Every week, the CharityFocus interns have to read a book and do a book report. Last week, one of the them got "How Can I Help", by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman. Here is an profound excerpt from Chapter 6:
This summer CharityFocus is hosting three interns. Sadan is a tech whiz visiting from Pakistan, Ketan is movement builder from Bombay and Bhoutik is a hip-hop fan from Fremont. And Sachi, a visiting filmmaker, is our fourth, adopted intern. :) Three of them are part of the Metta Mentors fellowship in Berkeley, and are being mentored by our own Deepak Goel.
Last night, Neil, Guri and I hosted them for some "aloo parathas", as they finished their first two weeks of orientation. Before we even got settled, their stories started flowing. Ketan held up traffic so an old lady could cross, Bhoutik helped a janitor clean the men's bathroom, Sadan stepped out of his comfort zone to tag random strangers at yesterday's Critical-Mass bike ride in SF. Together, they've already done two lemonade stands and a hear-the-homeless drive, and learned the art of receiving rejections, accepting overwhelming gratitude, and falling in love with Smile Cards. :)
"You should've seen Ketan dance! This boy's got some moves," Bhoutik said excitedly of the time when they were all walking down the streets and Ketan started to dance simply to support a street musician. "Caught up in excitement, we even just started to just compliment random strangers," one of the trio noted. Quick to respond, Ketan adds, "And tonight, as I walking here, three people stopped to tell me that I was looking great. What goes around comes around!"
This was all part of their two-week orientation process, after which they will be paired with specific CF teams.
When Deepak I forwarded the introductory note about the interns, most of the CF coordinators themselves wanted to join in the fun -- although some wondered if they'd be able to hack it. :) Here's an abbreviated list of the initial intern assignments:
A while back, I read Nicholas Carr's provocative article on the impact of Google on our brains: Is Google Making Us Stoopid? It's not a simple question to answer, but a very important one.
This morning, I received the Berrett-Koehler newsletter -- one of my favorites -- and noticed a provocative title: Death of Why?, a book by Andrea Batista Schlesinger. And then I read the insightful book excerpt that opened with:
After my second talk at London Business School, Andrew comes up to introduce himself. It turns out that he is the CEO of UK's largest parking garage company -- NCP -- and in listening to the CharityFocus story today, he had several "break-through" moments around the gift-economy ideal. "What if you allocated a daily kindness budget for each parking attendant, and gave them an opportunity to tag a random customer: 'Sir, your bill was paid for by an anonymous friend. Here's a Smile Card. Please pay it forward." The attendant would feel empowered, the customer would be bowled over, and the stories would ripple to shift the ethos of the entire company. Andrew digs it! He gets the power of small acts, because one of their parking attendants recently saved someone from a suicide attempt in the garage. We agree to video conference with his leadership team, to imagine the possibilities around their 750 garages!
During my last four days in London, I didn't get enough sleep but I did get many opportunities to plant gift-economy seeds in unsuspecting places. :) I was invited to London Business School by Professor Rao, to share stories with his classes ... and then, of course, serendipity has a way to taking over!
The Peace Fleece story of a couple of Maine manifesting goodness through a 24 year-old wool company in their backyard barn, is super inspiring. Perhaps due to their son's unflinching commitment to the gift economy, in May of last year, they decided step it up through a little Smile Card experiment. Every week, a randomly selected customer would get a note saying that their order was paid for -- just like that, a no strings attached gift.
This morning, Pete sends in a couple of the recent responses that have their crew beaming with smiles:
A few weeks ago, Brandt called- so excited that he had just learned of the Karma Clinic model.
When we first spoke, he was just so excited and said, “I’m going to do this! It just makes sense.” I knew he was serious but had no idea how quickly indeed he intended to take this project off the ground. Turns out, Brandt was in the process of opening his clinic in Portland– after practicing as an Acupuncturist for many years in Florida, he was invited to teach at NCNM and moved across the country, to serve in the capacity of a teacher. He decided that he wanted to do the clinic gift-economy style, and indeed 2 weeks later, he had his first patient! So, Brandt jumped head first into a gift-economy clinic and he loves it. As if this were not enough, he’s invited his colleagues at their clinic to jump in with him— and so, even they’re going to be practicing completely gift-economy style well-care on the days that Brandt is at the clinic.
What inspires me most about him is the energy with which he serves– for him, its just about giving. Sharing his gifts and living in line with his spirit.
And indeed, the gift-economy model truly speaks to the spirit of healers…
From a transcription of a lecture on Nonviolence delivered in Berkeley in 1976, by E. F. Schumacher:
The whole question of nonviolence was taken by various people as being primarily a question of revolution or change or avoidance of war, but the more I reflect on the matter the more I see that it goes very, very much deeper. So I will start talking about technology because what we stand in need of is to recognize the violence in our technology. We are always prepared to react in a violent manner because we are very short-tempered. We want to solve the problem immediately. We normally solve problems by taking a sledgehammer and smashing it and then the poor problem explodes into twelve bits, and then we take sledgehammers to smash each of the twelve and again they explode. The whole idea of nonviolence is to start living a nonviolent way, and the slogan of the organization which I set up in England twelve years ago, the Intermediate Technology Development Group, is something like, "It's second class people who solve problems. First class people don't have them." It's much better not to have them in the first place. As a highly intelligent person once asked, "When we see the connection, if an ancestor of long ago would visit us today what would he be more astonished at – the number of our dentists or the rottenness of our teeth?" We're very grateful that we have these problem solvers, the dentists, but it would be much cleverer not to have rotten teeth.
High in the Andes live the Aymarans. A tribe born with their toes dipped in original wisdom. They place the future at their backs and face their past with the intentness of a woman scanning a mirror for wrinkles or chin hair. An Aymaran gestures over his shoulder to indicate next year and will point straight ahead if you need directions to yesterday.
Perhaps the rest of us lied to ourselves about the future. Dangled it like a carrot in front of our noses, only because people can be such donkeys sometimes. Throw tomorrow like a stick or a newspaper and tell us to "Go Fetch" and we will, because we are a race freighted with hope, a people who have collectively deified the bend in the road.
Deified is a palindrome. It ripples forward and backward with equal meaning. Unlike the future it can be read both ways. The future read backwards is erutuf. An exotic word that bursts on the tongue like an unheard of tropical fruit, sweet and strange. Erutuf. The truth is we are the ones who have it all backwards.
Several weeks ago David Overlin was given a $10 bill. He was one of few thousand people in Southern Wisconsin asked by his bank to pay the money forward!
Yes, that's right. At each of its twenty branches, Sumitt Credit Union gave 100 people a ten-dollar bill to give away, if they were willing to declare their pay-it-forward intention on video. Top idea received a $500 prize too.
And they even got a proposal (that was funded) from a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, with this adorable video:
I love this style of micro-philanthropy, particularly with the on-site video declarations. It's low-overhead and high-buzz and I'm sure it was worth the $20K of their PR bugdet. :) It would be great to see more philanthropy head in this direction, where $20K is purely for the sake of creating a culture of giving, and to connect these experiments through a meta-platform like HelpOthers.org. Our monthly $100 contest on HelpOthers is a start in that direction. :)
A stunningly Beautiful poem from our poet-doctor-activist, Sri, who is currently in Burundi, serving in a small rural clinic. From the midst of Kigutu’s harsh realities come his moving stories and innermost reflections. He writes not just as a compassionate doctor pushed to the boundaries of his ability, but as a deeply human poet who sings of both suffering and its overcoming with powerful presence.
A while back, I read Nicholas Carr's provocative article on the impact of Google on our brains: 
A few weeks ago, 
Jul 03: AK on The Way of Social Action
Jul 03: Avantika on Two Weeks Into CharityFocus Summer Internship
Jul 01: Kevin on Two Weeks Into CharityFocus Summer Internship
Jul 01: Pancho on Three Peace Fleece Stories
Jun 30: bummiggity on Two Weeks Into CharityFocus Summer Internship
Jun 30: Hitesh Parashar on Two Weeks Into CharityFocus Summer Internship
Jun 29: AK on Two Weeks Into CharityFocus Summer Internship
Jun 29: Faruk on Two Weeks Into CharityFocus Summer Internship
Jun 28: Adnan on Grameen Founder Gets Nobel Peace Prize
Jun 27: Lavanya on The Death of Why?