Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Leanne Gully, your host for this episode and Director of Development at the Moth.

As a fundraiser, I think a lot about the concept of giving back, about what we can and should do as members of a community, how we can make sure that the things we value continue to have a place in the world, whether that's through volunteering, showing kindness to the people around us, or supporting the organizations

we care about. Today, we're going to share two stories that examine this idea and look

at what we get when we give back. And we'll tell you a little bit about how you can help

support them off in its mission to create community and build empathy around the world.

First up, we have Jim Beebe Woodard. He told the story at a Burlington, Vermont story slam,

where the theme of the night was Love Hurts. Here's Jim, live at the moth.

So as an adult here, I would characterize myself as a devout atheist.

But as a kid, I did grow up going to church.

And we went to a really nice church, actually.

It wasn't super dogmatic, and it was really invested in, like, families and doing good in the community, and kind of all the things church should do.

And one of the ways that our church did that was there was always some sort of food drive going on, canned food drive

kind of thing. And very often we would have a Sunday where all the kids in the congregation

would have some sort of canned good and at some point in this in the during the service, the kids would come up onto the chancel in front of the sanctuary

and they would have their canned goods and they put in a box and the minister would bless it.

And it was all nice and it was a nice way for kids to learn a little bit about giving and taking care of others in the community.

And so for a lot of years when I was really young, my folks would just give us

something and we'd go out and we'd put it in the box and that was that, and that was all good. So as we got a little older, my sister and I, there was a Sunday where my dad said, hey, why don't you guys go into the pantry and want to you pick something? Why don't you pick something that you'd like to give to another family in need. And we're like, all right, so we go in. This is the late 70s. It's

suburbia. We have a wall of canned goods and mac and cheese and my dad's old spice. And so I'm looking at all these canned goods and going through it. And I see there's a can of mandarin oranges. oranges and I was like all about mandon oranges I loved him so. I'd open them up, eat the whole can. It was so good. So I kind of like slid that to the side. So I'm going through, going through. And I come upon this honkin can of vegall. Now if you don't know what vegall is, it's this really horrible cut vegetables.

It can't get vegetables aren't all that delicious anyway, they're really salty and everything.

But vegol was particularly disgusting, and it had lima beans, and we just hated vegol.

So I was like, yep.

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