Category Archives: Uncategorized

Who would you give $10 to?

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Acts of generosity are contagious. Giving breeds giving. Water the tree and it will give you perfect apples… or was it a plant and flowers. You get the idea.

One man is putting our child hood dreams in humanity to the test. A Year of Giving.

One man. Giving $10 to a different person every day for a year. Simple. He is writing about each person he gives to over on his blog. He is not trying to change lives with $10. Only to inspire the act of giving. You can’t argue with that.

I have been following his blog. He is now up to day 219. Great place to go for some inspirational reading and to re-light your there-are-good-people-out-there fuse.

On the other end of the scale. Someone ran into my car while it was parked outside my house the other day. No-one left a note.

Karma is a bitch.

This is not a sob story

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Priyani lives on $2 a day

Priyani has been living on $2 a day for the past month

Today I met Priyani. A young girl living off $2 a day in Melbourne.

She’s sitting at fold-up camper table in the middle of Bourke St Mall.

It’s 1pm, lunch rush-hour in the CBD. The pretty Indian-looking girl is sitting in between two giggling friends, eating rice from a tupperware container.

Shyly, they offer me a small bag of rice. This will be the 27th day Priyani has had rice for lunch. And she’ll have another bowl for dinner tonight.

She’s not homeless or broke. In fact, Priyani works 40 hours a week in a restaurant.

The rice (and oats for breakfast) diet is part of a campaign to help raise awareness in Australia of extreme poverty.

Live Below The Line in Bourke St

Living below the poverty line on Bourke St

Around 1500 Australians are joining her this week for the official Live Below The Line campaign, which runs from 2-6th August.

So what’s it like to live for $2 a day in Melbourne?  She tells me she constantly feels tired, and her memory has gone. Such are the symptoms of malnutrition. For the full experience, check out her open diary.  She’s aiming to raise $500 toward education programs.

Onto the campaign.

Live Below the Line logo

Live Below The Line is a good example of making the most your ‘flag-wavers’, those like Priyani who are active participants in your cause. By helping them to be as connected as possible – to their online friends and to other participants – you start to build a strong web of support. Traditionally, online sponsorship  models like Everyday Heroes only allow individuals to interact with their supporters.

All the content on the livebelowtheline.com is share-friendly; from venting about your hunger on a hosted-blog, discussing the drama with fellow faminers on the forum, to sharing out to other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  It’s easy and integrated.

There’s a genuine community here, heavily populated by Gen Y’s.  It’s like a pimped-out 40-hour famine mashed up with the 2.0 picnic-challenge.

Lesson for short-term awareness campaigns: set up a challenge that’s both relatively achievable and relevant, and provide your participants with the right tools to share their common experience.

Yep. Agree. Absolute poverty is bad.

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Last week our whole office was lucky enough to listen to Peter Singer over lunch. An Australian philosopher and ethicist from way back (check out his Wikipedia bio to get the full background – he has strong and often controversial views on issues such as abortion and euthanasia).

But one point that Peter Singer makes that you can not argue with is his view on eliminating poverty:

“If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it; absolute poverty is bad.”

You could hop onto amazon and buy his latest book The Life  You Can Save or you could just watch the youtube video below – The Life You Can Save in 3 minutes. Powerful stuff.

World Vision Old Spice Ad

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Everyone has seen the ‘original’ series of old spice ads – now chocking up over 16 million views. Not bad for a guy who smells like Grandma’s Christmas biscuits.

World Vision pounced and last week released their own version. A little cringe worthy. Put on a shirt is the first thought that came to mind. But impressive all the same to see a religiously founded NGO reproduce a viral man-spray video, and get their CEO to take his shirt off. The jury is still out on whether they received an increase in donations, but with now over 26,000 views and no media investment it is a online success in the non-profit arena. Hats off to Tim and World Vision for ignoring the red tape that often prevents immediate campaigns such as this.

Does this make you want to donate? (or just give Tim a gym membership?)

UN Conference coming to Melbourne.

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Every year all the NGO’s and the lovely people over at the UN sit down to discuss how we can make the world a better place… by doing things like eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. This year, it will be in Melbourne. Hip hip hooray.

And I will be there.

Using what we all love to define as ‘social media’ to get the word from the small conference circle out to the masses.

Exciting.

This year is the 63rd UN  NGO Conference, it goes for 3 days and the discussions will be focussed on advancing global health and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s). Back in 2000 development goals were set to be achieved by 2015. This year we will check in to see how ye ‘old world is travelling to meet these MDG’s.

I will also be looking at how we can use the online space to engage a community that would otherwise not be involved in the conference. It is not until August – so the ideas are still brewing…