The $5 philanthropist

At the end of the day (the only time I have to organize my thoughts), I am finding I just don't have time to write a blog entry. Too much going on and too much need to spend my precious down-time with Jess and family and friends.

So I've taken to video blogging and here is my first post:



Also, you can find me on Twitter where I'm micro-blogging my day.

Labels: blog, charity, givemeaning, philanthropy, video

This note is directed at everyone who sent stamps and soda-can tabs in support of my Blog appeal that I posted back in the summer.

My Gramma had just moved into a long-term care home and was understandably depressed. One of the aspects of freedom that she lost in moving to this new care-home was the ability to collect used stamps and soda-can tabs to send to the BC Guide Dogs Society

I didn't think there was a financial benefit to the charity that could be derived from soda-can tabs and stamps but upon further investigation, found out that BC Guide Dogs Society receives more than $1000 a year from this simple act. That's a lot of dog food!

So, given that my Gramma couldn't collect these stamps and soda-can tabs, I decided to take up a collection through this blog and made an appeal to the readers to "Send me their junk." Within days, stamps and soda-can tabs started arriving from post-marks around the World!

Unfortunately, before I could complete the project, my Gramma passed away but a few days before she died, I showed her a picture of a collage of some of the soda-can tabs and stamps that had been collected. She was very moved.

Shortly after her death in September, I finished the product and this Podcast is a must-watch for anyone who participated.

Many thanks to all who honored my Grandmother with their participation in this project.

Labels: bc, charity, givemeaning, guidedogs, podcast, vancouer

Gayle Roberts is hosting the Giving Carnival this month and has suggested I contribute an entry on the "future of fundraising."

For those of you coming from the Giving Carnival that don't know me, I started GiveMeaning.com three years ago as a place for individuals and organizations to post project-specific appeals and provide donors with hassle-free, tax-efficient way to contribute and "evangelists" the means by which to promote the fundraising appeal online within their social networks.


The last time I contemplated the future, it was in 4th grade and I was convinced that by 2001, we would all personal robot assistants and flying cars. Humbled by my lack of prescience, I haven't sought to prognosticate since.

Let's see... In the year 2017, Bob Geldof will turn 65 and it will be two years after the Millennium Development Goals' first major milestone. I predict that Bob Geldof will launch the "Blue" campaign, rallying senior citizens to donate their "blue hair special" discounts to a newly formed organization called the Octagenarian Promise. But seriously folks...

I'm worried. Here's why:

1) Messaging & Delivery: First to delivery. In the early 1970s, it was inconceivable that a television ad could deliver a message in less than 1 minute. By the early 80s, that had dropped to about 45, by the mid to late 80s it was 30, and now it's conceivable to deliver a full message in 5 to 10 seconds. I'm the son of an English professor, I was a voracious reader until my late teens but now my eyes can't even stay focused on an entire newspaper or magazine article. This is not because of undiagnosed ADD but rather because of a "compression of messaging."

Now, when I advise consumer brands, I advise on how to embrace this compression of messaging because if the message of "buying this product makes you a happier/sexier/healthier person," that's all that's needed. But every fundraising campaign is also an awareness campaign, trying to actually inform and educate people.
I think education can still exist within hyper-compressed messaging but of all the
non-profits and other change-making groups I interact with, this issue is not a priority and for the most part, not on the radar at all. This is NOT just a problem for reaching today's generation 30 and under.

Absent making this a priority, I'm very concerned that many organizations will fail to earn their share of "conversational bandwidth" for both their organization and issue.

On messaging, take a look at this website for Camp Okutta and first click on the Shooting Range and then the Grenade Pit. What's incredibly sad is that when I saw the Shooting Range piece, I accepted it as reality that there was probably a kids camp like this somewhere in the US (sorry, but I envisioned this as "Blackwater for Kids.")

With "embedded reporting", pornography becoming mainstream, the content of the top-selling video-games, the rising popularity of characters like Nancy Grace and for that matter, Anderson Cooper, it's harder to shock us, to enrage us, to engage us. We now expect bad news, horrific imagery. We consume this unemotionally, disengaged. This means that our stories from the field are becoming "consumer news" in ways that don't provoke reaction in the same ways as before.

The problem is that if we in the non-profit sector "sink" to the levels of mass-media engagement, we're most certainly doomed but if we don't find a way by which to create our "content" in ways that people seek to engage, we're also in trouble.

2) Online fundraising risks becoming a victim of it's own success.

The more that online fundraising tools are embraced, the more likely that online fundraising (in most of its current form) will become less meaningful. In other words, the more emails we get from our social network, the more likely we are to see any appeal as "spam." When I started GiveMeaning three years ago, I made it clear that I didn't want to create a donor portal recognizing, that "most people don't wake up and think 'geez where do I want to give today?'" And I still believe that to be true. We're almost entirely fundraiser-centric, meaning that very few people come to our site looking to give away their money.

That said, I think one of the predictions I will boldly make is that we're going to see that online fundraising tools will plateau and perhaps even start a decline and that we'll start to see a rise in "donor-centric" sites.



This chart maps the popularity of five websites. Hugg, DonorsChoose, NetworkForGood, Kiva and Care2.com. The x axis displays the "traffic rank" (1 being highest) and the y axis is a 6-month plot of time. This graph shows that Care2.com (which has no online fundraising or donation functionality) leading the pack, followed by Kiva.org, then Hugg.com (a user-generated environmental news site), and then NetworkForGood (notice the "lumpiness" of website traffic") followed by a couple of big spikes for DonorsChoose during year-end and holiday season but falling-off after that.

For me, the future lies somewhere between Kiva and Care2. Kiva has managed to create micro-content that engages the small donor in repeat visits to the site and invests them in a specific outcome. Care2 is a site that provides news stories, discussion and other community tools to engage people around the issues they are most passionate about.

I see a migration from "reactionary" to "exploratory" in the online fundraising world where peer-to-peer funding will go from "asking" to "collaboration"

That's the direction I'm committed to taking GiveMeaning...

Lastly,the other point is that no organization should have to maintain a ten different profiles, accounts etc. The fundraising sites that are going to be still operating in 2017 are the ones that are publishing feeds from a central organization source. There will also be new "middleware" opportunities for vendors to manage donor communication but what is now called "Donor Relationship Management (DRM)" is going to be very different because it's going to be more about tracking all of these small micro-campaigns, both in terms of performance and media syndication.

So that's my vision. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is the Blue Campaign.

I think I might try a separate post on the actual fundraising industry but these are my thoughts on the future of online fundraising.

Labels: charity, fundraising, givingcarnival, philanthropy, The Giving Carnival

Ever since the day I wrote this post, I've been thinking a lot about challenges facing New Canadians, especially those who are coming to Canada as refugees or who come in hopes of escaping poverty.

A friend and colleague recently introduced me to William. William is one of the "Lost Boys of Sudan" and moved to Canada seven or eight years ago.

William has been running an all volunteer-run after-school tutoring program for African kids who are falling behind in school. And here's but one example of the problems facing New Canadians: Kids coming from other countries are assigned to school based on their age. So a 13 year-old kid who has just arrived from Sudan is being put in the same grade as a kid who has lived here all their life. That would be no problem if Sudan taught the same things and had the same level of education as Canada but how likely is that? Never-mind homework! Homework is at least somewhat reliant on having a parent able to oversee, assist or at least encourage the child in their studies but many of the parents of these kids never had the opportunity to be educated, leaving the kid alone to study and figure it out. What good is the chance at a new life if they're not supported with the basic ingredients needed to have a chance at succeeding in the new life??

So that's part of the problem. Here's part of the solution: William has been organizing a volunteer-run tutoring program for New Canadian kids struggling at school. According to him, it's pretty ad-hoc and in need of more tutors and in need of a permanent space (the church that they have been using gave notice that they can no longer host the group for free) but from my conversations with William and others like him, I'm beginning to come to a few distinct opinions that I'm going to share in separate blog entries this week.

In summary:

I'm going to argue that it might be a better "investment" for us to focus on the New Canadians arriving here from lives of poverty and conflict;

For those that don't give abroad because "charity begins at home," I'll outline a "two for the price of one offer" (horribly crass but used with the intent to provoke);

I'll expand on what I think is an evolution from "Immigrant" to "New Canadian" to "Canadian" and provide an argument that if we make the investment in the resources needed to make the transition to "Canadian" that we'll create new capital (financial and human capital) that will find its way overseas to address international development issues;

And finally, I'll try and express my thinking around the concept of "business planning" for giving.

Please join the discussion.

Labels: canada, charity, development, immigration, international, migrantworkers, refugee

Just got in from delivering a talk at a noon Rotary club meeting on Vancouver Island. I felt as though my talk was very well received and I had two unexpected bonuses:

I got to see my brother and his girlfriend for a few minutes (currently vacationing nearby) and I got to sit in the copilot's chair on the flight back to Vancouver.

My colleague Nate sent me s link to the following video clip just a few minutes ago:



Geoff (featured in the video) and his girlfriend have been raising money for this project for less than a month and have already raised $4,000! What's more, because of the nature of the project, no tax-receipts can be issued but it hasn't restrained generosity for this project.

The project is a fundraiser for a woman named Natalie Mperheza and her children Bienfait and Kesha. They came from the DR Congo two years ago and now reside in North Surrey in a government subsidized apartment complex.

Natalie and her two young children left DRC about two years ago and immigrated to Canada. I have been talking and thinking a lot about the challenges that face new Canadians and will be writing and Podcasting a lot more on the subject.

Speaking of Podcasts, I uploaded a new episode last night where I interviewed Shawn Smith of "Agents of Change" who recently led a group of young people on a ride from Vancouver to Mexico to raise money through GiveMeaning in support of Kiva's microcredit funds. Shawn was very open about his experiences and it's worth a listen to anyone considering a "bike a thon" or ride as a fundraiser. You can download it by searching the iTunes store for GiveMeaning or come over to GiveMeaning and download it from our site.

Labels: charity, community, fundraising, givemeaning

Yesterday, Terri Polet (a fundraiser at GiveMeaning) called the office. She told me that her sister runs a hot-dog stand in Toronto and had been using one of our Pig-e-Banks to collect spare change in support of Terri's fundraising initiative

Her sister Marianne has already raised over $100 in spare change through her Pig-e-Bank . So yesterday, I posted a Facebook note and tagged many of my friends living in Toronto. I asked whether anyone would be willing to take a picture of the Pig-e-Bank at Marianne's hot-dog stand and the very next morning: voila!

I met Jamie Drayton at this year's Mesh Conference. He's started a site called "Be a Good Buzz" which is a user-generated content site posting heart-warming, inspiring content.

In Jamie's post about the Pig-e-Bank and Marianne's hot-dog stand, he included link to a video about Marianne who is a bit of a living legend in Toronto.

Go to Jamie's post and click on the video link.

I'm honored that our little Pig-e-Bank is part of Marianne's stand.

To see the project that the Pig-e-Bank is benefiting, click here

I love how a real-world action was easily instigated through Facebook.

Labels: charity, facebook, fundraising, pig-e-bank, toronto

In the mail today, I received my first package of stamps in response to the recent request I made on this blog!

The stamps came from the good folks at Bluelime media and I'm most grateful!

After I posted my appeal, Darren Barefoot blogged about it and I'm pretty sure that the Bluelime folks heard about the appeal through Darren's blog. Many thanks Darren!

For those of you not familiar with my appeal, it's so simple: I'm asking that you cut the top right-hand corner of envelopes you receive in the mail and send them to me in the mail. Also, for you soda can or beer can drinkers, send me the "tabs" on the top of the can. Mail them to me here:

Attn: Tom's Gramma Fund
45 Dunlevy Ave, Suite 230A
Vancouver, BC V6A 3A3

My Gramma is no longer in independent living and the transition to a full-fledged care home has been very depressing for her and all of us that love her.

My Gramma recently told me that one of the things she most laments about losing her independence is that she can no longer send used stamps and soda-can tabs to the BC Guide Dogs Society. This great charity which provides guide dogs to sight-challenged people encourages people (especially seniors) to send stamps and soda-can tabs in to the charity who then sells the stamps and recycles the tabs and makes more than $1,000 a year from this simple act.

If I can collect enough stamps and soda-can tabsby July 31st, the BC Guide Dogs society might bring in one of their Guide Dog pups for a visit to my Gramma's care-home, something I know would cheer-up many of the residents there.

Please take a few moments out of your day to put aside your soda-can tabs and used stamps. I'll be sure to recognize each contributor on my blog and post pictures of the guide dog visit on this blog.

Many thanks!

Labels: bc, charity, donation, gramma, guidedogs, simpleacts, vancouver

I have been doing a lousy job blogging. Amongst all of my friends, there is growing consensus that we really don't want to hear how "busy" anyone is so I won't cite the b-word for why I haven't been doing the b-thing. Instead, I'll just tell you about my Gramma.

Without my Gramma (Betty), I wouldn't be here. Not the here here that every grandkid can say about their grandparents but the here in the story-line of "I got my start at Apple as a teenager" here.

When I got the invitation to meet John Sculley (my then hero) before he gave a keynote speech at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in May of 1993, my parents were just going through a divorce and we couldn't afford the cost of going to California.

My mum borrowed money from my Grandma (not a wealthy person by any stretch) and on May 15th, 1993, it all got going. I met Sculley, we exchanged cards, I met most everyone else in Apple's senior management team and the next year, I had a job offer.

Fast-forward to today: My Grandma is now 89 years old and has recently moved from independent living into a care-home. She is - understandably - not at all happy.

One of the things she had to give-up with her loss of independence is something I'm hoping you can help me with: She used to collect used stamps and soda-can "tabs" to send to the BC Guide Dogs Society. She displays a picture of a Guide Dog that the money made from her used stamps and soda-can tabs helped to train. It's already sad that she shares a room with two other women who are basically catatonic, and the loss of this ability to contribute to one of her favorite charities just exacerbates an already crummy situation.

So I called the BC Guide Dogs office because I was a little unsure of whether they actually wanted used stamps and soda-can tabs. In fact, not only was I unsure but I was entirely skeptical. I left a message in the very early morning (about 630am) on BC Guide Dogs' main phone-line and by 11am they had already called me back!

The person I spoke with told me that they make a thousand dollars a year or more from the soda-can tabs and stamps that they receive. What's more, the stamps are processed by visually-challenged people.

Here's what I'd like to ask of anyone reading this blog: Cut-out the top right-hand corner of your envelopes that you receive and send them to me along with any soda-can tabs. Mail them to me at 45 Dunlevy Ave, Suite 230A Vancouver, BC V6A 3A3

If I can collect enough of them by July 31st, 2007, there's a good chance that the folks at BC Guide Dog Society might bring one of their dogs to my Gramma's care home for a visit with her and all of the other residents.

It's such a simple request. It can help a great charity and bring a lot of joy to the residents of this care home, especially my dear Gramma.

I'll be checking my mailbox daily.

Have a great Canada Day!!!!

Labels: charity, guidedogs, simpleacts, vancouver

The latest GiveMeaning Podcast is up which can be downloaded free here at iTunes

This episode I start to address something I think we all need to be talking about a lot more: How the basic term "admin costs" have become so unfairly perceived by many donors, a perception that I readily admit project-oriented fundraising like what GiveMeaning does contributes to the negative perception around admin fees.

I also talk about my experience as a fundraiser using an online fundraising page at GiveMeaning and what I learned from the experience.

Anyway, have a listen and let me know what you think.

Labels: charity, fundraising, givemeaning, philanthropy, podcast

A bit groggy this morning. Woke up at 5:30am to speak at a Rotary Club meeting early this morning.

I found this story within the news section of the GiveMeaning site.

It's long over-due and it will be interesting to hear Mr. Giujin's official statements.

In other news, I found this article through my Google Reader this morning talking about different approaches to Corporate Philanthropy. Though it is specifically referring to Australian companies, it's good reading for anyone in corporate philanthropy as it raises the question that I think needs more conversation around: "Are corporate donors dealing with the real needs of the sector or are they more inclined to fund high-profile, simplistic, and sometimes ineffective, feel-good projects?" is the question asked by Niall Mulligan.

The answer should be both and at first blush, it might seem unfair to generalize but I do see this distinct dichotomy that the author flags. There is a new breed of community engagement consultants who are emphasizing "high-touch" projects that can mobilize their client's employees in ways that a three-year capacity grant to a sexual assault centre can't do. When these high-touch projects are designed more around looking and feeling good then around an impact/investment ratio, there is cause for concern.

I've been harping on this theme all week - the "feel good versus the know good" which may in fact be the perfect play on words.

On point, I'll leave you with this link from - of all places - PerezHilton.com. It's a strange day when Clay Aiken has got something poignant to say about what was missing from Idol Gives Back"

Labels: causemarketing, charity, csr, idolgivesback, marketing, media, philanthropy

A thirteen year-old stabs her best friend near fatally. My brother's high school three blocks from my childhood house is closed due to a man seen with ammunition. This was tonight's broadcast in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Anderson Cooper had tornado's and flooding in one part of the US and severe droughts in another part.

The Globe & Mail reported that despite massive gains in our economy, 1 in 8 children live in families under the povery line, and according to the same article, the instances of poor children are the same now in 2007 as they were in 1989, the year Canadians supposedly resolved to drastically reduce the number of poor children in Canada by 2000.

The likelihood of achieving anything close to the much-hyped Millennium Development Goals...

Meanwhile, somewhere in Africa, a white person takes pictures of little children, makes promises, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Say nothing of our culture, our priorities, what and who we worship, the pervasiveness of perverse and violent imagery that is truly warping our minds ...

Is all it futile? Probably. But it's my battle. I fight because it's what I consider worth dying for. The parts of Rilke that I read, I remember this (a horrible, bastardized paraphrasing): Writers write because they HAVE to write. They have no choice.

In answer to my earlier post tonight, there IS something wrong with mindless giving, with celebrity marketing, with all this complete and utter bullshit that has nothing to do with anything other than the marketing of a "feel good" effect.

If there's one group that shouldn't sell-out, it's those who are trying to save lives and change the world. Too bad. The path of least resistance is the road most traveled.

My pleasure, my inspiration comes from the crazies, the stupid, the irrational. They change the world. I will leave you with this.

Labels: charity, ideas, inspiration, philanthropy

I applaud the Viennese for creative fundraising ideas but something tells me this story wouldn't translate well as a fundraiser in North America. What do you think?

Labels: arts, charity, fundraising ideas, library

This morning I walked a mile in Women's shoes in my hometown of Victoria, BC. The walk was in support of Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre and it was a smashing success!

I'm just short of $2,500 in donations made and still half-way there to having to shave my beard but I'm keeping my fundraising page open for a few more days. I've shaved my legs, pedicured my feet, walked a mile and had cat-calls from passers-by in my hometown. Isn't that worth $20 or $50? Click here to make a donation and show your support.

On my fundraising page, I also have a number of other photos from today's event.

And, if you know any woman who wears a size ten medium, she might want to bid for the shoes I wore in today's event. I placed them for sale on eBay in hopes that someone might want to buy my beautiful shoes.

Thanks to everyone who supported me. I'll be posting video from the event early this week.

Labels: charity, fundraising, victoria, vwsac, walkamileinhershoes, women, womensrights

Here is a picture of the shoes I bought tonight for my 1 mile walk in women's shoes in Victoria this Saturday in support of Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre.

If you haven't donated yet, maybe this picture will compel you do so.

The pair of shoes I bought tonight are a sexy size-10 stiletto's. I'm either going to donate the shoes after the event to a women's shelter or sell them on eBay... Any one who can fit a size 10, email me if you want to place your bids today.

Labels: charity, fundraising, philanthropy, victoria, walkamileinhershoes, womensrights

A new Podcast episode is up and available for download from iTunes! If you download it, here a few listener's notes that go along with this episode.

A few details to follow-up on from this episode:

[1:08] Here is the survey results I mentioned from Valleywag. I misspoke: Kiva was #4 out of 20.

[5:23] The guys I refer to can be found at GiveMeaning by clicking here

[7:17] The blog I refer to can be found here

[8:23] I was thinking about Ghana.

[11:30] Of course, the argument here about the "industry of aid" is that this is still economic stimulus for the local community. The point I didn't make clear was that this person's cynicism was the Westerners profit-participation in the aid-industry.

[16:12] I'm an idiot. I said "A Country like Africa." Africa is a continent not a country.

[16:58] Firm evidence I love to opine even when I know little about the subject at hand.

[17:07] Check out WorldOfGood here. Fair disclosure: They have advertised previously at GiveMeaning.

[24:29] Here is a link to the article submitted at GiveMeaning.

[32:33] I'm not talking about just "other atrocities" but any issue that needs the attention of the entire GiveMeaning community.

Labels: activism, charity, darfur, givemeaning, kiva, microfinance, microlending, philanthropy, podcast, sudan

In my Google Reader the other night, I found a post by Amy Tiemann at the MojoMom Blog entitled "Fast-Food Philanthropy" talking about the recent "Idol Gives Back" American Idol campaign to raise money for charities seeking to address poverty in America and abroad. I wrote the following comment in response to her blog entry:


Thanks for your post. I can only imagine the negotiations that went on behind the scenes between the orgs that are to receive this money and the producers of Idol Gives Back.

As is the case with many big appeals (e.g. Make Poverty History, Live8 etc), the actual highlighting of individual charities in a piece like Idol Gives Back would be fraught with the brand managers of those charities squabbling over how they are represented, worried that they would lose a percentage of the pie, as opposed to think about how the pie is increased from mass-media events like Idol Gives Back.

Idol is one of the most valuable pieces of television programming on the network, certainly much more watched than the late-night and weekend appeals put on by the big international charities.

The fact that IGB's appeal speaks and incites action amongst a group of people most likely not otherwise conscious of the plight of African Countries is indeed a good thing. And while it leaves people to get that "quick satisfaction" that placates their need to do more than "phone it in" the reality is that for many citizens, this is all they are capable of.

I have lamented the fact that most all big appeals have little to no meaningful feedback. Long ago, I coined the term "Return On Generosity" to refer to the fact that without this measure, most of us are unlikely to remain invested.

What's wrong with Fast-Food Philanthropy is that the producers have forgotten to include the "toy in the happy meal" that makes one want to come back and collect the other toys on my next purchase.

I hate ending on such a stupid analogy but hey, I'm hungry and I'm in need of some fast-food.

Labels: americanidol, charity, fundraising, idolgivesback, marketing, philanthropy

Friday's are usually my slowest day. We have a team get together scheduled every Friday where we go for either a lazy lunch or a movie or something else meant for us to discuss the week and connect as a team. I try to keep my meetings light as a result. The morning started nicely as I read an email to my wife that I had received late last night from someone that had heard my speech in Campbell River. It was great validation of the immense amount of myself that I give whenspeaking at schools.

My policy is to try and meet with as many people who ask for my time as possible. And I must admit, sometimes I feel (especially with all the other demands on my time) that I should be more strict with my time but I've always believed that for every meeting that I feel misused my time..That it will all balance out.

A man called me last week saying he was from an African country and telling me that he was a survivor of torture and wanted to do some things back home for other survivors. He was scheduled for 10:30. Yesterday afternoon, a local Vancouver man called and said he had read some press on GiveMeaning and wanted to meet quickly just to learn more about what we do. I was more reticent to accept (not wanting to schedule anything that might make me miss my time with the team). I told Ruby (my assistant) not to agree to anything.

The man from Africa was late this morning. I was busy with a number of end-of-the-month issues so was happy to have the extra time. When he arrived at my office, I was still distracted with administrative tasks. I asked him to tell me his story. He apologized in advance, saying it was very difficult to tell his story. I started to focus in on him. As I did so, I noticed aspects of his physical appearance that made me think he had some physical disabilities.

Over the next two hours, he recounted his life from 2 years old to a man of 30 something. I had originally written an account of his story but have decided to delete it as I know I can't recount his story to you. What I can say is that this man sobbed through his life story, and saddened me with a story that filled me with hate, cynicism, and shock (in the truest sense that I was left without words, thoughts or even ability to respond to what I was hearing). This is a man that has been repeatedly tortured to inches within his life and harassed and intimidated even after fleeing his country and arriving in Canada.

This man came to me not asking for anything for himself but wanting to help people worse-off (I quite frankly can't even fathom how that's possible) than him, still living in his home country. He has every right to be entirely self-absorbed, tell his story to garner financial support for himself and his family and yet he's tenacious in his desire to support people who he feels need the support more than him.

I introduced this man to colleagues here at GiveMeaning who met with him separately to talk more about the specific project he wants to do back in his home country.

Ruby told me that the man who had called yesterday looking for "20 minutes" (I have never had a 20 minute meeting with a stranger in my life). I relented begrudgingly. Meeting with him would mean missing my time with the team but something in me told me I needed to meet with him.

By the time he came to the office, the team was leaving the office, leaving me to man the phones by myself. I apologized for having to interrupt our meeting but sitting in my office and listening to how I answer questions about the site is probably one of the best introductions to everything that GiveMeaning is. The more we talked, the more I wanted to say to this guy, in part because I was certainly robbed of my normal pretenses (i.e. armor) from the man I met in the morning.

In one of the phone calls that interrupted the meeting, I told someone about my fundraising page for Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre. At the end of my meeting, I ended the first meeting how I almost always end first meetings about GiveMeaning: "Hey, just go on the site and if you see something you like, make a donation or if you can't find something, submit a news story or your own project proposal." He responded by emptying everything he had in wallet on the spot. It ended up being $400. I was totally and completely floored.

The next meeting after that was a friend of someone who works here at GiveMeaning who , upon hearing about what GiveMeaning is all about, wants to create a free radio ad for us! By the time that I started my meeting with him, I was (and am still) emotionally run-down. The generosity of spirit that I am exposed to, and the serendipity that occurs in my life on an almost daily basis day chose to fully whack me over the head today.

I am incredibly blessed. For all who ask why I do what I do, the answers are above.

Labels: charity, givemeaning, grassroots, gratitude, philanthropy

I arrived into Campbell River this afternoon. I'm pretty sure that the pilot of our small plane forgot that there were people on board as he essentially dive bombed us onto the runway. An adventurous beginning to day.

I spoke at a secondary school here in town this afternoon and was saying to my friend Ryland that I never really know whether I made an impact or not. Though it sounds cheesy, I really do believe that inspiring just one person justifies the expense and time that these trips cost. I find that most students prefer to ask me questions one-on-one, not in the actual Q&A session but today, I had two great questions asked of me: 1) Do you have any pet projects? (Answer: My fundraiser for Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre and my Project to help raise funds for Yves) and 2) Who do I look up to?

That question really got me thinking. Though I admire parts of various high-profile people, there isn't one person I really get totally excited about. As I thought about the question more, I realized that the people that I really admire are a lot of the people that I find through GiveMeaning. Guys like Logan Cochrane, and Chris & Jeannie and so many other people all around the world doing amazing work and following their passions.

Just a few minutes before writing this blog entry, I noticed that one of the students who attended my talk this afternoon has already created a new proposal at the site. Click on her name on her proposal to read more about her. She is a great example of what I mean by being inspired by many of the people that use GiveMeaning.

The cynic in me says that this sounds like I'm pandering to GiveMeaning members but I promise I'm being entirely sincere when I talk about the inspiration and motivation I draw from our community.



Just finished speaking at a secondary school here in Campbell River. The last time I was here was in transit to Hollyhock on Cortez Island which is a quick water-taxi away from here. My hotel looks out on the docks where the water-taxi is and as the sun is starting to break, the urge to just jump over there is rising.

For those of you that don't know Hollyhock, click here. GiveMeaning is one of the sponsors for the upcoming Social Change Institute.

I jump at the opportunity to go to

Labels: campbellriver, charity, education, inspiration, school, youth

As many of you know, I've had my beard for quite a while. In Entebbe, a vendor said it was the (and I'm quoting exactly) "most glorious beard" he had "ever seen" and asked me to promise him never to shave it. In exchange, he gave me a slight deal on the replacement digital camera that I bought at his store.

Though I am remiss to break my word to this man, I am willing to quite literally sell-out. For a price.

I've decided to walk a mile in women's shoes (literally) in support of a Victoria, BC based charity called Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre.

I've created a fundraising page (at GiveMeaning, naturally!) to collect donations and if I raise $5,000, the beard comes off.

I'm sure that if my wife or my mum had an extra $5,000 to spare, they would gladly give the whole amount. But the whole point of a GiveMeaning page is about pooling together small donations to accomplish the bigger goal.

So, if you want to see my face again, click here and give generously!

I'll keep y'all posted.

Labels: charity, fundraiser, givemeaning, sexualviolence, victoria, walkamileinhershoes, womensrights

Well, I've finally gotten my first podcast uploaded to iTunes. For those iTunes users, you can download it from them here here
or if you don't use iTunes, you can get it here

The interview was recorded with Gavin Hollett, one of the founders of Opportunity Aequa, a Victoria-based non-profit that has raised nearly $15,000 through GiveMeaning to build soccer fields and bring soccer equipment to kids in Ecuador.

I blogged about Gavin just before he left for Ecuador but had no idea that he and the team would do such a good job of blogging while in Ecuador.

Their project is the best example of delivering their donors a "Return On Generosity." Go to their page and click on the "Blog" tab and read through their almost daily posts.

The Podcast is the first of what hopefully will be a regular series of interviews of project founders on GiveMeaning. Please let me know what you think of the Podcast.

Massive thanks to Ryland Haggis of RedPilot for creating the Podcast!

Labels: charity, media, nptech, philanthropy, podcast, web

At 6am this morning, we launched a brand-new version of the GiveMeaning website.

As most of you know, we here at GiveMeaning have been hard at work on a new version of the site since last September. We have codenamed this new site "SaveAnything" because one of the most significant new features of this site is that you can submit any news story that addresses something that needs "saving" to the site, tag the story based on what causes it's addressing and geotag the story (i.e. pinpoint the exact location of the story).

The original inspiration for GiveMeaning was from a news article that I read written by Christie Blatchford about a boy named Randall Dooney who was murdered by his father and step-mother. I was so shocked and horrified that this kind of abuse was known but not prevented in time that I wanted to DO SOMETHING about what I was reading. I went online but there was nothing I could easily find. While I spent hours looking (I wasn't working at the time), most people would spend a few minutes and if there was no gas to ignite that spark into action, it would just be a spark.

So now, there is a place where any news story in the world, no matter how local or global in context, not only can you raise awareness about that issue but by submitting a proposal, you can actually DO something about it, rate other proposals, see active projects that might match-up with the story and talk amongst a community of people that care about this news story. Later, we'll add other contextual relevance.

For the first time in many years, I've been able to apply my brain for new technology to my passion for philanthropy. When GiveMeaning first came onto the scene, it was an innovative use of existing technology for the philanthropic sector but it wasn't from a tech-execution perspective anything new. Here we have with this launch a number of new innovations that contribute to the general web world as well as the philanthrosphere.

A more thoughtful rating system
Most of the social bookmarking sites are strictly binary: You either agree or disagree on that story. On most social bookmarking sites, I find myself mindlessly clicking on stories based on a headline. Mindlessness will actually degrade a user's reputation on the site.

What we've done is created a real demand on the user to actually think about the story before rating it, knowing that it's not how many people have rated the story but how the community agrees with your rating of the story that influence your rating. In other words, we want people to submit a story that says "look, I feel that this a very important issue but the quality is rather week however it does detail the crisis in Darfur in a way that hasn't been covered before." You may rate the story's importance as a 5, its quality as a 2 and the informativeness as a 4.

Because we ask that when a new story is submitted, that the person submitting the story credit the actual writer of the story, the forth rating box is the "Source" rating which is scored by the credibility (based on past ratings) of BOTH the writer of the article and the person who submitted the story at GiveMeaning. Soon we will be able to show the actual ratings of individual writers and bloggers on an issue by issue basis (as determined by the GiveMeaning community).

Individual members of the community are not rewarded based on the number of stories they submit but rather based on their ability to be respected for their contributions and the accuracy of those contributions by the community at large.

This rating system is now applied across everything at the site. The reason I am excited about the rating system for new "proposals" and active projects is that it creates a feedback loop amongst the community to the "founder" of the proposal or project. Previously, if the community thought that the proposal addressed an important need but lacked detail and quality of the proposal, the proposal would likely just "die on the vine." Now, the feedback loop is there which will hopefully inspire project founders to think through how and what they present to the community in a new way.

The map feature is "just a mashup" of projects but is nevertheless very compelling visually. The ability to zoom-in on a tiny town in Malawi gives a whole new context to the project.

A new approach to tagging

We've developed a new collaborative tagging method for all media on the site that I really like. My big problem with leaving tagging something up to the person submitting the story is that this invites tag-spam and inaccuracies. I am guilty of bad tagging of my posts because I'm trying to tag based on what I think will get the most search-engine hits not what is actually most accurate for the story.

So what we've done is that as a logged-in user of the site, you have the ability to vote for the top 5 most accurate tags for that item. You can also "flag" tags that are either inappropriate or poorly submitted. As more people take time to tag the content on the site, the "related projects and proposals" will get a lot more accurate too.

Speaking of tags

The new search system on the site uses a combination of "Location" and "Cause" to help find things that interest you. So for example, by typing in Toronto, I see all the places near Toronto in the location cloud and in the "Cause" cloud, I see all the tags that have been submitted on content located in Toronto. Or, I can type in a tag like "womensrights" and see all the locations in the world where content has been tagged with that description.

We have a bunch of improvements and a new Q&A and About Us section that will launch in the next couple of days. Minor and major improvements will be made in the coming weeks. But I'm thrilled with this new release. We move away from being a site focused purely on "give money to this cause" and more of a place where you can come to find out about what's going on in your own backyard or about a community or cause that matters a lot to you.

Start submitting stories and let me know what you think!

Labels: charity, npotech, online, philanthropy, web, web2

Friends and family, colleagues and strangers!!!! I am over the moon to tell you that tomorrow morning we're going into labor! Alas, not the birth of my first child but the birth of a brand new version of the GiveMeaning site. It is radical both in its technical execution and its contribution to the "online social network" and "philanthrosphere" worlds.

The entire GiveMeaning site will be brought down for 24-36 hours as we migrate to both the new source code and a whole new set of servers.

Look for the new site Saturday afternoon or evening.

To everyone who has contributed to its development, I am so proud of us! To all of our families and friends who have suffered through our stress and long hours, thank you!

To the community of GiveMeaning members whose feedback over the past two years have contributed to the genetic code of this new site, we are grateful.

To those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, go to our new site anytime Saturday. We'll likely "soft launch" this for a week or so to figure out the response and then announce it to the world.

It's time to SaveAnything.

Labels: charity, innovation, npotech, philanthropy, saveanything, web, worldchanging

This is the best spoof of "celebrity compassion" and cause marketing ever done. And of course, it's done by Ricky Gervais. Stay around till the very end. It's absolutely priceless

Labels: africa, aid, appeal, charity, comedy, fundraiser, rickygervais

I'm back from Manitoba and as I look outside, it appears it's going to be a gorgeous day here in Vancouver. In my last blog entry from Manitoba, I had written about how thrilled I was to see Kevin Sites link to a project at GiveMeaning from his Hot Zone blog.

For those of you who don't know Kevin or the Hot Zone, you can learn more here

Kevin had written a story about a young boy named Yubaraj who was supporting his family by working as a parking attendant in Kathmandu. Kevin wrote about Yaburaj as a boy who accepts his responsibility but wishes to return to school.

Christine Egger, a reader of Kevin Sites' post, was so moved by the story that she decided she wanted to do something about what she had read. She found GiveMeaning and started a project to raise funds for his education.

She had raised a bit over $1,000 but the page had been pretty inactive for several months and was becoming time to close the page down to new donations.

But then, last week, we got word that Kevin was going to post an update on Yubaraj and link to Yubaraj's project page at GiveMeaning.

Sure enough, he posted this update and the response has been fantastic! In the last few days donations have been pouring in and donors have been emailing their own friends encouraging them to donate as well. The Yubaraj project is now 50% of it's goal and still going strong!

Through many phone calls and emails, I feel like I got to know Christine and I know how important helping Yubaraj is to her. She has made this her mission and to see this outpouring of support for Yubaraj through GiveMeaning makes me happy for both Yubaraj and Christine.

For GiveMeaning, Kevin linking to Yubaraj couldn't have happened at a better time. We are now days away from launching what is basically a whole new version of the GiveMeaning website. Without spoiling the surprise, I will say that the new site is designed around the deep belief of mine that people are most likely to do something in response to a story the one Kevin wrote. GiveMeaning wants to facilitate that desire in an even more direct way than we already do.

The site launch date has become a bit of a running joke but we're determined to get it as perfect as we can before launching it. It is coming within the next couple of weeks.

Labels: aid, charity, interational, media, yahoo, yubaraj

Alas, so true.

Labels: africa, aid, charity, development, humor

I'm here tonight in Brandon, Manitoba to support my wife, Jessie Farrell, who is starting her tour opening for Emerson Drive. I arrived from Toronto a day earlier than her (we had both been in Toronto earlier in the week) and checked out a local country music talent competition last night at the bar where Jessie will be performing tonight.

I'm very excited about Jess' show tonight. She plays tomorrow in Winnipeg and then rejoins the Emerson tour in the second week of March for dates in Kamloops, Kelowna, Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray.

I've had an incredibly hectic week myself starting in Toronto with some great meetings with both old friends and new. Amongst some of the new friends I met this week were Owen Charters (the new executive director of CanadaHelps.org), Adrian Bradbury (the co-founder of GuluWalk), and Peggie Pelosi (principal of Orenda Connections). I also had the chance to meet-up with some old friends, Mark Dowds and Darian Kovacs. It was great to see them and have a night-out on the town up until the point where I was convinced I had lost my credit cards (turns out they were at the hotel all along).

I had some very exciting business meetings (the most exciting of which I can't talk about in a public forum) and every-time I head out to Toronto, I feel like more of Corporate Canada gets what I've been talking about for the past two years and that more and more big charities are slowly starting to acknowledge that while they might want to own the donor relationship donors increasingly don't want to be owned by anyone.

While in Toronto, I saw Jamie Aaron, the founder of Shift. Jamie reminds me a lot of me when I was younger. In fact, I found out that he and I started our careers in a similar fashion: He managed to convince Apple Computer in Markham to give him a co-op position, I managed to get Apple Cupertino to give me my start. Jamie is surely going to be a major force (for lack of better term) in whatever he does and it's increasingly looking like that force will be used for good. Jamie basically was dissatisfied with the co-op placement opportunities he and his peers were being offered so he decided to start his own placement agency, reaching out to socially responsible and progressive companies and non-profits and playing matchmaker between interested students and these orgs. GiveMeaning is one of the organizations that accepted co-op placements through Shift and I met some great candidates earlier in Toronto. The person I was most impressed with was actually the youngest of the three candidates. I have done a lot of hiring over the years and I'm always amazed at how few people seem adequately prepared for the interview. What impresses me is when someone has researched the company (s)he is applying to and makes the interview as much about the company hiring the candidate as the candidate hiring the company. It's unfortunately rare to find an applicant who does this and so it makes even more of an impact when you find someone who does.

Lastly, I'm excited to say that Kevin Sites (of Yahoo's HotZone) has mentioned and linked to GiveMeaning tonight! Christine Egger, a reader of Kevin's had been touched by this story that Kevin had posted to the Hotzone and wanted to do something about the subject of that particular story. She found GiveMeaning and created this project to raise money for Yubaraj, a young boy living in Khatmandu. I'm hopeful that this exposure will help her reach her goal.

Well, Jess is on soon so I better head over to the North 40 Saloon!

Labels: charity, community, manitoba, toronto

As promised, here is the video interview for Pod 3. Hope the Pig-e-Banks are working out for you guys this weekend.

For Hugh Boyd's Pod 3



Add to My Profile | More Videos

Labels: africa, burundi, charity, nutrition, philanthropy, pod3, rwanda

This post was made by Hannah Lee & Anna Martin, our dynamic duo bringing GiveMeaning to communities across the Country.



So this is what a snowflake looks like!

Anna and I are deploying the Valentine's Day Piggy Box Campaign in the Calgary area this year. From the moment that we touched down from the airplane, I immediately loved the vibe of Calgary. It has a homey feeling to the city and I feel like I am at home. The pace is really nice...no one's in a big hurry to get anywhere but it feels like everybody gets the job done.

I must admit that I have never been so cold in my life. As Anna and I walked from store to store, we had to weather the snow and the storm. My fingers felt like they were going to fall off from the frostbite that was setting in. But, thankfully, after walking in the snow for 6 hours a day, we got to go back to the hotel and go for a hot tub. The soak was my saving grace.

It has been an eventful time in Calgary, and a highlight especially for me, was meeting Evan and Gabe (the project founders for Have a H.A.A.R.T. - tinman.givemeaning.com). Their own personal passion and dedication to getting their project completed was inspiring. Anna and I had a great conversation with them about their project, charity and the whole world of giving.


I am heading back to Vancouver tonight and am already missing Calgary. Although I have felt like I have been in the Artic for a week, I will miss the warmth that I have felt from the city and the people.





Yes, Hannah this is what a snowflake looks like.

I was surprised to find out that Hannah is new to what most Canadians experience every winter and that is a whole lot of snow! I found myself thankful to be in the role of "Canadian Tour Guide" as I have lived in Alberta before and I was able to navigate the streets of Calgary with ease.

Our time spent in Kensington Market and along 17th Ave was well spent. Businesses welcomed our Pig-E-Boxes with great enthusiasm, typical of Calgary's reputation of being the "city of hospitality".

Calgarians even went to the extent of going along with "Where's Pig-E?",our version of "Where's Waldo?" last night at the pub. Hannah and I asked if people could casually place our Pig-E-Box in places around the pub. Please take a look at some of our pictures and see if you can find Pig-E.

All in all we are happy to say that our time in Cow Town was great fun...who knows maybe Calgary will soon be called Pig Town.

Labels: calgary, canada, charity, community, philanthropy, pig-e-bank

On a personal note, I was happy to have Gavin Hollett over at my apartment last night to give him a cheque from the funds he raised at GiveMeaning in support of bringing soccer to a remote, impoverished community in Ecuador. He leaves late tonight.

This project is very special to me for several reasons. Gavin and several other guys all in their early twenties have all played on soccer teams coached by my older brother, Hugh.

Gavin was inspired by Romeo Dallaire's account of seeing young kids in IDP camps during the Rwandan genocide, who despite being surrounded by death and evil, were laughing and smiling playing soccer with a soccer ball made out of plastic bags and twigs.

So this group of guys decided to start collecting used cleats and balls to bring to an impoverished community. It started slowly but gained momentum and credibility and as he leaves tonight, they have raised over $12,000 and received tons of donated equipment!

Late last week, Gavin and a few of his colleagues found out that Romeo Dallaire was speaking in Victoria. They managed to meet him personally and they have a great YouTube clip that they're going to upload of them with Romeo himself talking about what they are doing and applauding their effort.

I'm always excited to see a project get completed, but this project is extra special, given it's personal connection to me and my brother. I was really grateful and honored to hang out with him and his girlfriend on their last night together.

They will be uploading Flickr and YouTube content while in Ecuador. Their blog is also directly imported to their page at GiveMeaning. Check it out at vicsoccer.givemeaning.com

Labels: charity, development, Ecuador, fundraising, philanthropy, soccer

If you haven't seen this already, you have to check it out

A day after Christmas, Philip Greenspun wrote that a friend of his had received a "water buffalo for Christmas from her dad." The gift was made through Heifer International's catalog of "ethical gifts." On their website, they call their catalog "The most important gift catalog in the world." Wow. Quite the claim. We're all familiar with the appeal of buying "ethical gifts" for friends and family. Many international relief and development charities have similar catalogues and new websites have emerged in recent years as online catalogues of these gifts.

Here's the catch: As Phillip's blog post said "If you read the fine print on the page, however, it turns out that there is no actual buffalo and no actual family and you won’t get a photo of your family and your buffalo. The money simply gets dumped into the common fund at the charity. We are trying to decide if this is the crummiest possible Christmas present."

The defense goes like this: "Donors are too lazy, or too uninterested in the details of our activities, so we're going to publish anecdotes that can be easily related and sold to the average consumer." At the best case, this is just lazy and unimaginative and at the worst case, well... In the days of heightened paranoia around "transparency ad accountability" and all of those other multisyllabic words that all cry "who can we trust?" isn't it some relatively dark shade of outright dishonesty?

The other problem with these unethically presented ethical gifts is that they let the donor off the hook. "Well ma, I bought you the Water Buffalo so that's my contribution for the year. Maybe for your birthday, I'll buy a pig, then we'll really have made a difference!"

Not only does it let the donor off the hook but it lessens the likelihood that you can engage that donor in the actual good work that really is happening on the ground.

I think it's high time we treat donors more intelligently, yes, even those that only have $100 to give. Instead of giving them this dumbed-down approach to giving, find new ways to express what it means to take on the problems of a community, embrace media like the one I linked to at the top of this post. Take some of your massive fund-raising budget and spend it on inexpensive video cameras, and a small centrally located edit suite, license some songs, and start posting 'em to YouTube like the clip I posted the other day.

That's the way to engage donors, not treat them like they need to be lied to.

Of course, I can't help but mention that it's this more respectful, intelligent approach that we do at GiveMeaning, but that aside, really, I'm saying to all my colleagues and "competitors" (your view, not mine): Treat donors with more respect and assume a higher degree of intelligence and interest in your work than in the "most important gifts" variety.

Labels: charitablegifts, charity, charitygifts, ethicalgifts, fundraising, greengifts, marketing, media, nptech, philanthropy

(Wickaninnish Gallery in Granville Island was the store who raised the most money)

We have picked-up all of our Christmas REAL CHANGE FROM SPARE CHANGE retail campaign experiment here in Vancouver and we're all totally blown away by the success!



By way of background, we built these beautiful red little boxes that we call "Pig-e-Banks" and gave them out to retailers throughout Vancouver. We asked them to pick any charity in Canada or any project on our site that they wanted to fundraise for and then ask their customers to donate their spare change.

After seeing how much money was raised by kids in our Halloween campaign pilot, we thought we would extend the experiment to retail stores.

Conventional wisdom warned that Point-of-Purchase retail real estate was far too valuable to give over to the Pig-e-Bank boxes, never-mind the business of the season would prevent employees from talking about the Pig-e-Bank or anything else during their busiest time of the year.


In less than three weeks, a total of $2082.05 was raised from participating retailers!!!

The top 5 stores (who raised the most money were):

1. Wickaninnish Gallery
2. Gloss Salon
3. Chic
4. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory
5. Heaven's Playground

The program validated everything I instinctively believed. It's perfectly fitting that the Chinese New Year is the "Year of the Pig." We're going to expand this coin collection program nation-wide.

GiveMeaning takes care of all of the logistics (picking-up, sorting, getting the participants the boxes etc). It's perfect for any store, any office, any desk at work. And our "Junior" version is ideal for kids groups and schools to raise money.

If you're interested in participating, click here



Dear, a store in South Granville got creative with their box and made a little sign to wave to customers asking them to donate in support of the BC SPCA.


Of course, the program couldn't have happened without Hannah & Anna, our dynamic duo who went store-to-store, spreading our Piggies throughout the city



Thanks to everyone who participated. In such a short amount of time, we raised a lot of money (given the denominations collected) and have proven the concept. Now it's time to roll-out these little Piggies across the Country!

Labels: charity, coin, community, fundraising, innovative, nptech, philanthropy, pig-e-bank, web

This morning, Lucy Bernholz over at Philanthropy 2173 asked "What foundations are blogging" and "Which foundations or donors are doing anything in virtual worlds or social networks?"

I had just finished reading Phil Cubeta's blog this morning in which he writes "Philanthropy blogging is becoming an awful lot like reading way too many professional journals: The official story told by the officials in official upper middle brow language that will upset no one and change nothing, often accompanied by advertising, or a business model that ties the words back to an influx of cash and a nice soft life. "

So in response to Lucy's question and to Phil's point, I ask "What foundations's representatives or donors are saying anything interesting or world changing on their blogs?" The list then becomes small if not almost entirely non-existent.

What I take from Phil's post is that bloggers who represent foundations, donors, charities, whatever, they must actually ENGAGE. And this starts ultimately by being able to talk about what's wrong with the sector and/or specific programs and interventions... It means throwing out ideas fearlessly that break the status quo and it means one of us philanthropshere bloggers actually being the ones to break the Gates Foundation story not just commenting on the story.

And you know, by being "out-there" it may mean you're less popular at the next schmoozefest, but guess what? You'll be headlining the event, because people crave the real deal.

On the Social Networks & Virtual World's Question

I have blogged previously about canceling my MySpace account. As someone who consults to many charities about IT and media strategies, I can tell you that if any charity or foundation representative boasted that they were spending time on MySpace or Friendster, let alone Second Life or any virtual world, I would tell them they are wasting their time.

Organizations are far-better served investing resources in making their own sites more interesting, including having content and activities that encourage that organization's supporters to be the ones creating a new audience. Kiva and DonorsChoose have introduced blog badges to some success but even the big sites have a long way to go to leveraging their content to turn their supporters into their spokespeople.

Labels: blog, charity, innovative, media, philanthropy, web, web2

I received an amazing early birthday gift today! Late last year, we raised money for an orphanage in Indonesia to buy a new minibus to transport the kids to school.

The orphanage is home to about 50 children ranging in age from 6 - 17. Because of the wide range in age of the kids, the orphanage must transport the kids to several different schools, which means several bus trips a day. In addition to school transport, the orphanage also needs a vehicle to go to the market each day to pick up fresh produce for the children's meals.

The project reached it's goal back in November with most of the funds being raised directly through the site and additional donations being raised off-line.

This video is what we got from the Canadian charity responsible for this project.



Jess and I watched it together first and we were moved to tears! Talk about "Return On Generosity!!!"

Labels: charity, fundraising, indonesia, media, orphanage, philanthropy, world, youtube

I just read this article from the Edmonton Journal about the We Care Marketplace, a "charity market" that occurs in the same spot every Sunday morning in Edmonton that gives away donated items "with no questions asked and no names taken."

It's entirely voluntary and no formal organization is behind it.

These kinds of grass-roots initiatives are exactly what I was talking about in my earlier blog posts today.

The article says that about 500 people receive gather each week to receive items.

On a similar note, I StumbledUpon the Burrito Project, another grass-roots initiative to feed the hungry that gives the "ingredients" needed for you to replicate their project in your community online and promotes itself well through MySpace and Friendster.

I LOVE these kinds of projects.

If you know of others like these, please post them here.

Labels: alberta, burritoproject, canada, charity, church, edmonton, faithbased, homeless, homelessness, ministry, poverty, society

It's easy to out-think ourselves. We're passionate, we want change, we want BIG change. Sometimes though, the most obvious, most immediate solutions are right in front of us.

Last week, someone very close to me witnessed a colleague of hers at work being quite literally shouted and verbally abused in front of a room of 15 of his colleagues. This man, a recent immigrant to Canada, is incredibly good at his job, not to mention routinely goes out of his way to help his colleagues in his workplace. The person (let's call her Mary) that observed this could see the pain and humiliation that this verbal abuse caused him and decided to do something about it.

On her lunch break, Mary bought this man a bouquet of flowers and a card and circulated the card amongst his colleagues who had witnessed this verbal abuse. Mary presented the card and flowers to this man who broke down crying, overwhelmed from both the generosity of his colleagues and the pain of being abused.

If we all seized the opportunity to practice these kinds of Random Acts of Kindness, the world in which we each live would no doubt be a far better place.

Why not commit ourselves to being on the lookout for one opportunity a week to commit a Random Act of Kindness for someone in your community?

Comment on the Blog with your stories. What you have observed others do, what you have done, maybe even suggest acts.

Labels: charity, community, help, kindness, randomacts, world

en·vi·ron·ment /ɛnˈvaɪrənmənt, -ˈvaɪərn-/ Pronunciation[en-vahy-ruhn-muhnt, -vahy-ern-] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun

1. the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences; surroundings; milieu.

It might come as a shock to some of my close friends when I say that I really haven't given much thought to the environment. It's true. For the kid who used to write letters to McDonald's asking them "to stop using stirofoame [sic]in their cups because it hurts the environment," it's been years since I have cared or engaged myself on environmental issues.

Before yesterday, the last time I got concerned about the environment was when I found out that Polar Bears have been declining in numbers because of the rate that ice is melting, causing massive disruptions in the feeding, hibernation and reproduction of the species. I remember the week where the news story was circulating and I did some searching but I couldn't find any organization to donate to, so I gave up.

I'm the kind of guy that last summer, as we enjoyed an especially warm summer, I glibly thanked global warming for the longer summer when making obligatory weather chit-chat in the elevator of my apartment building.

I never saw Inconvenient Truth, and despite attempts to get motivated to see it, just couldn't and still can't bring myself to do it.

This all seems like horrible admissions for a person in my job, and for a person who is known amongst his friends and colleagues as an incredibly passionate guy, a guy who quite literally aspires for nothing more than to change the world.

I suppose (if you'll indulge the metaphor) the clouds began to part for me round about Tuesday night when without warming and whilst still relatively warm out, snow began falling but then, within two hours had almost completely disappeared.

The next morning, we picked up Mr Brown as we do every morning. (We run a car-pool but it's economical not consciously environmental) He starts talking about this article, how 10 blocks of Austin's downtown core had been closed because of birds mysteriously dropping dead from the sky. This, I remember, is how that movie The Core started and then we found out that the earth had stopped spinning, dooming us all until Hillary Swank and that guy from Thank You For Smoking saved the world.

Apparently, birds dropping dead isn't limited to Austin. It's been reported in Australia as well.

I remember being in Toronto just before Christmas (it was warmer in Toronto than in Vancouver) and reading a great article in the Globe & Mail. I wish I could quote it exactly but it went something like "December - 23: In Ottawa where snowblowers are being sold at fire-sale prices and with flowers starting to bloom on Parliament Hill, it comes as no surprise that Prime Minister Harper is starting to take Global Warming seriously."

Throughout the day yesterday, various members of the upstairs team started emailing each other links to various environmental calamities, oddities or outright disasters.

By the end of the day yesterday, as snow began coming down again, we talked of little else other than just how f*cked we might be as a result of environmental damage.

And to be clear, this wasn't just end of the day kibitzing. This was neither dispassionate nor disconnected. This was genuinely a collective moment of several of us finally connecting our hearts and minds to the importance of the environment on our life here on earth. I mean, I don't know how many times I've heard pithy little statements like "we have only one earth" and variations on the theme but hey, we really have one f*cking planet and there is increasingly convincing proof connecting cause (our collective behavior and choices) to devastating effect.

I might be revealing too much of myself by referencing yet another schlocky near-apocolyptic Hollywood movie but in The Day After Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid plays a climate scientist who tries to warn the Vice-President of the US about a potential storm that would essentially create a new Ice Age. The Veep dismisses it, the World freezes over, the President dies, he ascends to the Presidency, and then at the end of the movie, from America's new base in Mexico, he addresses what remains of the World by saying something like "well, we've got to start taking care of the environment."

While back in the real world, there haven't been any Dennis Quaid types warning of an Ice Age coming in the next months or years, I reference this only as a reminder to myself of what might happen if we continue to push this off.



I found the above graph pretty compelling from an intellectual perspective. I found this in a report on Natural Disasters prepared by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. According to their report:

• The costs of disaster damage is now 15 times higher than they were in 1950s - According to the IMF, disaster damage caused $654 billion in material losses in 1990s.


• The number of disasters has grown: fewer than 100 in 1975 to more than 400 in 2005


• Approximately 2.6 billion people were affected by natural disasters over the past ten years, compared to 1.6 billion the previous decade

Despite all of this, I'm not compelled to act because of the Polar Bears or because I fear suddenly being frozen to death on my way into work. I look at this in surprisingly (for me) pragmatic terms: $$$Money$$$.

The need to do whatever we can to reverse and address the damage that's already been done, and to collectively do all we can to prevent more damage is best expressed in economic terms:

As the figures above address, not only are we vulnerable to more "big shocks" that devastate entire communities, regions or countries but everything from rising health costs, decreased agricultural outputs, wasted government and private donor disaster relief donations in the billions, there's no area of the economy that isn't touched by the environment. It's why it's called the environment.

I wonder if anyone has studied the environmental attitudes of Katrina victims? Do they correlate the devastation they experienced in any way to their own and their country's attitudes and actions towards the environment? Has even a significant minority of the affected population changed their daily actions to be more environmentally conscious?

Maybe it's already too late to reverse course and it's now all just an eventuality. But I ain't no quitter. Shouldn't we all be saying "But I'm gonna die trying?" Seriously, what on this earth, must happen for us to seriously give a damn?

The phone just rang. It was a good friend of mine. I told him I was in the middle of writing a blog about the environment. His reply? "Don't you have anything better to talk about than the weather?"

And this is the challenge.

Labels: activism, charity, climate, disaster, earth, environment, hurricanekatrina, katrina, politics, web, world

Happy New Year, everyone. I was telling Jessie that I remember being in 5th grade, talking about the 21st century as this far-away time, imagining what life and the world be like. I must admit my disappointment that personal Jettsons-like vehicles aren't the norm, and that life on a daily basis isn't much different from when I attended Campus View Elementary.

That said, if I have to compare 2007 to a more recent time when I dreamed of the future, say when I started GiveMeaning, a lot has changed.

When I started GiveMeaning in the summer of 2005 wise, intelligent, experienced people told me there was both no need to change anything about the charitable sector. Worse yet, trying to form some kind of business that could eventually profit from charity was not only bad business but just bad form.

Two years later, Philanthropy, social consciousness, charity, altruism, the desire to do good, to change the world is THE topic. Magazines launched, new web ventures launched, thinking changing, evolving.

I'm happy to see a more vocal voicing of a desire to find meaning in our lives. There is of course, danger that by turning up the volume on the conversation around doing good, that we overdose and overwhelm. Or that with all the recipes to do good, that we end up buying a bunch of ingredients, and then settling on take-out.

As for me personally, here are my New Year's resolutions (in no particular order):

Blog more: I want to do more with this blog. I want to get out of the office a lot more, not just in Africa but everywhere where we have projects going on (which is pretty much everywhere in the world). There are so many people that start projects on GiveMeaning that I am totally amazed and inspired by. I want to help tell their stories.

Women's Rights Now: I have registered the domain womensrightsnow.org I'm going to create a simple petition site that I want to use to advocate for what is the simplest, smartest one thing we can do to change the world: Ensure women's rights and gender equality the world over. I hope to launch the site before the end of January.

Get out there: The greatest joy and most inspiration I get is talking to young people. I want to get out to more schools this year.

And now on to my first day back in the office. Enjoy!

Labels: charity, givemeaning, media, npo, philanthropy, resolutions, web

I am exhausted. I have been traveling since last Sunday and I'm quite sure I have slept only a total of about 25 hours in the past six days. But it's been a good week and I'm always happy to be spreading the word about GiveMeaning.

Toronto earlier in the week was particularly special for me because I got to meet with Karyn Kennedy, the Executive Director of The Toronto Child Abuse Center ("TCAC")

TCAC was introduced to me by Christie Blatchford of the Globe & Mail (a journalist for whom I have immense respect). It was Christie's courtroom coverage of the story of Randal Dooney, a young boy who was brutally tortured and ultimately murdered by his Father and Step-mother that inspired be to start GiveMeaning. I was so angered and saddened by the total break-down in the "safety net" that was supposed to protect children in Canada from this abuse, that I wanted to do something, anything.

Here I was having just read Christie's coverage and motivated to act, and I couldn't find anything at my fingertips that I could do to react positively to this story. I spent the next couple of weeks trying in vain to reach-out to local organizations that were tasked to provide counsellings to children who have been abused but I either couldn't find the organizations or couldn't get my email or phone call returned when I did find a number or an email address to ping.

The reason? Because most of the small organizations, the ones looking after kids like Randal and his brother Tego (who survived and is now living back in his native Jamaica), these organizations operate on such shoe-string budgets that they don't have enough staff to both provide their services and respond to interested donors like me.

GiveMeaning's service is designed for ALL charities but it's the small organizations, the ones whose names we don't know, the ones whose organizations are constantly struggling for funding which really sums up more than 80% of the 80,000 charities in this country, and a similar percentage of the more than 1,000,000 charities in the US, say nothing of the rest of the world.

I had a great meeting with Karyn and though she doesn't have any projects on the site yet, we discussed several exciting initiatives that we can work on together. I've long asserted that if we want to truly want to make change in our country, we have to focus on the root causes of the problems that manifest many years later as a result of those problems.

Child Abuse is irrefutably one of the most obvious root causes of homelessness, violent crime, and sex crimes. Anyone who wants to actually reduce the instances of any of these social problems who proposes anything other than tackling child abuse is bound to fail. Blunt, yes. Controversial, maybe. Room to debate my point? Only by massaging the words. My assertion isn't a difficult argument to agree with, is it? And yet, in provinces like Ontario where too many sensational cases of children like Randall Dooney and Jeffery Baldwin were failed by the Province, leading to their deaths but across the Country, we have provincially funded organizations that are stymied in their abilities to intervene.

Child Abuse is one of those "hard topics" in charity to sell. But increasingly, I want GiveMeaning to find a way to address these "hard topics" by marrying our innovative marketing ideas with the wonderful, hard-working, and life-changing organizations like Toronto Child Abuse Center.

If we can empower organizations like TCAC by providing them new ways to communicate their message, new ways to engage, the children in Canada who right now, as we celebrate our holidays, are suffering horrible, unspeakable, unthinkable acts of violence and depravity will be saved. Let us not wait until they are another of Christie's stories.

As it seems to be the case with each of these blog entries, I start by meaning to keep it light, talk about a million different things that happened this week, I found a topic I needed to talk about, if for no other reason than for me to commit my own thoughts to the page.

Two last things. I have started my own project at GiveMeaning. In the two years of running GiveMeaning, I have never started my own project. I will enter a separate blog entry over the holidays about it, but you can visit it at yves.givemeaning.com

I'm on my way to do my last interview of a week that has been - gratefully - full of interviews. I have never met the host of Get Connected, but judging his bio, it should make for a good, interactive interview.

Merry Christmas (it's a sentiment, not a religious assertion).

Stay Safe and Warm.

Labels: abuse, aid, canada, charity, childabuse, givemeaning, philanthropy, politics, web

All throughout Vancouver stores, you will see our beautiful bright-red boxes inviting you to make "Real change from spare change." This is the next extension of what we launched at Halloween with our kids Pig-e-Banks. Over $100,000,00 in spare change is given to charity every year in Canada alone. GiveMeaning wants to show the world (starting in Canada) how much change this change can make.

With a Pig-e-Bank box, retailers collect money for a charity they choose. They collect the money in-store and attached to the box are a set of cards that each person is encouraged to take which directs them to a special web page on our site that explains what charity has been chosen by that retailer and why. Click here for an example. Click here for an example of what a retailer's page looks like.

You too can order your Pig-e-Bank to sit on your desk at work, at a dinner party or even if it's just in your bedroom, get your Pig-e-Bank today.

Labels: charity, coincollecting, coins, community, fundraising, innovation, pig-e-bank, retail, web

stick around i got a hunch
we'll bomb this town and stop for lunch
and never, nevermind these awful cries
it's not as real if you don't look in their eyes

These are lyrics from Stabilo's song that I downloaded tonight.

I know why I'm restless. Before a flight, I almost always buy an armful of magazines and newspapers to read on the plane. Tonight, it seemed as though all of what I read stitched together in my mind. Here are the threads I'm weaving with:

Vanity Fair: article on neo-cons fingerpointing at the Bush administration now that Iraq is more than a quagmire.
Us Magazine's (my guilty pleasure) feature on holiday gifts that give back,
The Walrus - "Stars in Africa"
Globe & Mail - Christie Blatchford's weekend article about Shawn Denty, a Canadian soldier who with help from his family, friends and neighbours back home in Oakville, got medical equipment donated to a hospital in Kandahar City, Afghanistan.

First, on its own for a second, because I'm just so beside myself about this, I have to separate this from all other thoughts. US Magazine's feature on "Holiday gifts that give back" includes a US $2,600 Gucci hobo bag that gives 20% of sales to UNICEF-run programs in Mozambique.

Never-mind whether it's 20% of gross or net sales. I just can't help but see it as shockingly crass. Anger-making crass. In another blog entry, I want to rant about this more but I'll move on.

This article in The Walrus spoke about how Oxfam has a staff position for "Artiste liaison manager" responsible for reaching out to potential celebrity spokespeople. It also spoke about a book called "Compassion Fatigue," the title (for these purposes) says it all.

Vanity Fair's Iraq article made me think back to the failure of Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia (aka "Blackhawk down") which made me think back to the days that Republicans said that the US has no business in the business of nation building. The loss of US lives in Somalia weakened the voting public's will to support these kinds of interventions. Clinton thought there was not enough political support at home to intervene in the Rwandan genocide.

Then, I came into my hotel room and logged on to the BBC website and read a debate about what to do about Darfur. It bears noting that I accessed this link to the debate because I had originally clicked on an article about what George Clooney had to say about Darfur. It's from there that I linked in to the debate. And, you know: on one level, there you go. Clooney helped me click through. And when I clicked through, I read the Debate. So there.

But then, when I click through and I read the Debate, I think back to the neocon article. The one where a bunch of intellectuals talk candidly about the failure of the war in Iraq, a war that they all famously advocated for. The glossy pictures of these individuals all giving their best "ponder pose" that accompany their finger-pointing and deflections really does give weight to the ol' "a picture is worth a thousand words."

The connection between the debate about what to do in Darfur and the Vanity Fair article is this: There is no way that the US, or Canada (with its mission in Afghanistan) is going to send peacekeeping troops into Darfur. And a UN peacekeeping force is what's needed.

What is needed to stop the violence in Darfur is for the lives of each UN soldier to be equal to that of each innocent man, woman and child in Darfur. All life is equal in the world except in politics.

This is my new campaign idea: Give soldiers something worth dying for. If we want to end the genocide in Darfur, we must be willing to pay with our soldiers lives. It's just that I can't see any Canadian or US politician being so bold as to say so. Incidentally, I think that a Canadian military presence in Afghanistan is worthy and so this "war worth fighting for" is specifically talking about Iraq.

But are you willing to support the politicians who propose they send your country's soldiers in to intervene, knowing that any foreign troops will be treated by the government of Sudan as hostile invaders? Are you willing to risk the lives of our soldiers to save the lives of their men and women and children.

It's 4:12am now. A busy week ahead of me here in Toronto.

Labels: africa, charity, darfur, media, music, philanthropy, toronto

Friday's at GiveMeaning are supposed to be an opportunity for us to slow down, eat lunch together as the whole team (it's taking a bigger and bigger table to accommodate us all) and talk about the week that has passed.

The day started with a rush order of another 80 piggies for a church youth group in Vancouver. Jess and I delivered them to the church, thinking we would just drop them off. Instead, I found myself standing in front of the kids explaining the Pig-e-Bank's to the group of kids.

I must admit, I found it difficult to just explain the basics of the Pig-e-Bank at first but found my footing quickly and acted out a little skit (Jess' idea) that seemed to go over really well. But what was most satisfying was after standing in front of the whole room, I talked to some of the kids in smaller groups and was able to get their reaction as they held the box themselves. It was my first direct experience with a kid's reaction to the box and I have to say how proud I was.

It was a great feeling.

I came back to the office to find a great article in today's Vancouver Courier which describes the Pig-e-Bank program perfectly and ends with the first public mention of our expansion strategy for what will be a much bigger plan to make real change from spare change

Kids are starting to come online and activate their boxes. To protect their privacy, I can't post links to their individual pages but suffice it to say, I could spend the entire weekend reading their descriptions of what they're inspired about and why they want to help the charity they chose.

Speaking of the weekend, tomorrow I get my dreaded vaccines. Ouch.

Labels: charity, coincollecting, fundraising, halloween