Tag Archives: charity

Reframing the Story of Ethiopia

The usual story we hear about Ethiopia is one steeped in poverty and despair. We hear stories of famine and political unrest. That’s the common narrative. It’s unfortunate because stories are powerful. But it’s not the whole story.

There are also Ethiopians doing amazing things. Not just marathon runners, but business leaders, doctors, activists, writers, musicians and more. Flowers of Today, Seeds of Tomorrow is a coffee table book to tell those stories. They’re currently doing a Kickstarter project to fund publishing the book. It’s about 85 percent written, and you can see some of the incredible stories and layouts on the Kickstarter page.

This is an opportunity to reframe the story of Ethiopia.

Doing Good in Ethiopia
I don’t want to contribute to the narrative of despair. I’m wary of providing the kind of international aid that’s merely drops of water on a wildfire. While famine, poverty and despair need to be stopped, I want to address those issues in ways that offer hope and empowerment, not empty charity.

Just last week we celebrated a new well in Ethiopia. I love that the local people in Segalu built their own wall around that well to protect it and are raising their own money to support and maintain that well. I hope this is a project that empowers them, freeing up their time and energy to pursue more productive efforts.

Likewise, I think Flowers of Today, Seeds of Tomorrow is a book that can empower a people. It reframes their story and shifts the focus from nostalgia for the past or despair for the failures of today to a hope in the promise of tomorrow. These are stories of Ethiopian heroes who have overcome that past to find success today.

We need those stories. We need those heroes.

Bring It Home
Four years ago today my son Milo was born in Ethiopia. I wouldn’t see his picture for six weeks and I wouldn’t hold him in my arms for five months. He no longer lives in Ethiopia, but it will always be a part of him, a part of me. These are his stories, and as you can imagine, I have a vested interested in seeing stories of hope and not despair.

Ethiopians, like all of us, are not bound by poverty and famine. They are not limited to political unrest. They have heroes and champions. It’s time for a book that tells those stories. I know my family needs one in our library.

Consider backing this Kickstarter campaign and helping this project come to life. I know it’s a lot of money, but the $50 reward gets you a hardcover version of the book and they’ll donate two softcover Amharic versions to libraries in Ethiopia through Ethiopia Reads. That’s a great way to share these stories with your family and with the people of Ethiopia.

Let’s tell the story of hope.

A Class Reunion of Sorts

I had a weird dream last night. I was visiting my high school (Yes, I have reoccurring dreams about school—you’d think at 31 these dreams would go away, but no. A few weeks back I dreamed about having to go to school with Yeshumnesh!) and while stopping by the room of a former teacher (who suddenly had a ginormous office complete with fire place) half of my graduating class showed up. It was some kind of bizarro reunion, but I was seeing all these people I hadn’t seen since high school (and I couldn’t remember half their names). Unlike most of my high school dreams this one wasn’t traumatizing—it was hopeful and uplifting.

Which is all very fitting because that’s pretty much what happened yesterday (not the bizarro reunion part, let me explain).

Julia Music is an old friend from middle school and high school. We were really just classmates back then, but today I consider her a friend as we’ve bonded over adoption and long waits. She’s been a big supporter of my book, Addition by Adoption, and even got an unnamed mention on page 50. She heard about the slow but steady pace of my effort to build a clean water well in Ethiopia through charity: water. A portion of the proceeds from my book go to the well and a lot of folks have donated above and beyond that. Since April we had raised $2,046 of the needed $5,000, which is pretty remarkable.

Well, Julia stepped in and decided to help me get to halfway in one day. That meant raising $454 in one day. She started bugging people on Facebook and didn’t stop. She posted well over 150 times on people’s Facebook walls, asking them to donate to my cause. Some people call that annoying. I call it life-changing. Because the money started coming in.

It was $10 and $20 at a time (and sometimes a little more) and it started adding up. Since launching the book and this campaign in April I’ve had 10 people make donations directly to my charity: water campaign. Yesterday 21 people donated. Many of them were people I went to high school with.

By midnight a total of $475 came in, putting the campaign at $2,521—just over halfway.

We’ve been so busy lately—busy with our second Ethiopian adoption—that I’ve hardly had time to think about promoting my book or continuing to beat the drum for clean water in Ethiopia. $5,000 was beginning to feel like it would take forever. And then someone else comes in and carries the load for a little while.

As Mark Horvath of InvisiblePeople.tv would say, I’m just wrecked. I’m humbled that my former classmates would rally like this. I’m full of gratitude and overwhelming thanks. “Thank you” hardly begins to cover it.

A class reunion indeed.

Only $2,479 to go until we can build a clean water well in Ethiopia.

Run Fast for Ethiopia

Another cool adoption story involves a boy adopted from Ethiopia who wanted to raise money for his homeland (there’s no public blogpost on this one, so I’ll leave off the names—though the identity will be obvious to the people who know). He organized a charity run, dubbed “Run Fast for Ethiopia,” and raised at least $170 for the Hossana region in Southern Ethiopia. The money will go to buy cows, chickens and plant a vegetable garden as part of the fundraiser for the Summer Mehaber, an annual picnic celebrating Ethiopian culture here in the Twin Cities.

I didn’t hear about the event until the day after, but I so would have been there.

The boy’s sister also did a fundraiser of her own, hosting a garden tea party for the ladies.

Consistency is the Key to Generosity

I meet with my tax guy today, which means I’ve been frantically pulling together forms and statements and crunching numbers. I hate accounting and I’m horribly disorganized when it comes to that stuff. Which is exactly why I hire a tax guy. It’s always wise to hire people who are really good at the things you’re really bad at.

Anyway, I had an revelation as I was looking at the numbers for our charitable giving. I felt like I’d been pretty generous this past year. My wife and I have talked a lot about generosity and giving and being more intentional about supporting good causes, not just with our words but with our wallets. We’ve tried to support causes as they come up and not be so cheap about it. Personally, I’ve tried to only plug the causes I’ve actually donated to. It seems disingenuous to spread the word about something but not chip in yourself.

So with all that focus on giving, I thought we’d do pretty well for 2009. Go us.

Turns out our giving is down compared to 2008. By quite a bit. Doh.

There can be all kinds of factors at work to explain this, including the fact that we made less money in 2009 or we were more tight-fisted because of the travel expenses to Ethiopia or whatever. But I think the real factor is consistency.

While we tried to actively donate to more causes in 2009, the result was a lot of tiny donations. $10 here, $20 there. That’s good money and it will go to good causes, but it doesn’t add up to much. It’s a drop in the bucket. What does add up is consistent giving. Weekly or monthly donations add up a lot more quickly. That sounds completely obvious and it is (I told you I hate accounting), but it doesn’t really sink in until you sit back and look at the numbers over a period of time.

Our donations were down in 2009 because we lowered one of our consistent donations. It seemed financially prudent at the time (and still is), but it means we gave a lot less and our impact is likewise reduced.

Like much of life, it comes down to consistency. If you really want to make a difference in anything, you have to work at it consistently. You can’t just do something once and expect change. It’s true with teaching your kids, it’s true with learning any skill, it’s true with work–and it’s true with money.

[Note: Money and giving can be a pretty touchy subject. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to do it, I’m just sharing a lesson I learned. I also don’t mean to minimize one-time donations. Those one-time donations add up when you bring them together (remember how they made me bald?).]

I Salute You, Mustache Men

Today is the last day of November, which means it’s the end of the Movember charity drive, an event where men agreed to go clean-shaven and then grow mustaches for the month of November in order to raise money for men’s health. Movember specifically fights prostate and testicular cancer and donations go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Since its inception in 2003, Movember has raised more than $47 million for men’s health. That’s a lot of money for mustaches.

I first heard about this event when I saw my old friend Kyle and my brother Rick participating this year. I really wanted to join them, but my wife said I wouldn’t get kissed for a month if I grew a mustache. That’s a long time to go without getting kissed by your wife, so instead of participating I’ll have to make do with supporting them. Cancer is one of those things that inevitably impacts everyone. My grandpa is a prostate cancer survivor—and it’s through efforts like these that hopefully there can be more survivors.

Despite my wife’s distaste for the mustache fashion statement, I have to say that I love these kinds of charity events. As a culture I think we place entirely too much importance on personal appearance, and anything we can do to thumb our nose at the status quo while supporting a charity is just awesome. (This coming from the guy whose only haircut in the past two years has been shaving his head for a cause.) Maybe next year I’ll forsake getting kissed for a good cause (but don’t bet on it).

So even though I couldn’t join my mustachioed brethren, I salute your Movember efforts and the mighty hair spreading across your upper lip. Every mustache makes a difference. You can support Kyle or Rick by making a donation on their respective pages.

And what’s a post about mustaches without an homage to them in song from none other than the Tick? We could all use a little mustache feelin’:

2010 Camaro Test Drive with a Mulleted American

This video is awesome. A friend of mine has been rocking a mullet for charity. He somehow finagled a test drive in a 2010 Camaro with the designer, Tom Peters. Hilariousness ensues.

Read more about the test drive and consider supporting the Camaro drive. That brave mulleted American edited the video for my water walk and helping him score a Camaro for charity is the least I can do.

(If that video isn’t working, you can also watch on Vimeo.)

Reflecting on the Bald Birthday Benefit

So tomorrow will mark the halfway point in this little head-shaving, water-fundraising experiment called the Bald Birthday Benefit. Of course we hit the goal last week, raising $600 and giving clean water to 30 people in only six days. With my birthday still a few weeks away, we upped the goal to a ridiculous $5,000 to see how much more we could raise. At this point, every extra buck is just gravy since I’m still shaving my head for hitting the original goal of $600. And it’s all going to an amazing cause—charity: water.

I’ve been trying to spread the word about the Bald Birthday Benefit any way I can. So far it’s happened primarily online through this blog, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. I’ve got about 900 followers on Twitter, 600 Facebook friends and I e-mailed about 200 friends. My blog probably reaches the least number of people out of all those methods, and oddly enough, even though all those methods point to my blog, my blog traffic is going to be lower this month than it has in any of the past three months (that’s primarily thanks to weirdly popular entries, like can a state secede from the U.S. and banana allergies).

I’ve been trying to blog and tweet about this a lot, attempting to capture people’s attention and hopefully gain more donations. I realize there are very few people who read every blog post, tweet or Facebook update. It’s very easy to miss one, so I’ve been trying to up the volume in hopes of catching more people. It seems to work, though I’m also very leery of being annoying. There’s a fine line between increasing the frequency and increasing the annoyance factor.

Continue reading Reflecting on the Bald Birthday Benefit