The podcast Guiding Growth: Conversations with Community Leaders from the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, event and meeting venue Modern Moments and the Gilbert Independent/yourvalley.net explores the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. This partial transcript of the most recent podcast with Fran Lowder has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Fran Lowder is the appointed president of For Our Town Gilbert, an organization that brings together the leaders of government, education, faiths, businesses, charities and more to focus on the community social uplifting needs like domestic violence elimination, mental health awareness-improvement, hunger, shelter, and many more. During the first year of service the group grew For Our Town quarterly breakfast to more than100 participants, a food drive that has collected over 500,000 pounds of food; and thousands of school supplies. 

Before leading For Our Town, Lowder helped to bring the JustServe initiative to Arizona. JustServe is a website that connects volunteers with nonprofits. She also is the co-director of the Arizona Light the World Giving Machines with her husband Steve. Giving Machines are vending machines that allow the user to give to those in need by buying items for charities that are loaded in the machines. The machines support 30 charities this past year and raised $1.5 million for the charities. She’s co-led this work for seven years and raised more than $6 million dollars total. 

She and her husband of 36 years have four children, one grandson and a granddaughter on the way. 

I know you shared with us your mom's selflessness in terms of service to others, and I would love it if you would share some of the examples of the ways that she also served her community and served. 

We were crossing the border, and this was Christmas break and it was cold and windy and snowy, and it was awful out there. And she puts the car in park and we're actually on the border. So it's like a good incline. You're not supposed to stop your vehicles. This is like the '80s, but still not supposed to. But all along the border, there are people that are asking for handouts and things like that. And she saw her before I did. She jumped out of the car and there was a mother, and she had a baby and a sling on the front, a toddler on the back, probably a 5- or 6-year-old at her feet. And then she had two others that were asking for handouts. And all she had on was a cotton dress, no shoes, no coat, nothing. And my mom jumped out of the car, took off her jacket and wrapped her around and she said something, whispered something in Spanish — my mom's fluent — and whispered something to her and then got back in the car.  

But that's just something that my mom, that was who she was in everything she did until the day she died. She was serving others. 

I want to touch a little bit on the work that you and Steve have done over the last decade of your life and how that service has impacted our community and our state. Why don't you share a little bit about justserve.org and the Light the World Giving Machines?  

Justserve.org started with a website that we got put in charge of bringing to the Valley 13 years ago. And I remember Kayla Kolar, and she was at the (HD South) museum at the time, and she goes, “It's a what?”  

“And I said, it's an opportunity to put your needs, your service needs, because you had to be a 501c3 in order to put your service needs on justserve, still do. And I said, you can put your needs on this website and then we're going to help you get volunteers now. And so I explained it, it was a very new concept for these charities to actually be able to identify their needs. plus where are these volunteers going to come from? And I said, our goal is to get our volunteers to come from the community, high schoolers, stay-at-home moms, businesses. That's where we're going to find your volunteers. And I remember that the missionaries were volunteering for Kayla and helping her there at the museum. And I said, they'll be a big part too. And so we took a lot of flak at the very beginning ... but the vision caught on.  

So then just working in the community right along the same time we were doing justserve is when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came out with this wild idea about a vending machine. And they were given the task of how do you get service opportunities to more people in a very easy way, a very quick way that can benefit these charities. And the Giving Machine was born. So they took out all the candy and the sodas out of a vending machine and they replaced them with cards for nonprofits. And the dollar amount can range anywhere from a couple of dollars all the way up to like $500. And you just go up and you look at the charity, the charity charity's name is on the card as well as the item, and then there's a little description of what that is.  

And then you swipe your card, you choose your card, and they drop. And that's the Giving Machine. 

Share a little bit about what For Our Town Gilbert is and what they do. 

For Our Town is a great organization and it helps bridge gaps and bridge the community to the faith interfaith businesses, schools. It gives us an opportunity to take a look at issues that are happening in our community, and it allows for us to help support what's already there. 

You know, the (Community Engagement) Task Force that (Gilbert Councilmember) Kathy Tilque chaired. Incredible. ... But that task force identified some real issues in our community and For Our Town really picked up to try and figure out what the best way for us was to support.  

We have a quarterly breakfast ... and that quarterly breakfast brings in topics, hot topics that our community is facing, and we bring in specialists and we network and we have over 100 guests that come to our breakfast. And it's just a wonderful thing.