Are you a turkey person?

The question might sound silly, but the answer could reveal the difference between simply showing up and truly making an impact.

The turkey person question came up during a conversation Bill Courtney had with a player on the struggling high school football team he’d volunteered to coach in an impoverished area of Memphis. The team — featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Undefeated” — had had a dismal record over the previous decade: just four wins and 95 losses.

Courtney, CEO of Classic American Hardwoods, knew that he had to go beyond teaching tactics to help his players succeed; he also had to share with them the principles of life — character, commitment, and integrity.

But only half the team was buying into these principles.

The question that stopped this coach in his tracks

Frustrated, Courtney asked a player what he had to do to get the rest of the team on board. The player responded, “Coach, they’re trying to figure out if you’re a turkey person.”

Confused, Courtney pressed him for more information.

The player told Courtney that every Thanksgiving and Christmas, volunteers would roll into their neighborhoods to hand out gifts, hams, and turkeys. The players and their neighbors took these gifts and food because they didn’t have any of their own, but then the people who gave out the turkeys were gone and never seen again.

“It makes you wonder if they’re doing that because they really care about us, or they’re doing that to make themselves feel good,” the player told Courtney.

Courtney said the scenario doesn’t diminish the beauty of giving away turkeys or serving in soup kitchens, but it should make us think differently about giving.

“The moral of that story is not to disparage that work, it’s to ask this question: ‘What’s your motive?’” Courtney said. “The people you’re serving see right through fraud. So, we’ve got to engage for the right reasons, so the very people we are serving buy in and see it for what it is — which is service, care, compassion, kindness.”

He said if we had millions of Americans doing that, we could make a meaningful impact.

When ‘somebody’ means you

But which Americans are equipped to help?

Courtney said each of us is.

“There is — in every major metropolitan area in this country — a street that, when you’re driving past it, you think, ‘Good God, car, don’t break down here,’” Courtney said. “We see all the abject despair, the loss, the poverty, the disenfranchisement. Many times, we’ll think, ‘Man, that really is bad down there. Somebody ought to do something about that one day.’ My question is: Who’s somebody?”

He said there’s a great disillusionment that people don’t think they can make a difference.

“I’m here to tell you, there is not a single person on the face of the planet that does not have a skill set and does not have a passion that can have a positive impact on another human being,” Courtney said.

If each of us decides to be part of the solution — and little by little, each of us does what we can — we can chip away at the dysfunction.

“It’s going to take an army of normal folks — not the government, not the smart people on CNN and Fox, not the people with the social media,” he said. “It’s us. If we actually said, ‘I’m going to employ my passion and my skill set in areas of need,’ if we had millions of people doing that — this will change us.”

“An Army of Normal Folks” with Bill Courtney is supported by Stand Together Foundation, which empowers individuals to reach their full potential through community-driven change.

Learn more about Stand Together’s efforts to build strong and safe communities and explore ways you can partner with us.