You Showed Up for Lebanon!
From podcast launches to Lebanese cooking shows, you jumped in with your whole hearts for our brothers and sisters in Lebanon! Here are some crazy creative ways our friends helped make this rapid response possible…
Chef Joel’s Lebanese Lunch Livestream
From podcast launches to Lebanese cooking shows, you jumped in with your whole hearts for our brothers and sisters in Lebanon! Here are some crazy creative ways our donors decided to make this rapid response possible.
For a nation known worldwide as the food capital of the Middle East, empty tables are heartbreaking. Today, the UN estimates over half the population of Lebanon lives in fear they will not have enough to eat. In August, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history ripped through the city of Beirut, taking more than 200 lives, injuring over 6,500, and leaving 1 in 10 homeless. The crisis threw a country already grappling with food insecurity into a full blown fight to feed her people and the 2 million refugees living within her boarders.
One Million Thumbprints, together with Chef Joel, and our long-term Lebanese program partner, Together for the Family, are coordinating a targeted, on the ground, deep-in-the-community, crisis response in Beirut.
But there are still many empty tables to fill. Chef Joel and his talented team to double the number of families we can serve. For less than $300, you can fill an entire family's table with staples--bread, cheese or milk, sugar, pasta, rice, flour, beans, and wheat--for a month, and also provide COVID-19 PPE and basic health supplies for the whole family.Let's work together to fill tables!
Want more? Catch the LIVESTREAM here and learn a little Lebanese cooking at the same time! Chef Joel’s team is still raising funds for our feeding program in Lebanon—so eat a little hummus, drink a little wine and donate to fill the table of someone worried about feeding their children in Lebanon today!
Amber’s Birthday Wish
This is Amber. She DM’d our Instagram a few days before her birthday and told us the one thing she wanted for her birthday was “to do something that felt good in my bones.” “If I have any seat at the table, I want to spend my 40’s making sure others have a seat there too...”
Amber is a Brave Soul. The one who is quietly looking around and asking out loud who isn’t at this table, and how to help get them there. We were so proud to help her celebrate her day by giving it away!
The money her friends and family gave to celebrate her went o help moms and kiddos who live at ground zero with food baskets, health items and PPE to keep them safe as—because disasters don’t care if there is a pandemic happening, right? Amber invited those she kick off her next decade the best way possible— with LOVE, PEACE and FULL BELLIES!
Laurie Launched the HeroMaker’s Movement by Loving Lebanon
Laurie had worked in communications, publishing, and storytelling in academia for over 15 years when she began to dream about sparking a real conversation around everyday heroes. Being who Laurie is, she began talking, writing, praying, and looking for the right opportunity to bring good people into the conversation with people who are inspiring others by what they say, do, or by who they are to be and do better.
“I think for too long many of us have had a narrative that tells us that our lives don’t matter as much as others,” Laurie said as she opened her first ever FACEBOOK LIVE event for HeroMakers. “Our world tends to tell us that our influence and worth is measured by the position we hold or the money we have or the achievements we’ve accomplished. But I think all of us are longing for a different narrative and this is the one that tells us that whether we have 50,000 followers online or 1 real friend in real life, all of us can change the world.”
As a key supporter of 1MT, Laurie saw the work of Izdihar and Trivina, leaders of our 1MT partner Together For the Family, as the very inspiring heroes she wanted to highlight!
“Last week my friend Belinda Bauman called me and said, as she sometimes does… ‘Hey Laurie, I think God is up to something …’ She told me a bit of what we will hear today from her and this incredible woman named Trivina Kassis. All of us knew that this was an opportunity to tell you a story of a land far, far away for many of us. Really it’s the story of heroes, and of you guys being given a chance to be a hero for the people of Lebanon too…”
Laurie and her team at HeroMakers Movement raised thousands of dollars to help fund our rapid response that day! You can check out HeroMakers and catch this truly incredible interview with Together For the Families Director of Operations Trivina Kassis here.
Let’s Keep Going
One Million Thumbprints is not going anywhere. We will stay faithful partners to Izdihar and Trivina, and the good women of Together for the Family, working to keep the good going through the crippling food insecurity, health care needs and residual trauma care needed in this resilient community. We welcome and celebrate the crazy risk, creativity and hope you bring to crisis or catastrophe.