Here at ItStartsWith.Us we’ve gotten very good at bringing people together around the concept of micro-giving, specifically as it relates to giving of our time and energy to accomplish big things in just 15 minutes a week.
But sometimes time and energy aren’t exactly what people need. Sometimes what they really need is a bit of a financial helping hand. I’ve never asked our main group to donate money to a person or a cause, and I want to keep it that way. I love that this group is all about touching people’s lives without spending a dime.
With that being said, however, I’ve been thinking for a long time about how we could use our micro-giving concept in the financial realm to produce similar amazing results. I’m happy to announce that I’ve been working with my boy J. Money from Budgets Are Sexy, and we’ve come up with a way to do it.
The concept is simple – it’s the same one we use with the other ItStartsWith.Us initiatives:
- 500 people participate in a Weekly Mission = 125 hours of community service are pumped into the world
- 500 people participate in a Love Bomb = 1 person gets 500 comments on their blog, and is touched for life
- 500 people participate in a Love Drop = 1 family gets $1,000 to help out during a tough time
The first two we’ve been doing for a long time – you’re already part of it, and you’ve seen the awesome results. The last one is what J. and I are launching right now. We’re still in the startup phase, so we don’t have all the details nailed down yet, but here’s the basic idea: We’re going to build a community of people who will give either $1 or $5 a month in order to help someone out. Same concept as everything else we’ve done here . . . giving just one dollar a month is an incredibly tiny amount, but when you combine that with thousands of people doing the same thing, think of the impact you’ll be able to make on one person, or one family.
We’ll be taking suggestions from team members, just like we do with the Love Bomb project. In just a few months, when this group grows to be a good size, imagine being able to recommend a family you know to receive a Love Drop, and we simply give them, with no strings attached, a check for $10,000 to help them get through a tough situation. Or maybe we buy them the new car they desperately need to be able to commute to a new job and become financially stable again. As with everything else we do here, the possibilities are limited only by our imagination.
To kick off our new project, J. and I were trying to think of people in our lives who could use a little bit of extra cash, and I mentioned a friend of mine whose family experienced a huge house fire a couple weeks ago. My friend, her husband and their two little boys escaped unharmed (thanks to a functioning smoke detector), but they lost almost all of their possessions, and they’ll be living out of a hotel for the next five months while the house situation gets sorted out.
We want to help this family out, so we’ve set up a little ChipIn widget on J.’s blog post here: “Announcing Our Very First Love Drop“. It will allow anyone to give through PayPal, and next week we will cut a check to the family with 100% of the proceeds.
As I said, this isn’t something that the main ItStartsWith.Us group is going to focus on – we’re going to keep doing what we do best. But if you’re interested in the possibilities of this new project, and it sounds like something you would like to learn more about, you can get on the Love Drop mailing list below. Getting on this list doesn’t take money from your account or commit you to any contribution amount; it will simply allow you to hear more details about this project as we get it going, and you can decide from there if you’d like to participate or not.
This is one more way that we’re going to use the micro-giving concept to change the world. Thanks for helping us!
Similar Posts:
- Our First Love Drop
- Love Bomb + Love Drop for Jill!
- Love Drop Business Details
- Join the Love Bomb Team. NOW.
- When You’re In Over Your Head
