Follow up: Gaynor makes her confidence greater than her comfort.
To grow your confidence about what you can accomplish in the world you occasionally need to step outside your comfort zone and do something that stretches your vision of what’s possible. You may remember Gaynor Rigby from law number three: Always make your contribution bigger than your reward. She was the Strategic Coach® team member who decided to adopt The No-Entitlement Attitude™ and went on to progress from receptionist to Director of Sales and Marketing. This story, which first appeared in our Spring 2005 Newsletter, tells how Gaynor has since gone on to make an even greater contribution to someone else's bigger future by leaving behind her apprehensions and venturing into the still disaster ravaged, post-Chernobyl state of Belarus.
In the Summer 2003 edition of our Strategic Seasonings newsletter, we profiled Strategic Coach client Brian U’Ren. At that time, Brian was trying to organize the largest ever delivery of medical supplies to victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Belarus. Brian succeeded in that goal and has since multiplied his efforts to help orphans and other victims improve their prospects through better housing, education, food, and household and medical supplies through an organization called Canadian Aid for Chernobyl (CAC). Recently, Strategic Coach team member Gaynor Rigby took a closer look at what Brian and CAC are doing, and made a contribution of her own, with help from The Strategic Coach’s “Silver Bullet” program.
Gaynor Rigby with Denis Vorobiev, the Belarusian
orphan who has a bigger future thanks to her sponsorship.
In 1998, co-founders and owners, Dan Sullivan and Babs Smith, created a program that offered Strategic Coach team members the opportunity to collectively distribute money among charities of their choice. Inspired by a Strategic Coach client who had created a similar program with his staff, Babs and Dan liked the idea of their team giving back to the community through charity and volunteerism. From this, the “Silver Bullet” program was born. Today, it has evolved into a $150,000 out-of-pocket, annual fund donated by Babs and Dan for use by the Strategic Coach team.
Not wanting the contribution to be solely financial, Dan and Babs took the idea one step further by encouraging team members to also donate their time. Every Strategic Coach team member gets three “Silver Bullet” days per year, above their regular six weeks of vacation time, to volunteer with an organization of their choosing.
Gaynor had been looking for a charity to put her time and money behind when she discovered Canadian Aid for Chernobyl. CAC is an organization dedicated to providing medical and humanitarian relief to families, children, and orphans in southern Belarus, an area severely affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
CAC’s mission resonated with Gaynor and she decided to get involved. “You just want to take everyone under your wing and fix it all for them,” Gaynor explains. “I can start with one person and make a difference in their life, and hopefully that one person then has a ripple effect on other people.”
And Gaynor has done just that. Through Silver Bullet contributions, her own significant out-of-pocket donations, and a week spent delivering humanitarian aid in Belarus with CAC, she has without a doubt made a huge difference — most noticeably in the life of one Belarusian orphan by the name of Denis Vorobiev.
Gaynor has been sponsoring Denis, a 22-year-old university student, through CAC’s orphan sponsorship program for the past two years, sending him money for basic living expenses and to help with his education. Along with paying his rent in a modest apartment, she’s also bought him a microwave, fridge, and computer for school — all things most people take for granted but for Denis, are absolute luxuries.
Gaynor’s busy schedule at the Coach means taking time away from the office can be difficult. But she says having Silver Bullet days secured her decision to leave the company for a week in March to travel over 4500 miles to Belarus with CAC’s relief mission. “It definitely made it easier,” she says. “I felt I was getting the support of The Strategic Coach; that people here would understand why I would be gone.”
While in Belarus, Gaynor had the chance to meet Denis for the first time. It was definitely the highlight of her trip, to meet the young man whose life she has helped change so completely. “I feel like now I am responsible for him and wonder what else I need to do to make more of a difference,” Gaynor explains. “It’s really just about giving someone a chance; an opportunity. There are smart, intelligent people out there who just don’t ever get a shake at having a good life.”
And for Denis, meeting Gaynor went beyond the money and sponsorship she has provided. After spending the day together in Belarus he told her, “You’re my family. You’re not really my mom or my dad, but you are my family.”
Gaynor is committed to making the CAC relief mission an annual trip and plans to travel to Belarus for even longer next year. “People ask me if it was a good trip. It’s hard to say it was a good trip, but it was a worthwhile trip,” Gaynor says. “Definitely a worthwhile trip.”
For more information on CAC visit www.recorder.ca/cac/cac.html
