We recently connected with Lisa Wallace and have shared our conversation below.
Lisa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
The Brightside Project equips and empowers children to reach their full potential by building resiliency and giving hope. Today’s children are suffering from complex social, emotional and mental health issues. They’re facing insurmountable peer pressure and social media influence, academic hardships, unhealthy relationships and conflict in the home. Now more than ever, we need to focus on our children and ensure they have the brightest and best future possible. We know based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory that we must first meet their physical needs. Through a variety of programs and events, we increase a child’s access to basic necessities such as food and personal care items. We also offer free books and “Reading Buddies” to children to promote and enhance literacy skills as well as support their social-emotional development needs. We also focus on The Search Institute’s Developmental Assets Framework that identifies 40 positive strengths and supports needed in a child’s life to help them grow up caring, healthy and responsible. Our programs and events focus on building external assets of support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations and constructive use of time as well as internal assets such as commitment to learning, positive values, social competence and positive identity. We’re confident that through these efforts, we are building resiliency in a child which is their best tool to overcome any adversity in life.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
The Brightside Project was launched in 2016 by father-daughter team, Scott Lewis and Lisa Wallace. Through previous work in the non-profit sector, they identified a gap relating to children. They noticed that children were hurting and struggling to see a brightside during life’s challenges. With a goal to reach directly to the children, they launched The Brightside Project to equip and empower children to reach their full potential by building resiliency and giving hope. Their current line-up of events and programs are aimed at increasing a child’s access to basic necessities while meeting their social-emotional and mental health needs. The Brightside Project’s line-up of programs and events currently include; The Sunshine Bus, Sunny Sunshine, Food for Kids, Bright Christmas, Bright Easter, Back to School Clothing & Shoe Voucher Program, Backpacks for Kids, Coats for Kids, The Imagination Library and Crisis Relief for Kids.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
If nothing else good has come from social media, our ability to build a successful non-profit organization from the ground up over the past 7 years has been greatly attributed to it. Utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google and YouTube, we have been able to network with others and share our impact through photos, stories and videos to an audience that stretches far beyond our local community. Our advice to anyone starting to build a social media presence is that you have to be consistent, engaging and relevant. There is nothing more disappointing than visiting a business’ social media page to gain a sense of who they are, only to find the page is outdated, stale and boring. Social media is an ever-changing, always moving, fast-paced tool that has the potential to grow your business if you are intentional about it being an up-to-date, engaging and relevant place that represents who you are, what you do and how you do it.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
This has been an extraordinary year for us at The Brightside Project. On February 3rd, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio that resulted in several cars carrying hazardous materials catching fire causing a city wide evacuation. With East Palestine being on of our service areas, we mobilized our Crisis Relief team immediately to help meet the needs of the people. Our every day focus as an organization is working with children and equipping and empowering them to reach their full potential by building resilience and giving hope but this disaster created a need for us to offer relief services to people of all ages. For about 12 weeks after the derailment, we accepted donations of food, water and personal care items to distribute to people in need. This was a total shift in our focus and required endless hours of energy and attention to meet the need. We opened additional hours, added distribution events, utilized off-site warehouses to ensure all the needs of the people were met. With a staff of just 2 people, it was a daunting task to keep up with the outpouring of support from across the country, managing and distributing the donations, meeting additional needs of the people impacted while keeping up with our daily operations and regularly scheduled programming. After meeting the initial relief needs, we shifted our focus back to helping the children through the relief process utilizing school partnerships and our Sunshine Bus.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brightsideprojectohio.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebrightsideproject_ohio/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrightsideProjectOhio/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-brightside-project-inc/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrightsideOhio
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thebrightsideproject6005
Image Credits
Credit: The Brightside Project