Dear Disruptors and Innovators from the SXSW CauseLab:

Wow. Hard to believe that it’s a little more than three weeks ago when Brian, Scott, and I had the pleasure of working alongside you in the inaugural SXSW Interactive CauseLab. CauseLab was just the beginning of the year-long initiative we launched with our cause partners, Feeding America, Share Our Strength, and Capital Area Food Bank to spark innovation and broaden engagement to end hunger in America.

Since CauseLab, our team has been busy sifting thru the notes and ideas generated from both the morning and afternoon sessions. We noticed some similar themes and nuggets of intriguing ideas that we are working on fleshing out. Three, in particular, are potentially game-changing and will help fuel greater awareness, access, and advocacy:

1. Create a Data Consortium: collect, organize, visualize and make available comprehensive information down to the local level on hunger statistics for any hunger organization to utilize.
2. Hunger Think Tank: a sustained collaborative, cross-disciplined, coordinated team to generate and share ideas of how to address issues of awareness, access, and advocacy that organizations — particularly, smaller community-based — can implement to reduce hunger in the community and start to build a hunger free community. Many of the ideas that were generated during the sessions, for instance, might be developed further by this think tank.
3. Army of Davids: to help accelerate local advocacy, create training, resources and tools to activate local advocacy. This might include mobile capabilities, online tutorials, virtual volunteering, etc.

With your help, we’ll be developing these three big ideas out with the goal of attracting entrpreneurs, social and otherwise, to adopt and run with them. So please, stay in touch with us and share your thoughts on how to shape and enhance these bigger ideas. With the creative, innovative brain power, and different perspectives that each of you bring, we know we can develop these into truly game changing approaches.

A few more updates for you:

• The Goodzuma platform will launch officially on April 15. Before then, we need your help to continue to shape the 24 ideas we generated together in Austin and to populate it with your own individual ideas. Because of the unexpected delay in the launch, we will be running the idea contest from April 15-May 31 for the $1,000 and $500 cash prizes. You can add your ideas by going here.
• Tyson Foods, the sponsor of the Digital Can Drive, and our team are working out the specific food bank recipients for each of the Top 10 States. You can go to http://wecanendthis.com to see the Top 10 States that will each receive enough food to provide 150,000 meals.
• We are encouraged by the public feedback we’ve received about the CauseLab at SXSW. It seems to have stood out in people’s minds as one of the highlights of this year, thanks in large measure to the participation of people like you. Here are some links to blogs and photos taken: Alternet Post, Thought Gadgets, Techcocktail, and SXSW Official Photos. Let us know if you have seen or written about CauseLab and we can add it to our list.

Thank you again for your participation in the inaugural SXSW interactive CauseLab. We look forward to the work ahead to bring your ideas to life. And, trust that you will continue to participate during this year so that together we can end hunger.

All the best,
Anne Mai Bertelsen

P.S. As a reminder of our year long initiative, you can view the slide that Brian Reich shared during his presentation at CauseLab.