Director's Message: One Life at a Time
From EDCT's 2010-2011 Giving Report. Download the full report.
How do we measure our impact (and yours)? One life at a time.
Donors want to know about measuring an organization’s impact. We can point to some obvious metrics. We can tell you how many hits we receive on our website, how many treatment referrals we give, or how many clinicians attend our Annual Forum.
But because we don’t provide medical care — and because eating disorders themselves have so often been characterized by secret, silent suffering — some of our most important areas of impact are also difficult or impossible to measure. Yet they are perhaps even more important than the other metrics.
For example, hope is not a measurable commodity. Yet hope is one of the most important things we offer. We cannot put a value on what our family support groups mean to those who come week after week. We cannot know how many people began receiving the life-saving clinical help they needed, all because a primary physician or a coach attended an EDCT presentation and recognized the early stages of an eating disorder. And while we can measure the number of students that we reached in schools across the state, it is impossible to know how many eating disorders we helped prevent because of the seeds of knowledge we planted.
But we know it happens.
And we know, even more surely, that you make it happen.
More than most nonprofit organizations, EDCT depends on the contributions of our supporters — financial contributions as well as contributions of time and energy. With just one full-time and two part-time employees, our organization runs on volunteers.
Thanks to you, we can hold conferences that educate treatment professionals across the state. Thanks to you, our Speakers Bureau reaches more Tennesseans each year than we could ever reach otherwise. You coordinate events like our Evening of Song & Story. You seal the envelopes and apply the stamps when
we send mailings to our members. You even help us transfer data when we upgrade our website. Compared to other small organizations, we can do so much more because you do so much.
We can measure the number of hours you contribute as volunteers. But we cannot measure the difference you make — one person and one family at a time — or the lives you help change, in ways you will never know, among people you may never meet.
Thank you for making all the difference.
Elizabeth Llewellyn
Executive Director