In Her Words: Accidental Philanthropist Yeulanda Degala, Leading Through Action & Example
Yeulanda's grassroots nonprofit, Good Neighbors Network, started as a small gesture of goodwill and now helps to fill in the gaps for hundreds of students and families in Chicago's northwest suburbs.
We live in a great area 25 miles northwest of Chicago. It’s an affluent suburb. The schools are amazing. People move here for the school system. Some people move here to make a better life for their kids and are living paycheck to paycheck and working numerous jobs to do it. They are living on the margins and trying to get by, and it can be hard. Although my husband and I have the resources we need for our own family, I grew up with a single mom and my sister and I received the “free school lunch” from K through 12. I know firsthand that some families really count on that free lunch.
“What are the kids who receive free lunch at school going to do?” was my first thought when on Friday March 13, 2020, I got the email saying the schools were going to be shut down for two weeks. I thought about the kids. I thought about the parents. I have two kids of my own and I know that when they’re home, kids eat all the time. They eat when they're bored. They eat when they're hungry. My two kids will eat us out of house and home. I just had such empathy in that moment.
When I was a kid, volunteer service was a requirement in my house. Even though we had need, we also had to give back. It was a part of our life from an early age. We always had to pay it forward. My mom would wake us up on a Saturday morning, super early to go volunteer somewhere. I hated every minute of it. What kid wants to wake up early on a Saturday? Zero kids everywhere. But those lessons stuck with me, they are part of my DNA, and I knew that the community where I live could and would come together to support other families.
“I'm collecting snacks on my front porch for the kids receiving free and reduced lunch. There’s a bin on my porch.”
Rallying Community Support
Without thinking of how exactly I was going to do it, I put out a post to just my kids’ schools saying “I'm collecting snacks on my front porch for the kids receiving free and reduced lunch. There’s a bin on my porch.” Within three days, my house was full of donations. I sent the message on that Friday and by the following Monday, I realized I needed to figure out a distribution solution. Before too long, I had enough snacks for the whole district. Pretty soon I had enough for multiple districts. I got on the phone to the school districts. The districts acknowledged the need but at first didn’t know what to do for distribution either. We figured it out together and ended up utilizing some of the systems they already had in place. For example, some districts utilized the bus routes. We would bring goods to them, and they would drop off at the bus stops. Instead of picking up or dropping off their kids for transportation to school like they normally would, the parents would go and pick up bags of food.
At first, we thought it was just going to be a two-week need. After about four weeks when school was still closed but the school districts got the food thing figured out, we realized that there were ongoing needs for a variety of things. The community kept showing up to help and people kept donating not just snacks, but also hygiene products, feminine products, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, hand sanitizer — all those things that were scarce and could be expensive. As the need changed, so did the items that we collected. I would fill up my house multiple times over the course of the next three years.
Making It Official
I said to my husband early on, “Thanks for letting me start this whole pantry thing in our house.” He looked at me and said, “You would have done it anyway.” We had been collecting and distributing for two years when he said, “You need to get nonprofit status so people can donate and write it off.” I thought it would never work but he said, “You’re already doing it.” At the time I didn’t think it would be sustainable, but we’ve been doing this work for four years now.
I ended up taking my husband’s advice and started operating Good Neighbors Network as an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in early 2022. In addition to allowing tax benefits for individual donors, starting the nonprofit allowed us to pitch businesses for different things, and it allowed us to be positioned for growth. Now we partner with several local school districts, and they rely on us for support that I never could’ve imagined at the beginning.
She got a full ride to Illinois State University (ISU), but she didn’t have the resources to cover all those extra things you need when you go off to college.
Soon after we started, we offered support to some first-generation college students. I collected items from the community like gift cards and cash for students who were going off to school but didn't have the opportunity to volunteer and do all the things that get you more scholarships. There was a student I knew who had worked full time to help her family pay rent. She got a full ride to Illinois State University (ISU), but she didn’t have the resources to cover all those extra things you need when you go off to college. For example, she didn't have the dorm room stuff. If her friends were going off and getting a pizza, she might not be able to do that. That was super personal to me due to my own experiences. So, my lightbulbs flashed, and I went into action to collect funds and items so she could go off to college and have her refrigerator and other things for her room. I didn’t want her to have a situation where she was in the middle of WalMart and having to think about putting something she needed back on the shelf. She just graduated from ISU this year.
Last year we piloted a program where we gave graduation gifts to 56 Wheeling High School graduates who went through the AVID program and were going on to higher education. Some went to the local junior college. Others went to trade schools. Some went to four year schools. We gave them each a leather bound padfolio, a headshot donated by a local photographer, and the option to get a dorm room supply kit. The dorm room kit includes things like extra-long twin bed sheets and other things that people who are first-generation college students often don't even know they need. This year we gave the same gifts to 70 AVID graduates at Wheeling and 26 at Rolling Meadows High School. Right now we have 64 students signed up for the dorm room supplies.
Another one of our goals was to get something permanent in schools and we were able to do that with Wheeling Community Consolidated School District 21, where we started a program called Neighbors Care Closets. It’s like a pantry, but one that students and families have access to within the schools. They can access food and snacks, but also hygiene products, and sometimes we have cleaning products, or warm socks. Teachers are always reaching into their own pockets for things kids need, whether it’s a snack or school supplies or whatever. We wanted to take that off of teachers.
We like to have community members involved in our efforts as much as we can. We’ve been holding pop up packing events at least once a month. There was one last Saturday to prepare dorm kits. Whole families can and do participate. All the items got packed in laundry baskets. This year it was a lot bigger because we were able to get sponsorship from Costco, among others. I reached out to a few companies and did a couple of grant applications. The next thing we’ll start working on is back to school backpacks filled with supplies.
We’re not trying to reinvent any existing wheels here.
Working through the schools to support students and families will continue to be our focus for the next five years or so according to our strategic plan. We want to concentrate on areas where we can help fill a gap. We’re not trying to reinvent any existing wheels here. We're hyper-focused on the northwest suburbs with our service area spanning from Wheeling to Elk Grove Village. That’s a huge service area, but it's all under the High School District 214 umbrella.
Each year we get better, stronger, and more professionalized, and some of the weight is taken off my back. This year we had some we had some grant funding that allowed me to take a small salary, which I donated 100% back into the organization. We finally got an office space and that was great in terms of allowing me to have some separation and balance. I thank my family because they allowed me to take over the house for so long.
Staying Balanced
Good Neighbors Network is my baby, but I knew that my strengths weren’t being utilized and that I needed to get stuff out of my head and documented so other people could help execute. I have a volunteer who is a retired business analyst and is just killing it. I know I have been the bottleneck of this organization and this analyst has helped by putting policies and procedures in place so I can be gone and nothing is going to fall apart or if it does, we can fix it. For the first time in four years, my family and I went on vacation for spring break, and I left my laptop at home.
I will stop and smell the lilacs and the appreciate the peonies. I want to continue to do this work, and I want to expand.
I started to have some health issues and that was a clear wake up call. If I break, then this does not happen. But also, I need to be present in my life, my actual personal life, too. I started getting in the habit of doing a guided meditation walk every day. I walk down the street with my big headphones and I, for real, stop and smell the flowers. I will stop and smell the lilacs and the appreciate the peonies. I want to continue to do this work, and I want to expand. I’d like to be able to replicate what we’re doing in other districts. The need is there, and the community support is there, but I need to take care of my health and be careful not to take on too much more too fast.
Belle Curve Stories is about women navigating life with grit, grace, and growth. What do those three words mean to you?
All of those words resonate tremendously.
Grit is what it takes to get through life on a basic level. I am a black woman who grew up in the South, in the middle of an orange grove in tiny Wimauma, Florida. I moved to a predominantly white area and now I’m doing something for the community where I get to lead in a way that I never really expected. I've worked hard. I’ve sunk my teeth into the things that I believe in. I saw things that needed to happen and I’m making them happen. It’s being able to say, “Okay, here's this problem. I know I'm gonna get to it, I know I'm not going to solve it, but I'm going to tackle it.” That's what grit is to me.
Grace is the way I try to live my life. I always give everyone grace in life. We're all trying to survive. We're all doing our best. I don't beat myself up anymore because of the things that I can't achieve or can't accomplish, and I really try to make sure people in my sphere don't beat themselves up either. I'm constantly saying, “Give yourself grace.”
Growth is something that I hope that you're doing every day. I want to learn something new every day. I want to see something good in the world every day, even on bad days. We've all had lots of bad days, but I want to be able to say, “I'm continuing to move forward,” or “I'm continuing to try to excel,” or “I'm imparting something on someone else and helping them to grow.” That’s how I see growth.
If you could go back in time and give advice to your 25-year-old self. What would you say to her?
Looking at the growth that has come from me since that time, I would not even recognize my 25-year-old self. I would tell her that what your life has been to this point is not going to define the rest of your life. You’re going to move mountains even though you may be lost right now. Things are going to change.
I’m very happy about the lessons that I received growing up about how to treat people. That’s always been a part of my ride. Being able to use my experience in a way that I get to lend a hand to someone else, to give of myself, of my talents and time to other people is the whole point of life. It’s why I exist.
As told to and edited by Teresa Bellock and Sandra Ditore.
Yeulanda Degala, 47, is the founder and executive director of Good Neighbors Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides assistance to under-resourced neighbors in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Born and raised in Florida, Yeulanda nows lives in Arlington Heights, Illinois with her husband and their two children.
