Greenlight Community Success Stories - Tell Us Yours!

Has the Greenlight Community added to your success and joy? We'd like to hear about it. Be generous and inspire others by sending your story to Community Admin Sara Grace to appear on the site.

Greenlight Community Lifelines
by Keith Ferrazzi

I’d like to introduce the leaders of the Greenlight Community: Jorge Colon and Maxine Karchie. What’s especially cool about these two, besides the fact that the City Groups across the country have arisen thanks to their volunteer leadership – is that they’ve become lifeline relationships for each other, despite the fact that Maxine’s in Canada and Jorge’s in Miami.

Before getting involved at GC.com, Maxine had never really socialized or networked online. “I‘ve never been a Facebooker. I would email occasionally, but I wasn’t one of those people who went online,” says Maxine. That all changed when Maxine met me at an event asked what she could do for the movement. I told her to get her butt on GC.com!

Jorge was a Never Eat Alone fan, and his initial purpose in joining Greenlight Community was purely professional. He was getting ready to launch the Online Bar Association, to build professional community among lawyers who practice independently and online – and needed to take a pulse on everything else already out there. “But Greenlight sucked me right in. I had to keep putting off my OBA Launch because I got so active in organizing the Greenlighters!”

Maxine and Jorge, along with two other leaders, Seb Zar Bourcheix and Tami Conner Chester, and several other community ambassadors, started working together to help Greenlighters connect offline, through philanthropy, in-person City Group meetings, and ultimately an annual international event, still in the offing.

“We are now literally like four wheels in a car,” says Jorge. “We’ve become our own version of the lifeline relationships Keith talks about in Who’s Got Your Back. Each of us has our own distinct abilities, direction, and way of doing things, but we’re all necessary for the movement to continue to move forward. We need all four tires.”

Says Maxine, “When I wasn’t feeling well after a recent surgery, they were there for me – I was surrounded by flowers. We were Skyping from my bed!”

Their experience organizing the GC has propelled Maxine and Jorge to step up in their local commitment to community service. Jorge served as PR spokesman and coordinator for a statewide interfaith “Day of Service” this spring, which resulted in 4000 man-hours of volunteer work across 21 projects.

Maxine worked with a gaggle of Alberta-based Greenlighters to launch a gala called Dine for the Cure to raise funds for the Alberta Cancer Foundation. (Please help by donating: dine4cure.ca!) Maxine’s mission was personal: “I’m a cancer survivor. I’ve been cancer-free for 10 years. But my dad died of cancer, my best friend and cousin just died of cancer, and my aunt died this past fall. I wanted to do something to fight.”

Her event was capped by a Chinese lion dance, traditionally used to bless the new year. During the dance, dancers shredded heads of lettuce and threw them into the crowd. According to tradition, those it lands on are considered doubly blessed. Says Maxine, “We felt it was a good way to bless everybody who took part – it wasn’t religious, but spiritual in some way. I was sitting next to my son, and we both ended up with lettuce in our hair. Between that and the power of the event, I’ve never felt more blessed.”

Thank you Maxine and Jorge!