HappyRant

Businessman says, pay it forward on 9/11

OK, so this is a day late, but I like the idea.

When Kevin Tuerff's plane was diverted to a town in Newfoundland on 9/11, he marveled at the hospitality the residents showed the nearly 7000 stranded passengers. Back home, the owner of the Austin, Texas based company Enviromedia took a cue from the movie "Pay It Forward" and established a "pay it forward day" in his company in honor of the victims and heroes of that day.

The idea is to honor the Sept. 11 anniversary by having everyone do random acts of kindness for at least three strangers.

...on each anniversary, Tuerff's employees try to make a difference, armed with $100 and a mission to do good deeds in the community.

Like so many inspiring ideas, I love this not just for the immediate impact of it, but for the seeds that it plants both with the employees who get to focus for that day on paying it forward and the people who are the recipients.

"We hope that this can be a regular activity, that can be positive, that people can try to make a difference and restore faith in humanity," Tuerff said.

Good stuff. We need more of it.

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What's right with the world?

Lately I've been listening to Air America on my car radio (liberal/progressive talk radio). Since I lean more to the left in my political views, I find it easier to listen to than conservative talk radio, as I agree with more of what they're talking about.

But even if I find it easier to agree with, I still find myself frequently having to turn it off or change the station. Yesterday, driving in silence after feeling compelled to turn it off yet again, I was noodling over what that was all about.

Ultimately, it's because much of politically oriented talk radio - both liberal and conservative - is focused on, "What's wrong with _______." There is almost never a celebration of things going right. There is almost never a recognition of the immense good being done in the world. And all that focus on what's wrong starts to drag me down.

The key measurement in talk radio (and other media) seems to be, if it raises your blood pressure, turns your face red and makes you splutter and spit, it must be good entertainment.

I don't have any illusion that I'm going to change that - certainly not with a blog post. But I can plant a seed to counter it that some of you might carry out into your lives.

Reinforced by the media, looking at what's wrong with the world has almost become a habitual perspective. And habits don't change without a concerted effort. With that in mind, I'd like to challenge you to start a new daily habit. Every day, make it a point to ask yourself, "What's right with the world?" Go out of your way to reinforce a positive view.

Maybe you do it first thing in the morning to set the tone of your day. Maybe you consciously scan the newspaper for positive stories. Maybe you keep a what's-right-with-the-world journal, much like keeping a gratitude journal. Maybe you start a what's-right-with-the-world blog.

However you do it, you just might be amazed at the degree to which what you focus on shapes your image of the world. 

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Yahoo! Purple Acts of Kindness

I'm a firm believer in the power of the business world to do good. Yahoo's Purple Acts of Kindness program is a great example.

What exactly is that? I'll let Yahoo! explain...

Yahoo! seeks out individuals who are doing great work in their communities, and amplifies their good deeds by putting some purple power behind their efforts. Leveraging the reach of the Yahoo! network, we hope these stories will touch many of our 500 million users, and serve as an inspiration to commit similar acts of kindness.

The most recent story shines a light on an 8 year old girl in Topeka, Kansas...

This remarkable third-grader from Topeka, Kansas, was inspired by Yahoo!’s Be a Better Planet campaign to encourage Topekans to use reusable shopping bags at the grocery store. Her grandmother contacted Yahoo! to see if we could help jumpstart her campaign.

As part of our Purple Acts of Kindness program, we sent Jaide 900 (purple) canvas shoppings bags. She’ll sell them for $5 a piece at local supermarkets to raise money for organizations that preserve the environment and improve the lives of kids, including Keep America Beautiful, the Topeka School Fund, and the American Heart Association.

What I love about this is not so much the concrete effect this has (let's be honest - 900 shopping bags is only going to have so much of a positive impact on the planet). It's the ripple effect. It's the fact that Yahoo! is shining the light on people who are putting the effort into making their corner of the world a better place.

The more positive efforts people are exposed to, the greater the likelihood that they will feel moved to take some kind of positive action themselves. With its reach to hundreds of millions of people, this has the potential to inspire far beyond the scope of the individual projects Yahoo! highlights.

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Online change-the-world communities

A core piece of any movement for positive change is achieving critical mass, getting enough people involved and engaged that it starts to gain momentum on its own.

With that in mind, it's been heartening to see the proliferation of online communities with a do-gooder bent. Here are three of my favorites:

Zaadz

Wiser Earth

Care2

It's not just the fact that they exist that excites me. It's the way that reflects a broader cultural shift towards the importance of incorporating a way to make a difference into the fabric of our lives.

Whee-haw!

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US sets charitable giving record

Americans and American culture are too often either over-idealized or over-demonized. The reality is that there are both positive and negative aspects.

Here's one of the big positive ones. Americans are givers. 

Americans gave nearly $300 billion to charitable causes last year, setting a new record and besting the 2005 total that had been boosted by a surge in aid to victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and the Asian tsunami.

Donors contributed an estimated $295.02 billion in 2006, a 1 percent increase when adjusted for inflation, up from $283.05 billion in 2005. Excluding donations for disaster relief, the total rose 3.2 percent, inflation-adjusted, according to an annual report released Monday by the Giving USA Foundation at Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy.

And the lion's share of that comes from individual donors...

"What people find especially interesting about this, and it's true year after year, that such a high percentage comes from individual donors," Giving USA Chairman Richard Jolly said.

Individuals gave a combined 75.6 percent of the total. With bequests, that rises to 83.4 percent.

And it's not just the rich philanthropists who are getting in on the act...

About 65 percent of households with incomes less than $100,000 give to charity, the report showed.

"It tells you something about American culture that is unlike any other country," said Claire Gaudiani, a professor at NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and author of "The Greater Good: How Philanthropy Drives the American Economy and Can Save Capitalism." Gaudiani said the willingness of Americans to give cuts across income levels, and their investments go to developing ideas, inventions and people to the benefit of the overall economy.

How does that compare to other countries?

Gaudiani said Americans give twice as much as the next most charitable country, according to a November 2006 comparison done by the Charities Aid Foundation. In philanthropic giving as a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. ranked first at 1.7 percent. No. 2 Britain gave 0.73 percent, while France, with a 0.14 percent rate, trailed such countries as South Africa, Singapore, Turkey and Germany.

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Neuroeconomics shines light on why it feels good to give

It's no secret that it feels good to give. Now scientists are zeroing in on why it feels good.

That good feeling you get by writing a check to your favorite charity could be your brain patting itself on the back.

Reporting in today's issue of the journal Science, a team of economists and psychologists at the University of Oregon have found that donating money to charity activates regions of the brain associated with pleasure.

The study represents a major advance in the young field of neuroeconomics, a collaboration between economists and psychologists to determine how the brain directs the way people handle money.

Economic models would suggest "only Bill Gates or Warren Buffett should be making contributions, and everyone else should just free-ride," said one of the authors, economics professor William T. Harbaugh. "But that doesn't happen; there's high participation, where even low-income people are giving away a portion of their income."

The apparent reason is that giving to others produces a "warm glow." As Harbaugh described it, "people feel good knowing that they're a charitable giver."

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Banking for change: Community-minded banking

When you think of the banking industry, a social agenda to make the world a better place isn't typically the first thing that comes to mind. But for Chicago-based Shorebank, it's an integral part of the reason they exist. Today it's a thriving, if fairly small, financial institution, but as this article describes, when it was founded in 1974 expectations were anything but high.

Opening a bank aimed at improving the quality of life in poor urban areas was supposed to be a grand notion doomed for failure.

The demise of ShoreBank, which promotes everything from redevelopment to minority businesses to environmentally responsible lending, was so predictable that a university professor came running to document its beginnings for a case study on business failure.

...Thirty-four years later, the stories are about its trailblazing success.

The bank has managed to thrive in both the financial and social good arenas.

Despite its altruistic slogan -- "Let's change the world" -- this is no charity organization. The Chicago-based banking company reported net income of $5.3 million last year even after tending to its varied missions.

But its biggest impact has been in what it calls community-minded investing, not profitability.

Founded in 1974, the bank was built on an idea far before its time.

ShoreBank was founded on the '60s-era idealism of Ron Grzywinski, Houghton, Milton Davis and James Fletcher (the latter two now deceased), who together ran one of the nation's first minority small business loan programs. Intent on finding ways to reverse the decline of inner-city Chicago neighborhoods, they zeroed in on redlining -- banks' then-routine denial of credit and services to customers in poorer areas.

The four young bankers raised $800,000 in capital and obtained a $2.4 million loan to buy the failing South Shore National Bank in 1973, using it as a model for their then-novel idea that private bank capital could be used to achieve social purposes.

Last year, banking for the poor hit the mainstream awareness as Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize. The insights of Shorebank's founders were woven into Yunus' success.

Through its far-flung business, it can even claim a supporting role in the work honored by last year's Nobel Peace Prize. Grzywinski and Houghton, on 18 trips to Bangladesh over 10 years, advised winner Muhammad Yunus on how to start and manage his Grameen Bank for the poor specializing in very small loans called microcredits.

"They have shown that you can both promote economic opportunity in low-income communities and be a profitable, financially sustainable institution," said Andrea Levere, president of Corporate for Enterprise Development, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that promotes economic development.

Co-founder Grywinski regrets that there haven't been more companies copying their success.

While he has no problems with ShoreBank remaining "really tiny minnows" in the banking world, Grzywinski, 71, expressed disappointment that its experience had not sparked a "broad revolution" in community development banking.

 "It does seem as though a bank company holding model is a very good model to deal with things like neighborhood development, environmental conservation, et cetera," he said in an interview. "So we would like to see a lot of other people do it."

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Paul Hawken & Blessed Unrest

Looking around at what's happening in the world, it's tempting to throw up your hands in despair. So much of what we're exposed to in the major media focuses on doom and gloom. 

But every once in a while a voice comes along that offers a perspective of hope and possibility. Last week I was in San Francisco at the BALLE conference (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), and I had the good fortune to hear one of those voices, Paul Hawken.

Hawken, who recently wrote the book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, maintains that, contrary to the major media perspective that everything is going to hell and there's nothing we can do about it, there is a massive, decentralized, ad hoc movement underway.

He describes it as an immune system response. In this article, adapted from Blessed Unrest, he writes:

Historically, social movements have arisen primarily because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those woes remain legion, but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the planet has a life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change. It crossed my mind that perhaps I was seeing something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in the conventional sense, is it a collective response to threat? Is it splintered for reasons that are innate to its purpose?

He describes the "movement" further...

The movement can’t be divided because it is atomized—small pieces loosely joined. It forms, gathers, and dissipates quickly. Many inside and out dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to bring down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing, informing, and massing.

The movement has three basic roots: the environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization—all of which are intertwining. It arises spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in history.

This paragraph struck a chord for me...

The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world.

Hawken's message was inspiring and hopeful. Everybody I talked to about it came away feeling a renewed sense of possibility. That the individual work we all are doing isn't just pissing in the wind, but part of a cumulative effort that can make a difference.

Perhaps my friend I attended the conference with said it best when she said, "I'm a T-cell." She didn't need to change the world - she just needed to keep focusing her efforts on her corner of it, and others would be doing the same.

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Big business. Big difference.

I love the potential of the business world to make a positive impact. One great example of that is Green Standards North America, a company built on the idea of doing well by doing good. 

On the surface, it sounds like a brilliant PR scheme. Big business shuns corporate world in favour of small-town Nova Scotia, where the players live out their dreams - and stoke their conscience - making the world a better place for poor people. Dig a little deeper, and you realize it's actually true.

It's hard to argue with their success. The multimillion-dollar company, Green Standards North America of Bridgewater, did more business in the first three months of 2007 than in all of last year. The program is called Waste to Wonder, and it involves diverting corporate waste such as furniture and equipment from landfills and donating it to worthy causes, like schools and charities. Computers, desks, chairs, boardroom tables, projectors - more than 30 million tonnes of corporate waste head to Canadian dumps each year.

The company combines money-making with money-giving.

"It's altruistic capitalism. At the front end, we've got an operating company that charges other companies to do work and makes profit. The back end of the business is a charitable trust, and the operating company covers a lot of the cost of the charitable trust. So we don't go out asking for money, we go and earn money to run the charitable trust. That's unique. The other aspect, which is equally important, is the people involved. We've got an environment here and a team of people here who really feel they're making a difference, and that's very, very motivating for those involved."

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Sharp increase in US youth volunteerism

The current generation of youth gets a lot of flack in the media for being self-absorbed and feeling overly entitled.

While that might be true, I also see that same generation as more focused on making the world a better place than previous generations. I think the altruistic focus that seems to be prevalent in that age group bodes well for the future.

Here are some statistics from a report titled "Volunteering in America: 2007 State Trends and Ranking in Civic Life" that back that up...

Volunteerism is up sharply among young Americans, according to a report released last month by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Among youths age 16 to 19, volunteer rates have almost doubled since 1989.

The article goes on to describe the trend I've seen in today's youth.

...the increase in the number of young people volunteering through their schools, churches and other community organizations is especially encouraging. Like the generation of young people who helped launched the Peace Corps in the 1960s, many in today's younger generation appear committed to building a better world through service to others.

They're doing it by mentoring younger children and helping older people live independently. They're raising money for those in need and lending a hand in times of crisis. And they're setting a wonderful example for the rest of us.

So here's a thought. What if we started focusing on the potential of this generation to make that positive impact? What if we stopped griping about how they're not like us, and started focusing on how we can support the positive energy they bring to the picture?

There's no doubt this world is in need of some serious change for the better. And if we play our cards right, today's youth will be leading the charge.

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