Filed under: Inspirational Thoughts, Social Change | Tags: change, children, geography, travel
By Cheryl Mahoney
Just a brief post today. I’ve been meaning to update on a story I shared last May, about 11-year-old Zach Bonner who was in the midst of a more than 1200 mile walk to the White House, in an effort to raise awareness of childhood homelessness.
Well, here’s the good news–he made it! Zach, with hundreds of people walking in support, marched up to the White House on July 9th.
I would’ve loved to be there, if only California wasn’t a bit far from Washington, D.C. Though apparently not too far for some people: Zach’s next plan is to walk from Tampa, FL to Los Angeles, CA. Mapquest tells me that that’s 2,532 miles. Lots of luck to him, and I’ll keep an eye out for news to keep you posted!
In the meantime, you can visit The Little Red Wagon Foundation’s website, the nonprofit Zach founded, or read this article about Zach and other young philanthropists in The Washington Post.
Filed under: Inspirational Thoughts, Volunteering | Tags: Insights, Inspiring Stories, International Volunteering
by Anis Salvesen
Tony Deifell was a photographer. He had a fear of losing his sight that he compares to the fear concert pianists have of losing their fingers. This project, of teaching photography to the visually impaired, was a little bit about facing that fear. But more importantly, it was about helping kids express themselves in an unconventional way, thereby helping everyone who came across their work to see the world through a different lens.
So what happens when you spend five years teaching visually impaired children photography? Well, if you’re Tony Deifell, who in addition to being a visual artist is also a social entrepreneur, you end up with some great lessons about innovation (“seeing things differently in the broadest sense”) and leadership (“acting on what you see and helping other people to see”).
You can watch a really great presentation by Tony , where he speaks to Google employees at Mountain View as part of the Authors@ Google program, on YouTube. The video is 51 minutes long, and though it’s definitely worth watching in its entirety, I thought I would share just a few great parts of the presentation. The common thread in the many stories he shares is actually the physics of light. He groups the stories according to the following: Distortion, Refraction, Reflection, Transparence and Illuminance.
At the beginning of his presentation, Tony asks his audience to look for themselves in the pictures and their accompanying stories. So that is what I did, only I looked for both insights about myself personally and insights about UniversalGiving.
Distortion - One of the distortions Tony mentioned is fear. Who can’t relate to that?
For me a big fear has always been sharks. As a kid, though perfectly cognizant of the impossibility, I was afraid to go in the deeper end of the kiddy pool because it seemed like an excellent place for sharks to lurk.
As far as the applicability of this metaphor to UniveralGiving, I think there is sometimes a “fear” of volunteering, especially in an international setting, and we help people see past that.
Refraction – Tony shared a wonderful African folk tale, which you’ll have to watch the YouTube video to hear (minute 31:57). But the moral of the story was that each of us sees only fragments of what’s really out there, of what’s possible.
Not only does UniversalGiving take part in this sharing of knowledge through our own website, but we also watch presentations like this one online, read other people’s blogs to learn from them and in turn share that knowledge.
Reflection – This is about one’s values. What values do you hold so dear that they are part of the fabric of your being? It’s funny that just yesterday, Pamela, our CEO, gave an interview and talked about how you can’t turn off your passion. She gives of herself all day, helping others to give, but when she goes home, it’s not like she’s done giving for the day. For example, she often takes delicious leftovers and shares them with the homeless on her walk home.
Transparence – Tony describes this as “ being open and candid and connected in the world, and is about breaking down the barriers.” What we do at UniveralGiving is break down some of those barriers to volunteering internationally.
Illuminance – This one is great. It is “about the bigger picture.”
Tony was sitting with a student, sorting through her photographs. At first when he saw a photo of a crack in the sidewalk, he thought the young lady who had taken the photograph had meant to capture something else on campus. It turned out, she had deliberately taken a photo of the crack, which she then sent to the school superintendent informing him that the crack was a daily hazard that needed to be fixed.
Who would have expected a visually impaired person to communicate such an issue with a photograph? At UniversalGiving, we daily have our eyes opened to new possibilities, which is part of what makes working and volunteering here so exciting.
So that’s us. When you look for yourself in the photos, what do you see? We hope you share with us some of your own insights. Thank you for reading this blog post, and we look forward to some good stories.
Filed under: Fun Ways to Give, How to Give Daily, Social Change, Volunteering | Tags: free ways to give, take action
By Cheryl Mahoney
Have you ever looked up the bus schedule, while standing at a bus stop? Or sat in a restaurant and looked up the difference between “sate” and “satiate”? If so, odds are good you have a smart phone. In that case, this post is for you, because I’ve found a resource to do something really smart on your phone–and not only smart, but giving, too.
I’m talking about microvolunteering. We’re all busy–that’s pretty much a given. If you don’t have time to spend two weeks in Costa Rica, or even a Saturday afternoon at Glide Memorial but still want to give back, what do you do? Well, duly noted that I’m a big believer in priorities and that you can make space for most things if you really try…but we’re busy, and quick and easy ways to give back can be very appealing. That’s why I do all my searching with GoodSearch, and why I click every day to feed the hungry. Real ways to give that just take a minute or two. And now there’s a way to volunteer that just takes a minute or two as well–that’s the idea of microvolunteering. If you’re sitting at a bus stop–killing time before meeting a friend–waiting in a long line at the store–you can use that time to volunteer.
You can go to The Extraordinaries.org and download their iPhone app, to have microvolunteering opportunities sent right to your phone. You can translate a website, tag images for the Smithsonian, or classify images for NASA (who didn’t want to work for NASA at some point? Even if it was at the age of six). Small things, sure, but that’s the whole idea. The Extraordinaries describe it as “crowdsourcing”–divide up a task and send it out to a crowd, each individual does a tiny part, and see how much gets done. Think about Wikipedia–imagine if one person had to write all those articles! So with the power of the crowd, with everyone doing a little, those spare five minutes spent staring into space, just waiting around, can turn into opportunities for world change.
I have a small confession now. My cell phone is over four years old. It makes calls, it texts, it takes pictures…and that’s pretty much it. Second confession: I rather like it that way. My cell phone is small, rounded, flippy, the same one that Orlando Bloom had in Elizabethtown, and it does pretty much everything that I need it to do. I don’t need my phone to play music or check my email or clean the kitchen sink. But I do rather regret that I can’t use it for microvolunteering. That won’t make me run out and buy an iPhone, but I will keep an eye out for a good way to microvolunteer that can be done despite my old phone–and when I find something I’ll let you know (and if you see something, let me know!)
And in the meantime, I just really enjoy the fact that this concept even exists. I love all the cool new ways people find to change the world.
by Anis Salvesen
There’s a fabulous recent trend of people becoming really excited about volunteering. However, there are still some of us who are sitting on the sidelines waiting for the perfect volunteer opportunity to come along before we jump in.
Recently I was baking cookies, and while they were in the oven becoming extra delicious, I decided to do a quick Google search on why people don’t volunteer. Straight away, I came across a couple interesting links.
One was Top Ten Reasons to NOT Volunteer on Youthnoise.com. It was a list that I suppose was meant to illustrate the lack of substance of most of our excuses for not volunteering. Take, for example, reasons eight and nine: 9. I’m waiting for Spaceman Spinkeedoo to return from planet Zumar with the bag of cheese puffs he stole from me. 8. I’m counting the dust specks in the ray of light from my bedroom window.
Now, I have been guilty of coming up with some pretty creative excuses of my own in the past, but the one which I found deterred me the most was a fear of not liking the volunteer experience. What if I volunteered at a soup kitchen and bumped into someone carrying a couple of pitchers of very hot coffee, and hot black liquid spilled all over that person and me and someone walking by? What if after colliding with the coffee server I then slipped on the caffeinated liquid and pulled the person who tried to help me stand upright down too? This sounds rather far-fetched, but I should tell you that I was one of the clumsiest people in college. I managed to make myself bleed with a gummy worm and hit a tree trunk with the roof of my car without flipping the vehicle over. Yes, I was that clumsy.
But what about most people? Did anyone else share my fear of a bad experience? In conducting my quick Google search, I did notice that at least a couple of sources also mentioned this fear of a bad volunteer experience tarnishing future efforts to volunteer. It makes sense, but there’s something else I should add. Actually, I’ll just paint a quick scenario.
Okay. So say you decide you want to volunteer somewhere. You know you want to go abroad, and you know you want to work with children. So you go to http://www.universalgiving.org because you read our blog, and you like our site, and you select “children” as your focus area. You get 168 results, and you’re really excited because you find a great project with a fantastic organization, and you know it’s fully vetted, or that organization wouldn’t be on our site. So you get any vaccines you need, and you hop on a plane. You get there, and then you realize that the two most obnoxious volunteers in the entire world are your new roommates.
Is this a perfect volunteer experience? No. Does it mean you’re not going to volunteer ever again? Hopefully the answer is also a “no.” Those two crazy volunteers may have driven you insane, but at least they make a good story. They might even be fodder for that book you’ve been thinking of writing.
What I’m getting at is that even if one volunteer experience is far from perfect, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again. Last time we went camping, my husband and I had no tent, so we “slept” in the car with a puppy that refused to stop barking at the dog in the next camp site. My husband burned himself making dinner, and in the morning he awoke to realize he had a really bad flu. Our speedometer stopped working minutes after we got on the road to head home – this was after I awoke the entire campground by stepping on the gas instead of on the brake pedal on our way out. We took a one hour detour to see a lighthouse that we ended up not actually being able to see because of the thickest fog ever, and then we narrowly missed hitting a cow that decided to wander onto the road.
We’re hoping to go camping again in August. I hope if you’ve had a bad volunteer experience that you also try again. Thanks for reading this blog post!
Filed under: Inspirational Thoughts | Tags: change, future, hope, moon landing
By Cheryl Mahoney
When I was in history classes, sometimes it felt as though all we studied was one war after another. It was always heartening to be able to point to the moon landing as one historic event that wasn’t violent and was, I think, truly about achieving a dream.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” –John F. Kennedy
“That’s one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.” –Neil Armstrong, upon stepping onto the moon
“Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.” –inscription on a plaque left on the surface of the Moon
Walking on the moon may not have much directly to do with philanthropy, but I think there are few things more symbolic of the ability of humanity to achieve whatever we set our minds to. Forty years ago today we went to the moon. Let’s set our minds on changing the Earth.
