CHARLOTTE
After her husband died in 2006, Mary Logan found herself alone in Lincolnton, N.C. Retired after years of working in the town’s mill, she decided to move closer to her family in Charlotte.

Though she grew up with very little, Logan never once considered herself poor. Despite her limited means, Logan knew there were some things no one should go without. That’s why she was thankful to find the Free Store, a program sponsored by Crisis Assistance Ministry that distributes clothing, shoes and other necessities to people in need.

“Nobody should go without clothes. Nobody,” she said. “I’ve found things that I thought I would never find. I mean, really, it’s a blessing.”

Logan isn’t someone you might expect to see at the Free Store. By her own admission, she has the means to shop at department stores, but she simply said, “I’d rather come here.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be, said store manager John Wakefield. He said Crisis Assistance Ministry’s goal is to help everyone, including patrons like Logan.

“We don’t care where you live, how much money you make, if you have a job or not, or if you have a home or not,” he said. “We want you to take that money and go help pay your rent, your utilities, your food bill for your kids, whatever it may be, and just come here and help take that extra pressure off.”

Crisis Assistance Ministry began in 1975, during the mid-1970s economic downturn. A group of local clergy set out with the goal of “pooling resources to more effectively meet the needs of low-income families in financial crisis in Mecklenburg County.” The Free Store became a staple of Crisis Assistance Ministry’s offerings in 1978.

Ministry grows in response to need

Today, Crisis Assistance Ministry has grown to become one of the largest nonprofit agencies of its kind in North Carolina. The organization receives most of its funding from government grants and private contributions. In 2009, grants and contributions exceeded $17 million, with almost half coming from the city of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Rather than reacting in the wake of financial disaster, Wakefield said the organization takes measures to prevent financial distress for individuals before it occurs. Redirecting funds from expenses like clothing and toward more pressing financial obligations is one way to accomplish the goal.

“We have approximately 7,000 individuals in Charlotte right now without homes,” he said. “We want to keep that number from going up, and that’s truly what we’re here for.”

Last year, Crisis Assistance Ministry helped more than 50,000 Charlotte area families through financial assistance programs, furniture and appliance distribution, as well as the Free Store. Communications Director Akilah Luke said it’s not uncommon to see hundreds of people lined up outside their doors every day as early as 6 a.m., especially during the cold winter months. By intervening and helping these families before their situations worsen, Luke said Crisis Assistance Ministry plays a distinctive role.

“We’re that place — that safety net to catch families before they become homeless, and just allow people to just continue on with their lives and live with dignity,” she said.

But contrary to what one might expect, the majority of their patrons aren’t living in extreme circumstances. Just looking around the expansive waiting room inside Crisis Assistance Ministry’s main branch, there are faces that are not immediately associated with financial hardship. Instead you see folks like Mary Logan, the people you interact with every day.

“The families we serve are the working poor,” Luke said. “These are people that are your school bus drivers, the people who are checking you out at the grocery store, maybe it’s the barista at your coffee shop. These are the people that you’re helping, your neighbors.”

The number of people seeking financial assistance has increased significantly since the beginning of the financial crisis. Before the recession hit in 2006, Crisis Assistance Ministry served just over 40,000 families. Today, due in part to increases of more than 60 percent in hunger and homelessness since 2007, the organization is serving more than 10,000 additional families.

Charlotte city officials are also involved in fighting the growing number of homeless, and the almost 40,000 citizens living in extreme poverty. The city’s communications manager Jamie Banks said one way they are attacking this problem is by seeking to increase the amount of affordable housing throughout the city.

Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill found that traditional measures of poverty did not adequately reflect the dispersion of poverty in North Carolina. As a result, scholars discovered that large – and largely affluent – metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Raleigh contain sections of concentrated poverty.

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Coming Tuesday: The correct way to measure which teams are hot heading into the NCAA tournament.

The Last Four In

Trying to predict how a group of people will vote is not a scientific process. This is why I no longer make an official bracket prediction myself. But I think a few things factored into the committees final decision.

1) Every year the committee likes to single out a team and punish that team for a poor non-conference strength of schedule, and Colorado had a non-conference strength of schedule ranked 300+ this year. That is exactly what happened in 2007 when Syracuse was left out (for not scheduling enough quality road games), and I am convinced that is what happened with Colorado this year. For a long time we thought Cincinnati would be singled out this year, but they won enough games late to avoid the bubble discussion, and the punishment fell to Colorado.

Is it right to leave a team out for a poor NCSOS? On the one hand, if the short-term goal is to pick the 37 best at large teams, then clearly that is the wrong criteria. But part of the NCAA committee’s goal is a long-term goal. They want to encourage teams to schedule quality opponents so that the process of evaluating and comparing teams is easier. Perhaps leaving Colorado out makes the field “worse” today, but in the long-run, we get a better product when teams schedule quality opponents.

We also saw a record number of teams in the field with 14 losses this year, proving that the committee continues to put more emphasis on quality of opponents rather than quantity of wins.

2) RPI top 50 wins are not everything. UAB won just one game against the RPI top 50, but the committee put a lot of weight on wins against teams ranked 51-100.

Wins against the RPI 1-100:
UAB = 10
VCU = 8
Colorado = 8
Virginia Tech = 8
Boston College = 7
Alabama = 5
St. Mary’s = 3
Harvard = 3

This does not mean I think the committee made the right decision. But if you go back historically, it is not unprecedented. In 2005, UAB had zero wins against the RPI top 50, lost in the second round of the CUSA tournament, and still qualified for the NCAA tournament field. This has happened before.

3) Richmond was not a lock. Various bracket projections are going to count Richmond as a correct pick, but if Richmond loses to Dayton on Sunday, I think the committee swaps Richmond out and puts Dayton on the 12 seed line. I don’t know this for sure, but I think the committee tries to minimize changes to the bracket on the last day, and I think this was their easy choice. The committee chair said on CBS that the ACC tournament final was irrelevant to the decision to give Duke a No. 1 seed, which confirms for me that they would have made the easiest possible last minute decision.

4) The biggest snub of all on Sunday probably had nothing to do with the NCAA. Maryland was not invited to the NIT despite having the 36th best margin-of-victory numbers in the nation.

Look Back

I know the tendency is to see the bracket and look ahead. But I think it is important to salute all the teams that won championships or earned NCAA bids with their fine play in the last week. For the UConn Huskies to win five games in five days is nothing short of miraculous. The log5 odds said they had just a 2% chance of winning the Big East tournament title when the tournament opened. In fact, their current odds of making it to the Final Four are a much healthier 7.2%. In other words, what Connecticut did was more rare than making the Final Four, and much more special. And as Kemba Walker’s mom, who had been shown on camera all week, hugged Kemba after the title game, you certainly did not have to tell her to celebrate the moment.

Similarly for a team like Penn St. that upset Wisconsin and Michigan St., perhaps the first week of the NCAA tournament will bring more joy. But for the four Penn St. senior starters who came so close to the NCAA tournament two years ago, just making the NCAA field is a tremendous accomplishment.

For Washington’s Isaiah Thomas and his buzzer-beater to beat Arizona, and for Princeton’s Douglas Davis and his buzzer-beater to beat Harvard, these are the moments to be overcome with joy. Only four teams will make it to the Final Four in three weeks. Only one team will win a NCAA title. But along the way, there are numerous champions.

5 Games in 5 Days

How was Connecticut able to win five games in five days? They were relentless at taking the ball to the basket. Take a look at Connecticut’s free throw rate this year. (Free throw rate measures the percentage of free throw attempts per field goal attempt.)

November and December: 42.0
January to end of regular season: 27.7
Big East Tournament: 47.1

This was not simply Connecticut having big leads and their opponents fouling late in the game. Connecticut was extremely aggressive at driving the ball inside in the Big East tournament. Will they keep it going and reach the Final Four? My gut tells me they will not. And it is not just because they are 17th in the Pomeroy Rankings. Butler was similarly situated and made a deep run last year.

But I think it will be very hard for Connecticut not to have an emotional letdown after a tournament like this. I think the fatigue will be more mental than physical. UConn is going to go back home and hear how fantastic they played, and I think it will be very hard to focus on preparing for a first and second round opponent. And that lack of mental focus could be costly. But if Kemba Walker keeps getting into the lane at will, Jeremy Lamb keeps making killer floaters, and Alex Oriakhi hustles for rebounds like he did in New York, anything can happen.

What was in the water in the ACC tournament?

If you have never looked at Ken Pomeroy’s win probability charts, look at what happened in the top half of the ACC tournament bracket:

Miami vs Virginia

North Carolina vs Miami

These were two tremendous comebacks. (The win probability chart for North Carolina vs Clemson was equally crazy, but that chart is not up yet.) Note: You may need to use Mozilla-Firefox to view these charts.

Similarly, we all thought Alabama’s comeback win against Georgia might put them ahead of the Bulldogs, but that was not the case. But the win probability chart still looks crazy on paper: Alabama vs Georgia

The same thing could be said for the Michigan comeback against Illinois: Michigan vs Illinois. It seemed significant at the time, but ultimately, both teams ended up in an 8-9 game in the NCAA tournament. I think the key to the Michigan comeback was that Michigan forward Jordan Morgan got in foul trouble and had to leave the game. Morgan is not a threat to shoot the three, so with Morgan in the game, Illinois forward Mike Tisdale was sagging into the paint and double-teaming whatever Michigan players tried to take the ball inside. But with Morgan out, Michigan put five shooters on the floor, and Tisdale had to step out to defend the three point line. That allowed Michigan to use penetration and cuts to more effectively get the ball to the basket.

TNT and TBS

Poor Charles Barkley. Kenny Smith and Barkley are phenomenal when providing post-game commentary at midnight. But I don’t think Charles was quite ready to be in studio at noon on a Sunday.

Read more: http://basketball.realgm.com/article/212166/Yet_Another_College_Basketball_Column_(Post_Selection_Edition)#ixzz1GZTeQrbM

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(NAPSI)—With more than 500 million active users spending over 700 billion minutes a month on its site, Facebook has become a premier platform for socializing, sharing, searching and, now, shopping online. The emerging trend of selling and buying merchandise through Facebook and other social media platforms is here and it’s exploding. Booz & Company estimates that the dollar volume of goods sold through social media overall could increase sixfold, from $5 billion in 2010 to $30 billion in 2015. Businesses and consumers alike refer to this paradigm as “Social Commerce,” a fusion of social media and e-commerce that enables consumers to shop directly through their social networks.

Many stores are leveraging social networks to allow consumers to execute transactions in the comfort of their own Facebook pages, where attention is high and the user’s likes and dislikes are clear. The Social Commerce premise is that the focus is on people instead of products. There is a treasure trove of data based on users’ interests on their Facebook pages, and businesses can finally tailor the presentation of merchandise to offer a truly customized shopping experience. Businesses can now sell consumers exactly what they want, and consumers are reaping the benefits.

Social Commerce helps businesses offer consumers exclusive deals and special promotions while enabling them to connect with, listen to, understand and engage with their customers to improve the overall shopping experience. Furthermore, the information and content on Facebook is “shared,” meaning that friends can update each other on their recent online shopping sprees.

But in addition to benefits and opportunities, emerging communications channels always come with some new potential risks, and Social Commerce is no exception. The main concerns for consumers are security and privacy. Especially when phishing scams, identity theft and hackers are constantly in the headlines, consumers are more aware than ever of the need for online security and identity protection. With Social Commerce, cybercriminals are more likely to exploit the inherent trust that social networking sites enjoy. So how can consumers gain confidence in Social Commerce?

To know if a website, link and transaction are safe, the first thing to look for is an SSL Certificate, a technology that enables encryption when users connect to a website. When the lock icon appears in an Internet browser, this means SSL is in place, encrypting the site visitor’s information.

Symantec, the provider of VeriSign® SSL, has been working with a number of social commerce platform providers to offer enhanced security to organizations with a fan store on Facebook. When fans visit a fan store protected by VeriSign SSL, they will see the familiar “VeriSign Trusted” seal that more than 100,000 online businesses choose to show that their transactions are secure.

When consumers buy directly on their Facebook pages and see SSL, they know they can trust the businesses they “like” and that their transactions are protected with the most advanced and proven security technology.

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(NAPSI)—The nation’s leading emergency and resuscitation experts are working together to improve survival rates for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA).

The Problem

Sudden cardiac arrest occurs when the heart abruptly stops beating because of abnormal heart rhythms. Each year, an estimated 295,000 Americans die from SCA, as reported by the American Heart Association’s Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update.

For three decades, there’s been no improvement in the national survival rate of 8 percent for SCA, and depending where you live, the survival rate could vary greatly.

The Solution

The HeartRescue Project is a new initiative to improve SCA procedures in three critical areas of response: bystanders, emergency medical services and hospital emergency rooms. To educate people and encourage the proper response to SCA, the Medtronic Foundation committed more than $15 million to initiate the HeartRescue Project. The project assembles the country’s leading emergency and resuscitation experts to expand successful response programs in five pilot states. The goal is to improve out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rates by at least 50 percent in five years in these states.

HeartRescue partners at the Universities of Arizona, Duke, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Washington and their partner agencies will coordinate proven protocols and high-tech treatments that show SCA is treatable.

“There is a 500 percent variation in survival after cardiac arrest,” said Dr. Graham Nichol, a HeartRescue partner at the University of Washington. “Many people don’t realize that cardiac arrest can be treated. In many regions, bystanders, emergency response and hospitals are not working together to help the patient.”

What You Can Do

Success begins with public bystanders. Communities with higher bystander CPR participation have higher SCA survival rates. Bystanders can take the following three steps to increase survival rates: Recognize the signs of SCA and call 911, begin CPR and find an automated external defibrillator (AED).

• Recognize the signs of SCA—If you see someone suddenly collapse, lose consciousness and stop breathing, that person could be experiencing sudden cardiac arrest. Immediately call 911.

• Perform CPR-Begin hands—only CPR: Push hard and fast on the chest-about 100 compressions a minute. Let the chest rise completely between compressions.

• Find an AED—Continue chest compressions until emergency personnel arrive. If possible, have someone get an automated external defibrillator, turn it on and follow the directions.

More Information

You can learn more about this initiative at www.medtronic.com/foundation and www.heartrescueproject.com.

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Summer months provide ideal opportunity for charitable endeavors

Pay it forward: Children have the power to make a difference

(ARA) – In many ways, the joint birthday party in late January for 8-year old Sofia Segalla and her best friend, Clara Goulding, was full of traditional fun. They and 28 of their classmates enjoyed inflatable structures, a whirlwind of exciting games and exchanging giggles like only 8-year-olds can.

What was unusual, and truly inspiring about Sofia and Clara’s party, however, is that in lieu of gifts, the girls requested that donations be made to a Chicago-based nonprofit, Friends of the Orphans, to help children in need in Haiti who were affected by the country’s devastating January 2010 earthquake. The birthday guests contributed approximately $900 to St. Damien’s Pediatric Hospital, an amount that pleasantly surprised Sofia’s mom Michele.

“We did something similar for my son several years ago when he was 5, and this year, Sofia was truly excited about doing a party fundraiser,” says Michele Segalla. “It really made her think, and she’s more aware about people in need and how fortunate she is.”

It’s no secret that Americans are a generous bunch, and according to Giving USA, 83 percent of philanthropic dollars are contributed by individuals. In 2009, this amount totaled just more than $227 billion. While adults are well-versed in the benefits of philanthropic giving, teaching children the impact they can make by getting involved in fundraising activities and volunteerism can help shape a future generation of leaders.

“Helping others in need, and in Friends of the Orphans’ case, helping children in need, is tightly woven into our country’s fabric,” says Sharon Saxelby, president and CEO of Friends of the Orphans.

“By involving our children in charitable opportunities from a young age, we are not only reinforcing how blessed they may be in their own lives, but we are demonstrating that even the smallest initiative can make them feel good and change the lives of others. It’s important for adults to lead by example,” she says.

For parents interested in involving their children in charitable initiatives, how do they begin? With the lazy days of summer quickly approaching, parents have a wide open opportunity to seize some of those free hours and work side-by-side with their children on identifying which causes might appeal to them and how much time they can dedicate.

Based on what sparks their children’s interest, whether it’s sports, animals, nature, music or something else, parents and their kids can jointly research local or national opportunities for donation recipients. Sites like CharityNavigator.com allow visitors to search by category, hot topics or top 10 lists. Another option is to stay local. For instance, if a child has a love of animals, contact the local animal shelter to see what is at the top of their “wish list.” The most important thing when considering a cause to support is that the children get excited about it.

For a suburban Chicago 13-year-old, Caleigh Joyce, choosing an organization to benefit from her eighth-grade confirmation service project was an easy decision. Her family is a long-time Friends of the Orphans sponsor to 11-year-old Dulce from Cuernavaca, Mexico, so Caleigh knew she wanted to directly help children in need there.

For her “Frutas y Verduras Para los Amigos y Victorias” (Fruits and Vegetables For Friends) project, Caleigh created a flier, a mass e-mail to family and friends, and a website (friendsoftheorphans.org/caleighsproject) explaining her ambitious goal of raising approximately $2,000 to purchase four months of fresh fruits and vegetables for 180 high school children living in a group home in Cuernavaca. After visiting the home and her “sister” Dulce in February, she felt even closer to the cause and saw the direct impact her efforts will make.

“I chose to do this because it’s really meaningful and makes me feel good. It’s important, so I’m talking to a lot of friends and family about donating,” Caleigh says.

Saxelby notes that a secondary benefit to children getting involved in charitable endeavors is that it strengthens their future college applications and helps them distinguish themselves from their peers.

After children identify who they want to raise money for, the next step is how to raise the money. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and many activities can be completed in a day. Based on the age of the child and how many friends and adults he or she can enlist to assist, a few suggestions to consider, especially during the summer months, include:

* Neighborhood dog wash
* Charity car wash
* Used book sale
* Making and selling homemade jewelry
* Birthday party donation in lieu of gifts
* Backyard movie night on large screen under the stars

“There are so many worthy charitable organizations and creative ways to raise money. By fostering an existing love, children will be more motivated to stay involved,” Saxelby says. “Whether raising money to help the local animal shelter buy puppy food, or volunteering to clean up a park where kids spend hours playing basketball, that personal connection is really important.

“Today’s children have so much power to really make an impact in our world. Engaging kids in charitable initiatives creates a deeper bond within their own families and also brings them closer to those they are helping.”

For more information about Friends of the Orphans, visit www.friendsoftheorphans.org.

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