Lain Hensley innovates the art of team building and giving back.
"Nothing feels better than doing something for your community," one of 10-year-old Lain Hensley’s neighbors said while they were cleaning up a local park. It was his earliest volunteer memory.
"The words stuck in my heart, and I never stopped looking for the big thing that I could do to help the global community," Hensley said.
Odyssey Teams, founded by Hensley and Bill John, helps groups help people. They pioneered the Life Cycles team-building activity, which assembles bicycles and gives them to those in need—a task since unofficially appropriated by any number of other companies worldwide.
But Helping Hands, developed shortly after the bike program, really grabs at the heart of participants and enhances the quality of life immeasurably for recipients. In the past six years, meeting and event groups have incorporated the program and built 13,500 prosthetic hands, which are distributed through the Ellen Meadows Prosthetic Hand Foundation to children and adults in dozens of countries. The simple prosthetics enable recipients to return to work and provide for their families, to write, to live with a bit more dignity and more.
During the final day of MPI’s 2013 World Education Congress (WEC), delegates assembled 500 prosthetic hands in less than two hours—helping Odyssey Teams get closer to their goal of producing 15,000 hands by 2015.
Hensley also delivered a Flash Point session at the WEC, which he hopes attendees will use as a starting point to live a life that is more deliberate and less reflexive.
"We all develop patterns or habits in our lives—many of which do not get the best results and might even create obstacles," he said. "I want to entice the audience to practice the art of ’Catching Yourself Being Yourself’ and examine the patterns that are driven by the comforts and the behaviors that get us the best results. This will be the start." TMP
