The $5 philanthropist

A writer named David Baines called me on Friday morning to let me know he was writing a piece on me and GiveMeaning in the next morning's paper. Armed with our 2005 and 2006 annual reports we file with Canadian Revenue Agency, he recites publicly available numbers namely that we received $234,632 in tax-receipted donations (which are largely donations we received through our website for the projects on GiveMeaning.com) and another $730,350 from charitable foundations to pay GiveMeaning's administrative costs in operating the website in Canada.

He specifically states that I "refused to identify any of these donors" when in fact, I offered for him to speak with some of GiveMeaning Foundation's donors and yet he didn't take me up on this. I find it odd that Baines appeared to rush to publish this article, calling me for the first time the day before the article was supposed
to run.

Nevertheless, his main contention is that GiveMeaning Foundation has spent more money building the GiveMeaning brand and service than it has raised money for its projects. This is not only not in dispute but not surprising to anyone that knows anything about a start-up business. GiveMeaning launched its re-vamped website in late September of 05. Prior to that, our web presence was in Beta and very little transactions flowed through. The numbers that Baines is reporting on is our first full year of collecting tax-receipted donations in Canada for the GiveMeaning website. Given that our
average donation through the website is about $40, our first-year tally of money raised for projects is not surprising. It's also not surprising to anyone that understands the nature of a start-up that in the first few years of operation that start-up costs will exceed revenues. It took eBay eight years to make a profit.

Baines can't understand "why certain undisclosed charities would give money to pay overhead for what is essentially a charitable conduit." Foundations are investing in GiveMeaning because they recognize that the GiveMeaning service is helping charities of all sizes make fundraising easier and less costly. By supporting our work at
GiveMeaning, they are providing an infrastructure for all charities to use. He seems unaware that foundations regularly make grants to other foundations for capacity and infrastructure costs.

Of course I draw a salary and yes, my wife works as a contractor for GiveMeaning. Baines seems to think that GiveMeaning should run without staff and expense and that it's wrong for charitable foundations to provide GiveMeaning with the financial resources to build its service, a service used by charities of all sizes.

Baines seems unable to draw distinction between money raised through the GiveMeaning.com website for projects and money raised separately from donors who support our admin costs. When he says "Williams insists that, whenever a person gives money for a particular charity, 100 per of that money gets to the named beneficiary. That may be true, but it does not mitigate the fact that the vast majority of the
overall money collected during 2006 went to administration." By lumping together these two costs as one, he is ignoring the simple fact that the donors giving to our operating costs are doing so specifically FOR our operating costs and that donors giving through the website for projects have 100% of their funds passed on
the Implementing Organization responsible for carrying-out that
project.

It can't be laid out more clearly than what we have in our About Us section which reads "We charge nothing for donations collected online and even cover the credit card costs associated with each donation. We rely on the support of generous donors and advertisers to provide this service."

Baines leaves readers with his own judgement on what is or isn't philanthropy, passing judgement on a fantastic grassroots economic development initiative out of Uganda which trains Ugandan people to build guitars and then sells those guitars in North America to create self-sustaining, economic development and on Wild ARC, which is the
division of the BC SPCA that provides rehabilitation and care to injured animals. Baines doesn't think Sea Otters and poor Ugandan people fall into the class of "quality charities." He's entitled to his opinion but the whole point of GiveMeaning is to give grassroots initiatives an opportunity to find their audiences as we believe that any charitable initiative deserves to have the opportunity to better find and connect with supporters who care about those causes.

Baines' final point sums it up nicely. He says that "we have a responsibility to scrutinize all charitable endeavours to ensure that we are getting decent value for our dollar." He clearly doesn't think that GiveMeaning's service is needed, valuable or useful to the charities and donors we serve. And that spending money on a new way
of fixing a big problem is not warranted. He's entitled to his opinion.

Labels: givemeaning

In late October, I blogged about Gordon House Youth SEARCh, an innovative charitable program here in Vancouver provide training and resources for "at-risk" youth.

In the blog entry, I talked about my first-hand experience with a client of their program and I'm happy to report that the young man I spoke of has now been hired-on full-time by Cineplex Odeon.

The organization has just recently posted a project proposal on the GiveMeaning website and is now seeking votes. You can see their project proposal here. Please consider voting for their proposal or better yet, if you're sitting on 12 computers of similar make/model and OS, get in touch with me and consider donating them to this worthy cause.

Your computers will help many at-risk youth connect with employers, keeping them safe and providing them a much-needed income.

Labels: atriskyouth, computers, donation, givemeaning, gordonhouse, vancouver

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

Saw new proposal on GiveMeaning today.
Click on the founder (Jen's) name on the left-hand side.

This kind of energy is what keeps us all motivated.

Labels: africa, development, givemeaning, inspiration, kenya

I'm back. Despite having been back from an incredibly refreshing vacation for about two weeks, I have found it incredibly difficult to get back in work mode, having so thoroughly relaxed on my vacation. Every vacation I've ever been on has been a "working vacation" complete with Blackberry, MacBook and the OCD-inspired habit of checking of email every two minutes.

This time was different and I must say, I really needed the break.

So I'm back and I have more than a few stories to tell. I'll try and catch-up over the next few days but first, three small little tidbits that I'm pretty proud of:

While vacationing on Saltspring Island, we found out that my wife, Jessie Farrell, has been nominated for two Canadian Country Music Awards!!! To be nominated for Female Artist of The Year and "Rising Star Award" is really exciting and we found out by listening to JR FM while pulling our car into a Goat Cheese factory!

The next week, I found out that I've been named one of Marketing Magazine's "top 30 under 30," which I'm very proud of. It's good timing because I'm thinking about re-tooling my blog or possibly maintaining two separate blogs. One on philanthropy and cause marketing, the other on more technology, marketing and other rants. I want to invest more time and energy in blogging and am going to pursue this in earnest in September.

Lastly, GiveMeaning was mentioned in today's print edition of the Wall St. Journal (page D4).

So that's my exciting news.

Now, on to where I left off.

Labels: givemeaning, marketingmag, nptech, wsj

I'm trying to spend less time on the computer on weekends so I've got to make this quick. Last night, we launched several new features to GiveMeaning including the ability to subscribe to RSS Feeds for any cause, location or combination of cause and locations. So you can subscribe to a feed for everything at GiveMeaning addressing "poverty" in "Vancouver" as an example.

It's a great way to find out what's going on about an issue or community you care about.

Check it out.

Labels: feeds, givemeaning, nptech, online, rss, web

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

Kevin Sites of Yahoo's Hot Zone wrote this blog entry describing how Christine Egger and her team responded to a story that he wrote about a young Nepalese boy named Yubaraj.

It's a fantastic success story all around.

Labels: givemeaning, kevinsites, yahoo, yubaraj

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

Labels: fundraiser, givemeaning, victoria, women

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

It's a beautiful day here in Vancouver, the Canucks won game 2 against the Ducks and I've reached my first goal in my fundraising drive for Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre.

In less than one week, I have raised over $1,100! What's really special for me is that I've received donations from a few total strangers! I have no idea how they found my GiveMeaning page (perhaps through the blog?) but really want to wish a special thanks to those people!

Another bit of personal news. My wife, Jessie Farrell has her first Country single (Let's Talk About Love) on the radio across Canada and though it's been playing for only three weeks, it's already at number 20 on the Canadian Country charts! And the single can be downloaded on iTunes!

It's a very exciting time for the both of us!

Labels: fundraising, givemeaning, jessiefarrell, vwsac, walkamileinhershoes

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

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

As many of you know, I have been traveling across Western Canada to meet with local charities, students, youth groups and others interested in bettering their worlds (plural because a lot of our worlds are quite different from one another).

Kamloops, Kelowna, Grand Prairie, Fort McMurray, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Brandon. Unfortunately, we couldn't fit any cities in Saskatchewan in this trip though I really want to travel to Regina to understood the poverty crisis in a certain part of the city which - according to some accounts - is now worse than that of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

I had intended to blog from every city but I have a legitimate excuse: My wife. Now before you take me to task for being so totally lacking in chivalry, please allow me to explain myself. My wife, Jessie Farrell, is a country musician who was recently signed to Universal Music. She was given the opportunity to open for Emerson Drive who are currently the top-selling country band in Canada. And of no coincidence, her tour stops were in Kamloops, Kelowna, Grand Prairie, Fort McMurray, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Brandon. Being the opening act on any tour is by no means glamorous. While Emerson has a great tour-bus and a dressing room full of food and drink, Jess has a rented minivan and sometimes a bottle of water.

So here we were leaving Kamloops at 2am leaving for Grand Prairie (about a 9 hour drive). As soon as we pulled into each town, I would begin my day of meetings and presentations and then as my regular day would come to a close, I would then start my second job as Jessie's "Roadie" which would keep me on my feet until we loaded into the Minivan headed to the next city overnight.

The Emerson tour ended in Calgary last Saturday so we drove from Calgary Sunday afternoon back to Vancouver. We arrived (thanks to daylight savings and the roads being closed due to avalanche warnings) back in Vancouver on Monday morning at 5am.'

This week has been exceptionally busy not only catching-up from being on the road but also because we're preparing for what is a whole new version of the GiveMeaning.com website. I had hoped that it would be launched yesterday but the tech gods have not been smiling on us. It's now a certainty it will be sometime next week and I can't contain my excitement! We've been working on it non-stop since last September. I'm proud of what we have now and while there is plenty that was innovative about our use of technology applied to the charitable sector, this is the first time where truly innovative technology is being built and applied to the GiveMeaning site. You'll see what I'm talking about next week and hopefully agree with me!

I'm now here in Victoria bringing our "Party Pig" a massive bamboo version of our cardboard "Pig-e-Banks" for a fundraising event in support of Village of Hope a project on GiveMeaning benefiting women in Rwanda. I've been here all day for a variety of meetings today and at lunch, walked into a White Spot (for my American friends, I can tell you that White Spot beats In-&-Out burgers by miles) which I remembered from my childhood. I remembered being about 9 or 10 with my family eating a "Pirate Pack" at the exact same table as I was at today. It was an unintentional nevertheless much valued trip down memory lane.

I popped-in on the folks at Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Center, a great organization that uses GiveMeaning's personal fundraising pages for its annual "Tri-athalon of Compassion" and also met with Rumon Carter a very dynamic guy who used GiveMeaning last year quite successfully and has started a new project that is close to getting enough votes to start fund-raising.

This post is getting quite long and I haven't even talked about the highlights of the tour. I'll do that in a separate post over the weekend. It's now time to get going to the fundraiser. Please keep your radio stations tuned to your country music station and listen for "Let's Talk About Love" by Jessie Farrell!

Labels: canada, emersondrive, givemeaning, jessiefarrell, tour

This Saturday I turned 28 years young! I was talking to Babz Chula this week who told me that according to Astrologists, the planets are in the exact same place as when I was born during my 29th year, so this year should be like a "rebirth" for me.

I started celebrating Friday afternoon at our normal team lunch. This week I got to choose (I picked Denny's) and I received quite literally the best birthday gift ever. Each team member had written a little note and each note was stapled together to form a little booklet. The booklet got me very ferklempt and they had printed and framed three pictures, including a team picture that I've now hung at home. One of the other ones was of me at my desk and the other was a picture of my cowboy boots with the quote "I'm the decider" on it (a joke about Bush's famous line "I'm the decider, I decide things.")

Friday night, Jess and I had an amazing steak dinner with one of my best friend's and his wife and daughter who have become like an extended family. The dinner was amazing and I ate everything on my plate. Then, Saturday afternoon, we drove down with our two friends, Shira and Lucas, the couple behind Choosing Joy, a multi-medium company that I am very excited about.

Jess and I always see ads for Red Lobster on TV but there are no locations in Vancouver. Sometime last year, she said after seeing one of those mouth-watering ads that if she were to ever get a record deal, that we would drive to Seattle to go to Red Lobster and celebrate. Well, she signed her record deal late in December, so we decided it was time to do the trip! Shira & Lucas were game, so we drove down for the night and found the closest Red Lobster (in Lynwood).

We had a great night, ate tons and had some great conversations. We met a group of four women who were down from Whiterock for the weekend who were a lot of fun. We stayed the night in Bellevue and drove back late this afternoon.

If you're reading this blog and know me personally, it's not too late to celebrate! You can click here to make a generous donation in support of the first ever fundraising project I have created at GiveMeaning. I'm about half of my way there and want to finish my goal by the end of the month.

I'm looking forward to this year!

Labels: birthday, givemeaning

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