Many of you know that I'm heavily involved with an organization here in Columbus called the Westside Freestore. Great things happen there.

This short clip is an example of the Freestore in action on Morgan Spurlock's show "30 Days." Spurlock and his girlfriend spend "30 Days" trying to make ends meet on minimum wage in Columbus, Ohio. They start running into real trouble when Spurlock is injured on the job and can't work. Fortunately they find relief at the Freestore. Check it out.

Check out this very clever and cool commercial created for the Aukland City Mission (New Zealand), whose program every December strives to "Make Christmas happen for every Aukland child." The video features an Auckland homeless child imagining what Christmas morning might be like...with the help of some chalk.

Click here to watch the commercial

This year ACM donations are down by 70%, making this effort more difficult than ever. Not only is the commercial cool, the mission and vision of the ACM is fantastic:

In their own words,

"The Auckland City Mission provides unique and specialised health and social services to marginalised Aucklanders, helping them to move forward. Our work is constantly developing as the political, economic and social climate changes. Over the life of the Mission we have extended our work directly into the community and increased our advocacy role in order to offer relevant solutions to those who come to us for help.

All month many of you have been collecting clothes for the Westside Freestore on Sullivant Avenue in Columbus. I thought it would be good to take some time this week to ask a few folks from the Freestore to explain a little more about this ministry, share their heart, and let us know what their needs might be.

So I’ve conducted a quick interview with Michelle Fransisco and Mike Gadomski. Both are Board Members for the Freestore, but were volunteers for the ministry before ever participating in the leadership. I’ll let them tell you in their own words why they are so involved:

What exactly IS the Westside Freestore? What's the story behind it?

Last Friday night about a dozen of you gathered at the Grove City Vineyard to sort and pack the clothes you gathered for the entire month of March on behalf of the Westside Freestore.

I'll admit, I was completely blown away by the amount of the donations that came in for this important effort. So many of you donated. Thank you. So many of you asked your family, friends, and co-workers to donate. Thank you, thank you, thank you! In the end we had over 50 giant black garbage bags stuffed with good clothing as well as several car seats, baby play gyms, and other toys.

Thanks also go to norret for making a fabulous array of food for everyone who came out to help sort and pack. Everything was delicious Teresa, great job!

The results are in... the Twoshirts.org network of Grove City gathered an amazing 4,703 items and $2,403! But what's really amazing is that it weighed 4,882 pounds!!! According to the Mid-Ohio FoodBank, one pound of food is equal to one meal. As a team, we provided 4,882 meals. Great Job!

The climax of our food drive was the weekend of June 21 & June 22. We literally received 95% of our food in 48 hours! It was an absolutely spectacular site to see about 400 bags of food spread out like an ocean on the floor of my company's warehouse. I give you my sincerest apologies for forgetting to take that picture! On June 22nd, ten volunteers were hard at work counting and boxing those items. It was amazing to see so much food get neatly boxed in less than two hours. We were like a well oiled machine!

In the end, we filled 90 medium-sized boxes with food and stacked those boxes on 5 pallets. A driver for the Mid-Ohio FoodBank stopped by my company's warehouse on June 30th to pickup the food. It was really satisfying to see all of our hard work come to completion.