to create or fund youth programs in our community. Obviously the more money raised the more quickly we can make an impact right here for our children. To purchase tickets for our battle of the bands go to www.rocknmore.org/#!events/c1mya
The other areas we are currently focusing on are homeless assistance, dog park development, drug/alcohol/gang awareness programs and development of volunteer programs.
We thank you again for the amazing support you have given over the last nine months and with out you we would not have seen the need to move forward in the creation of Pull Together. We know that we have an amazing community and that when we can all pull together we will make it even better and stronger for our residents and our businesses.
You can find out more about us and our next steps at www.pull-together.org, email me at megan@pull-together.org or call 253.223.1593.
Megan Sheridan is a Maple Valley resident. She writes occasional columns about interesting people, businesses and issues in the community. She can be reached at 253-223-1593 or megan@pull-together.org.
