Joining Hands Nepal Video Yearbook 2011

The Power Of Video

I went to a workshop called "How To Make a Video That Doesn't Suck" hosted by Benjamin Packard of Retainer Media tonight. It was a great inspiration to any of us who have a moving story to tell and not a lot money to tell it. Here is a perfect example that Benjamin shared with us at the beginning of the workshop of a small nonprofit. Just try to watch this video and not be curious to visit their website afterwards!

Love Is A Creative Act

About a year ago I wrote a sort of manifesto, a document of my life philosophy as it stood at that time. It was an important action for me to undertake at that time because it was right before I was to undertake the first steps in the process of planning and building this new organization and global community that is ForWorld Thinking. The most interesting and important idea to come out of that process for me was the idea that love is a creative act:

"There are so many ways to engage in creative acts in every day life, big and small. When you choose to make a meal for family or friends from scratch rather than cooking frozen meals or getting take-out, that is an act of creation. The love you put into the food is absorbed by everyone who eats it. When you inspire a spark in another person through education, that is an act of creation. The spark ignites a new passion and opens a new path for the other person. When you begin a project at work or school or through charity, that is an act of creation. Whenever you bring something new into the world through love or inspiration or intuition, it is an act of creation that serves you and others. The two key elements in all acts of creation are time and love. If you devote your time and energy to an action, and you perform it with love and passion, it is more likely to be an act of creation. This harkens back to the notion of making every action like the first time, so you can maintain the inspiration and love for the action. When we are exhausted of cooking and cannot feel the love, we rush or we order pizza or we cook frozen meals, and we lose the power of the creative action. When we are exhausted of teaching and cannot feel the love, we rely on books or videos or rote lecture rather than discussion, and we lose the power to inspire creative thought. When we are exhausted of work and cannot feel the love, we coast or take shortcuts or shift responsibility to others, and we lose the power of creativity in our work. The more of our time we put into our actions, the more love and genuine care we put into our actions, the more creative force we exert in the world.

Action, we are nothing without action. Intuition, emotion, and thought amount to nothing without action. There is no purpose for the existence of this material world and our presence in it without action. We are put here to act, not sit idly by and let fate or the gods determine our life’s course. We are put here to act, not to react to our environment or our circumstances or the people around us and how they act. We create our environment through our actions. We create our circumstances through our actions. We create our relationships with the people around us through our actions. We create our world through our actions. We create our life through our actions. Our actions are all we have to function in the material world and make an impact. Creative action is our purpose in life."

The question then is: how can your love inspire you to act to help create a better world to live in?

Give Your Gift

To wrap up this week's theme of individuals making use of their unique skills to serve both their community and the global community, I want to highlight an organization that actually helps facilitate this process for individuals and nonprofits, Catchafire.

I was directed to their website by a post from their CEO and founder, Rachel Chong, over at the Fast Co.Exist blog entitled "Making Volunteering More Popular by Making it More Relevant":

"Last year, 26.3% of Americans volunteered, but only 1.8% of Americans volunteered their professional skills (PDF).

When people don’t have the option to volunteer in a way that draws on their strengths or their skills, when people don’t have the option to volunteer in a way that make sense to them, and when volunteering doesn’t result in an impactful outcome, people volunteer halfheartedly or they don’t volunteer at all. This is a pretty serious consequence. In fact, the volunteer rate in America over the past 10 years has dropped nearly 3%.

We need to give volunteering a make over. We need to make volunteering relevant again. In fact, 95% of nonprofits say they would like these services pro bono, but don’t know where to go to get them. If so much of the population has these skills to give away, and we’re able to convince these people to volunteer their skills, we have supply to meet this demand. I am confident that more than 1.8% of people want to volunteer their skills. We just need to give them the right opportunities."

I believe wholeheartedly in the mission of Catchafire of matching relevant skill sets with corresponding needs in the nonprofit world. In fact, it is exactly what we hope to do on a global level for our foreign partners and the communities in which they work and live once we get the appropriate tools and systems in place to make it happen. Stay tuned in the year to come for progress updates on the implementation of our volunteer program and how it will work to make this kind of skill-matching possible for us and our partners. In the meantime, if you have some special professional skills and a little free time to volunteer, why not head on over to Catchafire and see if they might be the right organization to help you match those skills to someone in need and make a truly impactful volunteer contribution this year.

Read the rest of Rachel Chong's post at Fast Co.Exist.

Nonprofit New Year's Resolutions

This post by chelseamurphy over on Points of Light's blog about their New Year's resolution to help more people in communities get involved in solving their biggest problems by volunteering is inspiring. Here's to hoping one day soon we can help even a fraction of as many people serve their communities in developing nations around the globe and make the kind of difference Points of Light and their HandsOn Network do.

"Every day, people of all ages, races, ethnicities and faiths step up to tackle problems in their communities and around the world. In 2010 more than 2.7 million of them did so with and through Points of Light.

Over the next three years, we plan to grow that number significantly and help broaden and deepen the ways in which our constituents create real and lasting change – and in the process define a new kind of volunteerism for the 21st century. A form of volunteering and civic engagement that calls on people to utilize the full range of their assets – their time and talents, their financial resources and their voice as citizens – to improve the world."

I really like the use of the word engagement for what we are talking about here. Each person can make a greater difference when they are engaged in the community because they can see the problems affecting people and are motivated to help find a solution. Engagement is a holistic approach to doing good for your community because it involves seeing yourself as an integral part of that community and its well-being, and it encourages a desire to do your part to maintain that well-being and to inspire fellow community members to do the same. Here's to making 2012 the year of community engagement.

Read the rest of the post on Points of Light's blog.

And for some bonus New Year's resolutions from impact nonprofit professionals check out this post over at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Generosity

I was reading a post entitled 3 Thoughts on Generosity by Sasha Dichter over on Acumen Fund's blog today, and I believe he made some important points about generosity as it relates to our mission here at ForWorld Thinking. The most relevant of the 3 thoughts he listed is quoted here:

(This post first appeared on Sasha's Blog)

"Generosity alone is not enough

Generosity is nothing more and nothing less than the foundation upon which we build. We won’t solve the big problems of the world just by opening our hearts. That is a dangerous dream, because the stakes are much too high. Yet without generosity too many doors are closed, too much judgment creeps in. Without generosity empathy is not given a space in which to grow and we experience the terrible misfortune of undervaluing the gifts we have been given. In so doing we run the risk of forgetting that each of us has something important to offer in creating solutions big and small.

To me, generosity is an active orientation towards the world and all its messiness. It is a refusal to walk by, to shut down, to pretend that if we just keep our heads down everything will turn out OK. It won’t, at least not without all of us."

What I think it is important to note is the idea that each of us has something to offer. The belief that a wealthy philanthropist can simply throw money at a problem to solve it is overlooking the complex relationships involved in any issue. This becomes even more true when we talk about supporting development work internationally, where cultural understanding is paramount in any effective solution. That is why intermediaries in the giving chain that work with local community members to come up with realistic long-term solutions are essential to success. We need to allow each person who is affected by the problem to give that something they have to offer towards the solution in order to reach the best possible outcome. That is the goal we aim to achieve by working so closely with foreign partners in developing countries to find lasting solutions to community problems.

Read the rest of Sasha's post at Acumen Fund's blog