Breakfast To Help Charities Help Others

The Dream Center of Pickens County and United Way are teaming up for a community awareness breakfast at the end of the month.

The topic of the breakfast is “How Cities, Churches, and Charities Often Hurt Those They Help and How to Reverse it.”

The breakfast will be held 8:30-10am Tuesday, April 30 at the Easley Campus of Tri-County Technical College.

Tickets are $10 and includes breakfast provided by Taste of Distinction and a copy of the book “Toxic Charity” by Robert Lupton.

Chris Wilson with The Dream Center of Pickens County said the breakfast came about after she and others with the Dream Center and United Way attended a SC Association of Non-Profits Conference in Greenville.

Lupton held a workshop at the conference

Wilson said the group came away from the workshop wanting to apply Lupton's principles to their own outreach and charity work.

“We're trying to help people, but we don't want to be doing for them what they can do for themselves,” she said. “It's about empowering them to do it for themselves.”

The breakfast is a chance for the group to share with others what they've learned from the book.

“It's informational,” Wilson said. “We're not saying that others are doing it the wrong way, that's not what it's about at all. We're going to have some resources to help charities and churches that are helping people, some tools that they can use. It's to give people ideas on how to apply these principles to what they're doing already.”

Wilson said the book talks about avoiding creating dependency among the people charities and churches are seeking to help.

She used as an example a program the Dream Center is launching this year.

“We'd been helping families by providing their Christmas gifts,” Wilson said. “This year, we're creating a store and people can donate toys to the store.”

The toys will be priced “between yard sale and wholesale prices,” she said.

“We can let parents pick out their own gifts and provide their own Christmas,” Wilson said. “And if they can't afford the toys, they can work in the store to earn money for Christmas.”

Purchase tickets online here or by calling Chris Wilson at 864-630-6313.