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Flowers For Good

Flowers For Good

by | May 31, 2019 | Buzz, June 2019

Perhaps the only thing better than receiving a bouquet of flowers is giving one to someone who might not ever receive flowers otherwise. For The Flower Shuttle volunteers, brightening someone’s day with a beautiful bouquet is a pleasure they get to enjoy each week.

Founded by former Raleigh resident Kathy Reece over a decade ago, The Flower Shuttle, a nonprofit, recycles flowers that would’ve been thrown away after weddings, funerals and other events, and delivers them to sick, poor or disabled residents all over the community.

“For some people, it’s the first bouquet that they’ve ever gotten in their life. That’s pretty touching,” says Katherine McVey, the nonprofit’s current president. “We kind of take it for granted, just because we’re affluent and we can afford them. But for these people, I think it makes them feel really special.”

Reece was inspired to start The Flower Shuttle after reading a story in Oprah Magazine in 2006 about a woman in New York who, after seeing just how many flowers were thrown away after events, started a foundation to recycle those flowers and give them to people who needed some cheer.

Realizing just how much of an impact a single bouquet can make, Reece started a similar program in Raleigh, out of her kitchen, until Raleigh Moravian Church agreed to support The Flower Shuttle as a community outreach project, donating $700 in seed money to start the nonprofit. The church continues to serve as headquarters where volunteers meet and create floral arrangements each week, every Tuesday at 10 a.m., to sort, prep and arrange blooms in bud vases and mugs (also donated) from the donations of flowers picked up the same morning or the day before. Volunteers then deliver colorful bouquets to 21 locations across Raleigh, including the Healing Place of Wake County, Sunnybrook, Triangle Family Services and WakeMed. 

“A lot of people who think they had been forgotten feel remembered now,” McVey, herself a former volunteer, says. McVey says she’s had her fair share of touching moments, and is dedicated to keeping The Flower Shuttle up and running into the future.

“I’ve gained a great deal of satisfaction knowing that I’m doing something to serve the community. People get so excited to see those flowers. It feels good to be a part of that.”

It’s not just the recipients of the bouquets that are appreciative, it’s the donors too, McVey says. She’s received notes from brides grateful that The Flower Shuttle could use their flowers after their weddings, and even some from funeral goers. McVey remembers one in particular where someone wrote, “My mom really loved flowers and she would be happy to know that somebody else got to use them and enjoy them.”

Since its inception, The Flower Shuttle continues to receive donations from people who don’t want to throw away their perfectly good flowers after events. The nonprofit has even had an impact in other cities as well; four flower recycling programs have grown from The Flower Shuttle, including in Nashville and in St. Louis.

In March alone, The Flower Shuttle volunteers created 1,116 arrangements, bringing the grand total of arrangements since the program first launched to 181,846.

Though The Flower Shuttle attracts an average of 70 volunteers per week, its substantial growth and ever-more generous donor base means The Flower Shuttle is looking for more volunteers, especially for coordinating and organizational positions. 

If you’re interested in volunteering with The Flower Shuttle, visit theflowershuttle.com

Breweries With A Heart

Breweries With A Heart

by | Oct 9, 2017 | Eat, October 2017

The North Carolina craft beer scene is vibrant and prolific, and in large part we have the shared, inexhaustible dedication of our breweries to their individual communities to thank for this. Charity events, community meetings and volunteer work create thriving taprooms that double as local gathering places. Within this sphere, two breweries in the works — Dingo Dog Brewery and Burlington Beer Works — stick out like an ESB on a shelf of IPAs.

The first of these service-oriented breweries is set to open a taproom late this fall, on North Greensboro Street in Carrboro, with overwhelming support from its local community. Dingo Dog Brewery will function as an animal rescue nonprofit, raising capital and funding operating costs for no-kill shelters and low-cost spay and neuter clinics, as well as providing education and outreach to meet the individual needs of local communities and organizations.

“At the heart of everything we do is this goal to provide a continued and reliable support mechanism for all of the amazing work being done every day by these organizations,” says Tim Schwarzauer, Dingo Dog Brewery’s founder. “Hopefully, as we grow, so too will the size of our contributions and our impact.”

The choice to devote the first nonprofit brewery to animal rescue was an easy one for Schwarzauer from the start. In fact, the idea of supporting animal rescue agencies developed into plans for a brewery, rather than the other way around.

“Ever since I was a child, my family had rescued animals, catching strays that would hang out around gas stations and restaurants mostly, rehabilitating them and giving them homes or placing them in homes,” Schwarzauer says.

After living through the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which left animals — dogs, cats, even parakeets — homeless, Schwarzauer’s family opened the Animal Rescue Fund of Mississippi. His connections and firsthand experience in the rescue community cemented deep relationships early on and came in handy as he founded his own nonprofit after moving to North Carolina.

“Knowing exactly what they face and having faced it myself probably lent the needed credence to our cause,” Schwarzauer says. “We weren’t just a gimmick, and we weren’t a scam.”

Second to the logistics of the nonprofit came the logistics of the brewery.

At specialty food store Fifth Season’s “Homebrew for Hunger,” a showcase for local hobby brewers, Schwarzauer met Billy Gagon. Gagon is now the head brewer and taste tester for the Dingo Dog brand. His brews have garnered a promising response.

“I think that was the first time I thought that my crazy idea could actually work,” Schwarzauer says of meeting his business partner.

Funding was another hurdle altogether. This spring, Schwarzauer turned to crowdfunding platform “Kickstarter,” to petition the community for $27,000.

“The Kickstarter campaign may have been one of the more nerve-wracking moments of our efforts to date,” Schwarzauer says. “With Kickstarter, it is all or nothing, so those weeks leading up to the end left us pretty anxious. But we not only met our goal — we exceeded it.”

And Dingo Dog Brewery plans to give back in big ways. The brewery promises to incorporate community outreach into each aspect of business, including hosting mini-fundraisers for local charities which will enable them to reach broader audiences and raise money without expending their often limited resources.

“Businesses can be successful by being tuned-in members of the community,” Schwarzauer says. “It is a mutually beneficial arrangement for all parties and a great example of one of our key goals — showing that corporations can be more than the unfeeling conglomerates the word brings to mind.”

If you’re concerned you’ve been tossing your money into too many “unfeeling conglomerates,” look no further than Burlington Beer Works for an honest, mutually beneficial investment. As a co-op and brewery, the business is owned by the community to support the community, and money channeled into the project allows owners to give personal insight to its direction. So far, the arrow is pointed at bringing new energy to downtown Burlington.

“Burlington Beer Works will continue to add to the ongoing revitalization of our downtown that started with the ‘Company Shops Co-op’ that opened five years ago,” founder Eric Henry says. “‘Company Shops Co-op’ was purposely located downtown to start that revitalization, and it was the business model we built Burlington Beer Works on.”

The business model aims to provide jobs, to sell local products and to provide excellent beer to its community. Although the projected opening date falls somewhere next summer, Burlington Beer Works began its launch around three years ago and continues to grow.

“We have over 1,700 owners and raised over $400,000 through preferred stock, as part of the $1.8 million projected cost,” Henry says.

The overall goal is to amass 2,000 community owners, and, while the owners have purchased a building, renovations won’t begin until they reach their community investment goal.

“Wouldn’t you want the opportunity to own part of a local brewery?,” Henry asks. “You’re buying a share of stock, which means you have a vote on the running and the future direction of the brewery.”

Customers can expect both Dingo Dog Brewery and Burlington Beer Works to provide beer and food from ardent connoisseurs of the trade. Dingo Dog Brewery’s taproom space will be dog and family-friendly, and it will maintain its beer production operations at PlowGirl farm — a converted horse farm-turned-brewery — in Orange County. Burlington Beer Works is already planning for a farm-to-fork restaurant on its own taproom’s second floor.

Whether you stop in in Carrboro and sample a “Lil Nubs” — a brew named for the nickname of the brewery’s namesake, Dingo the St. Bernard mix — or become a community owner of a brewery set to revitalize downtown Burlington, your first drink will be a sip to savor, for a good cause. 

Editor’s Note: Dingo Dog brews are available at select locations across the Triangle with a taproom opening later this fall. Burlington Beer Works expects to be open by this time next fall. 

Looking Back on a Decade of Change

Looking Back on a Decade of Change

by | Mar 6, 2017 | Buzz, March 2017

As the director of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance for a decade, David Diaz has been essential to the city’s growth. Now, as he prepares to leave, he offers some parting thoughts.

When David Diaz visited Raleigh a decade ago to interview for the chance to become the third president of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, he came prepared with organizational plans—how to grow the advocacy nonprofit, how to increase its power, and how to enlarge its budget. But he didn’t come prepared with something important—enthusiasm for downtown Raleigh itself.

In fact, at dinner during his first night in town, the job recruiter told him he may want to find at least a skosh of it before his slate of meetings and interrogations with the Downtown Raleigh Alliance’s board the next day.

“He said, ‘Hey, you might want me to sound more excited about downtown Raleigh.’ And that was telling: They wanted me to tell them how great their downtown was,” remembers Diaz. “And I must have, because I got the job.”

And now, after a successful decade in his role as the president and CEO of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, Diaz will take his leave this month. He and his young family are headed back to Virginia, where he worked before taking his post in Raleigh. He will help build a downtown-like culture in Tysons Corner, Virginia, an unincorporated bedroom of Washington, D.C., that’s currently loaded with shopping malls and corporate headquarters. But today, he’s staring out of the tall windows of the downtown coffee shop 42 & Lawrence, on the ground floor of the 23-floor apartment building the SkyHouse. It’s the sort of mixed-use facility that he could only dream about a decade ago. Suddenly, Diaz gets wistful: “I guess I’ll try to bring a little bit of Raleigh to Tysons.”

On that first night ten years ago, Diaz had dinner at Sullivan’s Steakhouse, a franchise that’s long been an anchor in the valley of Glenwood South. In 2007, there simply weren’t a lot of options for a nice meal in downtown proper. Fayetteville Street had just reopened. PNC Plaza was still under construction. And the new Raleigh Convention Center was still more than a year from opening its doors to the kind of traffic that would eventually fill its ranks of restaurants hotels, and bars.

“There was that excitement from the people interviewing me for the job,” he says. “But I didn’t share it, because I didn’t see it.”

What he did find soon enough, though, was a group of government leaders entrepreneurs, and citizens deeply invested in creating something great in downtown Raleigh, in helping to reinvent a city center that had slowly slid into obsolescence. Those are qualities that people in his role customarily attempt to foster; in Raleigh, he was able to step into a setting where people were already passionate about the possibilities. He could help the city itself grow.

Still, in his tenure, he’s accomplished those initial organizational goals: The Downtown Raleigh Alliance’s budget has tripled. It now hosts big banquets and mixers, devoted to celebrating and galvanizing downtown energy.

But Diaz seems proudest of the ways the Downtown Raleigh Alliance has helped shape the city’s still-emerging core, from policy decisions to business recruitment. In 2015, the city approved the Downtown Experience Plan, a landmark collaboration between the DRA and Raleigh itself meant to offer a 10-year vision for what’s to come. And Diaz leaves just as hotels begin to arrive downtown in earnest, the result of an initiative to redefine and remarket the meaning of being in Raleigh’s city center. That’s taken longer than he hoped, but it will prove an integral part of Raleigh’s continued momentum, he says.

As Diaz prepares to head north, his decade in downtown Raleigh has left a lot of lasting impressions—and several imperatives for the city, if it wants to capitalize on and maintain the growth it’s created. First, he says, the plans already in place have to be executed, from the long-delayed revitalization of Moore Square to the much-ballyhooed BikeShare program. These are central tenets of creating a richer downtown that’s capable of catering to a growing number of people and pursuits.

Second, Raleigh must maintain its mix of long-term visionaries and short-term doers, so that urgency and energy are met with the infrastructure to support them. And finally, the city has to balance taking risks with its customarily methodical, stepwise approach to decision-making. That could produce a city that’s stable and innovative, the ideal balance as the city soon considers essential questions about expanding the convention center, maintaining its downtown amphitheater, and, most of all, shaping a world-class park on the campus of Dorothea Dix.

“I’m excited that the mayor particularly wants to have some kind of aerial connection from Dix to downtown. That’s totally feasible, because there are pockets of Dix that are so close,” he says. “I would love to come back here in five years and see that started and see that connection to downtown. I’ll miss seeing that come to fruition.”