Last week I yo-yoed and clothed a homeless teen.

Here’s how it works: Virgin Mobile set up Blank2Clothe.com where anyone can submit a video*. They approve the video and donate one article of clothing to one of the millions of homeless youth in America. That’s it.

But it gets better. Each time a video is watched five times, they’ll donate another article of clothing. So far 11 articles of clothing have been donated from my video and the site claims more than 100,000 donations so far.

So let’s care for some homeless youth:

• Watch my video (it’s only 16 seconds).
• Submit your own video.
• Get involved to stop homelessness. (and there are plenty more ways to do this)

Slow-Building Campaign?
As a sidebar, I’m a little befuddled by the campaign. While I love the idea, their follow through seems weak:

• I submitted my video on Nov. 13 and never received a confirmation e-mail that they’d accepted it. According to YouTube they posted it on Nov. 13. I didn’t spot the video until today (when I was already grumbling that they hadn’t posted my video). Why squander people’s interest?
• The campaign launched in July and the site currently only has nine videos. Of those, seven are three months old and two of them were just added on Nov. 13 (and one is mine). So either they’re doing a terrible job promoting this thing and nobody is submitting videos or they’re not keeping up with the submissions. Hard to tell (one way to find out: submit your video!).
• The sad thing about this campaign is that it didn’t start out as Blank2Clothe.com. Originally it was Strip2Clothe.com and they were encouraging people to submit videos of themselves stripping (Tagline: “Someone out there needs clothes more than you”). There’s an idea loaded with problems. Suddenly the site design starts to make a little more sense (the “unzip me” graphic). But after a number of complaints, including some from their nonprofit partners, Virgin Mobile decided to ditch the stripping idea and make it a little more accessible. I applaud the change, though it does help explain the bizarre edge of the campaign—they were simply trying to salvage the idea.

At any rate, I hope the idea takes off.

* Be sure to read the fine print: Must be 18 or older, only you in the video, under 2 minutes, no brands/logos/copyrighted material visible in the video, no copyrighted music, no nudity, profanity, etc.