Dayton.com caught up with Ashley Yancey who, along with Jordan Hockett, is responsible bringing a piece of the global organization to Dayton.
Yancey, who now lives in New York, but went to school in Huber Heights and lived some of her adult life in Westside Dayton, was able to speak with us on the phone about how the service organization got started and why Dayton is a great place to get involved with service initiatives.
What is #Hashtag Lunchbag?
AY: It's a grassroots organization designed to help end hunger in the United States one lunch bag at a time.
Where does the name come from?
AY:The Dayton chapter is a branch of the larger organization that was started in Los Angeles and that was just a group of people who got together inside somebody's living room and started making lunch bags and started passing them out to people. If you live in LA or New York, which are very transient cities, a lot of the time people will go back and forth between the two. So, it was brought over to New York and people are always visiting New York, and from there, it just grew. So me, I'm from Dayton, Ohio, but I live in New York now. It was a project that worked really well in New York and there was a guy there, Ricky Smith, @Rickonia on social media, who is a comedian based in Cleveland. We were both attending and we were both talking about our connection to Ohio and he was talking about the really awesome things that he had done for his city. He asked me 'well what have you done for your city? I realized that I hadn't done anything for Dayton so the next trip I had planned to come to Ohio—which was last May 2014—I called some friends—Jordan Hockett who I went to high school with who is really active in the community and really making a presence in his community. I asked him if he could work with me on Hashtag Lunchbag for Dayton. He was on board.
Social media is where people are and it’s how you get people’s attention. You can’t just put up fliers in the traditional way you would have in years past. So, social media is essential in order to inform people on what is going on.
Why should people get involved?
AY: Honestly, because it feels good. Community service is the rent you pay for having a place on this earth. You want to leave it a little bit better than the way you found it. This is a very simple and easy way to make an impact.
How has doing this work impacted your life?
AY: It reminds me to not take things for granted. It has helped me to really appreciate the simple things.
How can people get involved?:
AY: The biggest things is that you wanted follow the social media accounts—you want to be on Instagram, Facebook and you want to get on Twitter. You want to follow those accounts because that it the way we keep everybody updated. This is how you see when the next events are and what we need from you. Sometimes we need more socks, more gloves—in the summer time we might need more hygiene items like soaps and deodorants. We do focus a lot on giving out food and lunches but anything else that's really small and a necessity that we can throw in the sack really helps as well. You find everything that we need on social media—we might say that this month you can bring this or that. Honestly sometimes people don't have the time and they just want to write a check and that's fine too. We have a PayPal account if you just would like to donate funds. Every little bit helps.
Follow the Dayton group at @HashtagLunchbagDayton.
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