But There’s Nothing In It For You

We moved to Vegas a year ago, and proceeded to do a “needs assessment survey” interviewing hundreds of people to learn of the needs in the community that were not being met.

One idea that kept coming up was that due to the economy there are a lot of people struggling to make ends meet, but who aren’t quite poor enough qualify for most forms of assistance. Many community leaders were asking how these people could be helped so they could feed their kids and not lose their homes.

This led us to create the Las Vegas Food Co-op. The idea is that by cutting out the grocer and getting (fresh!) food straight from distributors, we are able to provide $100 worth of groceries (to anyone!) for about $40. It will take a massive volunteer effort, but it will be worth it.

My wife was explaining all this to a co-worker recently and he was baffled as to why we’d do this, saying, “But there’s nothing in it for you.” And that may be true. But can you imagine a world where people put others first and worked to improve their communities? How good would that be? And if that would create a better world, why don’t we just start living that way?