When Brian Bailey and Dexter Fabian decided to bid on Item #03 in the CL Online Holiday Auction — "Buy the news: You decide the story, you pick the CL staffer to write it" — they figured the story they'd commission would be about, well, themselves. Or rather, about their popular website ILoveTheBurg.com and its companion Facebook page, Downtown St. Pete. A daily compendium of what's happening around town, the page is so lively and well-maintained that it has attracted more than 14,000 fans. It's partly a labor of love — these guys do in fact love the Burg — but it's also meant to showcase the social networking expertise they offer clients of their PR/marketing/graphic design firm, Rearden Killion Communications.
"It's no small feat that we created this following," says Bailey, who was a senior vice president at the Manhattan advertising firm Rubenstein Associates before moving to the Burg in 2003. "Everybody does it wrong on Facebook. People go out there with a strictly promotional attitude — they don't elicit the response. We just look for what people will be interested in hearing."
[Full disclosure: Bailey and Fabian are neighbors of mine and have worked on projects with my partner, Larry Biddle. But I had no idea they were taking part in CL's auction till I heard from our online producer that they'd placed a winning bid.]
A few hours before the team won the auction, one of their Facebook fans, Michelle Greene Hurd, dropped them an e-mail: She'd just been laid off, she told them, and did they know of any jobs?
That's when they decided they could use their CL page for a greater good.
"We just felt, how can we do something better with it?" says Bailey. "The fact that it happened a few days before Christmas also hit us hard."
So they ran a "Christmas in January" feature on the Facebook page a few weeks ago, asking members (Bailey prefers that term to "fans") to "send your ideas for St. Pete people, families, causes or charities you feel could be helped from a little publicity."
The message drew a range of respondents, from job-seekers (including a laid-off CL staffer) to non-profits to small businesses looking for a leg up. Some of these were not St. Pete-based, so they didn't meet the criteria, but all of the messages were direct pleas for help.
The following profiles represent a small sampling of the people who replied, and include the e-mail and Facebook messages that placed them in nomination. To see the entire list, read the online version of this story on ILoveTheBurg.com's Downtown St. Pete Facebook page.
Happy Workers Children's Center
Nominated by Anne Elizabeth Smith: "Happy Workers Children's Center in St Pete is a non profit day care srving St Pete for 80 years any help is always welcome!"
Located in the Midtown section of St. Petersburg, the Happy Workers Children's Center provides early education to children from low-income families, with tuition charged on a sliding scale. The curriculum (for ages 2 months to 5 years) is adapted from the Reggio Emilia Approach, a philosophy developed in Italy after WWII that encourages children to act as "co-conductors" of their own learning process, according to administrative director Jennie Henry.
Children learned about winter recently by building a snow-covered tree out of paper towel rolls and cotton balls. Then, as part of the center's family involvement program, parents were invited to come to the Center's art room, drink hot chocolate with their kids and read with them from a book called The Snow Day.
There are currently 115 children enrolled in the Center. Graduates do noticeably better when they get to elementary school than students who haven't had the same preparation, says Henry. Staffers are credentialed child-care professionals.
What's needed:
1) Funding for teachers' resource books.
2) Volunteers to help in classrooms and office — and the playground, where mulch and sand will soon need to be relaid. The Center is located at 920 19th St. S., St. Petersburg, FL 33712. Call 727-894-5337 or visit happyworkers.org.
CASA (Community Action Stops Abuse)
Nominated by Tif Blue: "CASA wants you to give of your time…and it's not easy right now to find a job…trust me i know!!!"
Founded in 1977 as the Free Clinic Spouse Abuse Center, CASA has grown, says Executive Director Linda Osmundson, "from a small shelter to what I like to call a full-service domestic violence center." With the shelter filled almost beyond its capacity (400-500), and with services such as transitional housing and legal advocacy reaching 10,000-15,000 individuals annually, CASA is a vital resource for battered women and children in Pinellas County.
But a $120,000 cut from the county has jeopardized one of CASA's most important features, its Visitation Center, a supervised facility for meetings between children and non-residential parents estranged due to separation or divorce — "a really important place," says Osmundson, "to create safety for the kids and the parents."
The loss of $120,000, which "essentially funded" the visitation center, meant its hours had to be cut back. And a message from Osmundson on CASA's website wonders what will happen if it's forced to shut down altogether. "Mentally, I calculate how many lives will be lost if the Visitation Center closes and battered women are required to negotiate with abusers about where they can visit the children. How many women or children will flee in terror to avoid unsupervised visits with a parent who has been violent? How much more time and expense will be incurred by police and courts?"
What's needed:
1) Funding. Send checks large or small to CASA, P.O. Box 414, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or contact the development department at 727-895-4912 ext. 114 or tdyer@casa-stpete.org.
2) Clothing donations. The CASA Collection Thrift Store, 1011 First Ave. N., offers CASA clients free choice from the collection and CASA sells the rest, with 100 percent of proceeds benefiting its programs.
Tiffany Blue
"…i know it's terrible to think of yourself at times like this…but after 2+ years…i guess it's time to ask for help… so i'm asking now…any help would be greatly appreciated…"
In addition to sending some love to CASA when she responded to the "Christmas in January" query, Tiffany Blue ("no, it's not a stage name") also sent an e-mail asking for a little help for herself.
"I saw the blurb on Facebook, and he was talking about someone who'd just gotten laid off— I understand what she's going through."
Laid off after 15 years in executive assistant positions with mortgage and insurance firms, she's been working part-time with a friend's business but can't find employment in the field she's most qualified for. She's also had 10 years' experience as a bartender, but that's not an easy job to find these days, either.
Blue is not sitting home on the couch all day playing with her two cats, though — far from it. She takes spin classes at the Y — sometimes six a week — and she's hoping to get certified as a spin instructor next month.
Spinning helps release "all the stress in trying to find a job," but the search is taking its toll. "I went thru my unemployment," she says. "It's really bad at 42 to have to call your mom and say 'I need help.'
What she needs: An administrative or executive assistant position.
Why you should hire her: "I'm very outgoing, very team-oriented or can work by myself. And I think outside the box — I will try to always look for things to learn and a better way to do it." Call 727-482-4363 or e-mail tif_blue@me.com.
Globe Coffee Lounge Clothing Drive
JoEllen Schilke: "We're doing a drive for the shelter for clothing, makeup, shoes, etc."
For the fifth year in a row, the Globe Coffee Lounge in downtown St. Pete is holding a clothing drive for "homeless or near-homeless families." Globe owner Schilke clears out a back area of her popular restaurant so that patrons can drop off clothes. She makes sure the items are "presentable," then packs them up each week in boxes and hauls them to their destination. This year, the YWCA family shelter gets the women's and children's garments and the DayStar Life Center will receive the men's clothes.
"We hope people will just give us clean, decent stuff," says Schilke, "and maybe a few business-type clothes that people can wear job-hunting."
How much clothing will she bring in? Hard to predict, but last year, when Schilke held a linens drive for a mental health center, she filled her Jeep Cherokee four times.
What's needed: Clothing and unused personal grooming items for women, men, children. Drop them off at The Globe Coffee Lounge, 532 First Ave. N. St. Petersburg during regular hours: Mon.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-1 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.-2 a.m.; Sat., 4 p.m.-2 p.m. Call for more info at 727-898-JAVA, or visit globecoffeelounge.com.
Michelle Greene Hurd
"That was me that called Dex and said, 'Do you guys know of any jobs? Because I don't have mine anymore.'"
Michelle Greene Hurd met the I Love the Burg! duo at a downtown St. Pete pub crawl they organized in December. (Bailey recognized her from her Facebook photo: "I know you!" he said. "You're Michelle Greene Hurd!") She was a fan of their page and a frequent commenter, so when she got the news that she'd been laid off from her human resources position with a federal contractor, she sent them a note: "You guys have such a fun job. Do you have any openings?"
They told her it was the just the two of them, but they'd keep their eyes out for opportunities.
Meanwhile, Hurd, 33 and married (her husband works for a fire alarm security company), decided to start writing about her changed status in a blog, Diary of the Unemployed Housewife. Though she's a self-described optimist ("a half full kinda gal"), her blog is candid and funny about the frustrations of job-seeking and the dangers of getting stuck in a domestic rut: "Pray that I am not tempted to watch any more TLC," she asks her readers, "because I am starting to believe I may be pregnant from watching so many episodes of 'Birth Day.'"
Coincidentally enough, the blog itself has turned out to be an opportunity. I started reading it in connection with this story, and liked it so much I asked her if she'd like to share it with Creative Loafing readers via The Daily Loaf. She said yes, and now she's one of our contributors.
What she needs: A job.
Why you should hire her: "I'm a highly energetic motivated individual who loves people and loves working with people in all types of environments — not just HR." You can find her reflections on unemployed housewifery and other matters at dailyloafblog.com as well as at her own site, diaryoftheunemployedhousewife.blogspot.com).
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2010.