HumanKindMedia

World peace: Changing the conversation to connection

World peace: two words that evoke tremendous longing and profound overwhelm in that part of the human heart that wants to see an end to suffering in the world. At HumanKind Media, we've been talking about possibilities in the face of seemingly impossible tasks in our world -- ending poverty, eradicating treatable diseases, and raising women's and children's status. But Liz and I were a little intimidated at the thought of taking on world peace. It's so big and seemingly impossible. And how would we even articulate what each of the many billions of people on the planet means by world peace?

We most easily describe peace by saying what it is not: conflict, abuse, oppression, war, and genocide. In the media we see protests, embargoes, sanctions, boycotts, people standing against the things that peace is not. A high school student, when I asked, said, "Peace would happen when someone surrenders." Argh.

Hooray! I Got My Smile Cards

A while back, the GlobalOneness Project people introduced me to CharityFocus.org co-founder Nipun Mehta. CharityFocus, founded in 1999 (I know, I'm slow to catch on), is now a giant web of "kindness ventures" centered around the giving economy, or the practice of generosity, both giving freely and receiving what is offered. I met with Nipun in a coffee shop last week, and I don't mean to be dramatic here, but he may have changed my life.

When we think of people living lives of service and giving -- well, when I think of that, I think of Mother Teresa and Ghandi, not the man who looks like a pranky grad student sitting across from me at the coffee shop. He doesn't say exactly what field he was in when he was at UC Berkeley, but I think it was computer science, since the main forum for his giving-economy ventures seems to be online. If it seems like I know too little about someone I interviewed, mea culpa. You can read more than I can tell you in his own words here. Before our meeting, he said he prefers to have agenda-less, face-to-face meetings with no time constraints (how refreshing is that?!) and he sent me the most wonderful brief on the philosophy of CharityFocus to give me background on what they're up to.

In brief, Nipun Mehta, the tennis-playing computer science/philosophy major, is Generosity Guy, but he'll be embarrassed that I put it that way.

Connection and tipping points, revisited

This is a rewrite of something we published back in September. There was so much good stuff percolating excitedly in here that we just had to go back, sort it out, and say it better, now that we're telling stories about connection and peace.

Paul Hawken, in one of our recommended books, Blessed Unrest, writes,

"What has changed recently, and has offered evidence that hope may be a rational act despite the onslaught of countervailing data, is the use of connectivity. Individuals are associating, hooking up, and identifying with one another. ... They are forming units, inventing again and again pieces of a large organism, enjoining associations and volunteers and committees and groups and assembling these into a mosaic of activity as if they were solving a jigsaw puzzle without ever having seen the picture on its box.

"The insanity of human destructiveness may be mismatched by an older grace and intelligence that is fastening us together in ways we have never before seen or imagined."

'Tis the season

Big media is excited this week about the upcoming American "holiday" Black Friday, the day-after-Thanksgiving day when retailers hope to move "into the black," and some of us move away from peace to frenetic nutsiness. Here in my country, a day doesn't pass without someone noticing that the holiday hype began pretty darn early this year -- like maybe in September. I would be the first one to advocate the holiday spirit all year -- make every day like Christmas or Hannukah or whatever holiday your culture creates under the auspices of love, peace, and understanding. But in my culture, the holiday spirit is inextricably linked (or is it?) to consuming -- consuming under the auspices of love, peace, and understanding, but consuming, nonetheless.

But the initial impulse that started all this was the impulse to give. We here at HumanKind Media like that impulse and want to encourage as much giving as possible, and our HumanKind policy is to be a piece of media that stands up for something, not against. We're only anti- the anti's. (Get it? Yuk, yuk.)

Grateful

I get pretty contemplative at the beginning of the holiday season in the western hemisphere. Here is the big benefit of citizen journalism: Since I create my own media, and my editor is my friend, I can pretty much get as personal or as opinionated as I want, and if my readership goes down, it's just my own darn fault, but I'm not taking an entire newspaper or broadcast station and all the employees and their families down with me. :-) So, since you've got the other 95% of your media to help you with your turkey, tell you how bad gas prices and airport boarding lines are, and/or how to get along with your in-laws this week (if you're not in the U.S., disregard this part), I just wanted to write this very personal note about how grateful I am, and to invite you into a few quiet moments of gratitude, too.

Two years ago this week I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and right about now, two years ago, my husband and I were getting ready to tell our children, and I was figuring out how to get out of a couple of consulting gigs because, in the few days since the diagnosis, I hadn't been able to figure out how to keep my work in other parts of the country going and go through chemotherapy at the same time (as laughable as that sounds, I did try pretty hard for a few days to see if that could work).

Too much fun :)

I've been trying to write this two-paragraph blog on and off for a few hours now, hoping to cover all the cool things I've discovered in the past few weeks that I can't wait to share with all my friends. We're awash in great stories! So instead, I'm giving each of them as a gift to you today: first, a trip through happiness, then some addictive vocabulary-building, and finally, smiles for everyone. All I ask is that you forward anything you take joy from to some of your friends to help spread all this generosity, happiness and caring as far as you can:

Happiness Project
Liz got to interview Gretchen because they're both in New York, but I found her first! (I even made a spot on my newly designed high-goodness iGoogle page for a subscription to her blog.) Her easy-going commentary on our individual quests for happiness is inspiring and endlessly helpful. I think I've become happier just watching Gretchen figure it out.

Vocabulary-building to end poverty: Free Rice
No joke. Head straight to Free Rice, play a vocab game, and for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. Don't click if you don't have a few minutes though -- it'll snare you! While you play this insanely addictive game, the advertisers at the bottom are sending bits of that excess American capital known as advertising revenue to countries that need food. If you can pull yourself away from the game for a second, take a look at their stats. They've gone from hundreds of grains of rice a day donated to millions a day in only a month. Isn't it amazing what you can do to end poverty (we're assuming we already talked you into a mosquito net) in just a few clicks?

Smiles for Everyone: Smile Cards
You may remember our blog on the Seva Cafe, brought to us by the GlobalOnenessProject. Our friends at GlobalOneness introduced us to the Karma Kitchen in California. CharityFocus.org , creators of way cool "giving economy" projects are, I am certain, transforming the world already, through their endless efforts to spread generosity like a virus through the global internet community. Order your free Smile Cards here and start your own pay-it-forward ripples today. And, of course if you'd like a little more inspiring media today, there's Karma Tube, the "inner-net" YouTube.

These are just a few morsels to whet your appetite for upcoming stories about CharityFocus, the giving economy, and the rapid rise of generosity as the new capital. Stay tuned.

HumanKind Challenge: More fun with friends

Something we've noticed here during our interviews and our first two HumanKind Challenges is that giving draws a crowd. Sometimes all it takes is one person to say, "Hey, I want to run for women in the Congo," or, "Let's raise money for ..." and before you know it, they've got friends and partners in their giving adventures. That happened to us when we asked people to participate in HumanKind Challenge #1, donating mosquito nets. Now we've got matching happening, and fund-raising in small groups, and monthly donations starting to roll like a snowball, thanks to you, our readers, our friends.

Cari Class and Stacey Boscoe started their giving adventure with dinner. California resident Cari heard about Dining for Women from a friend in Oregon. Founded by Marsha Wallace in 2003, Dining for Women is a can't lose situation for anyone who 1) has friends, 2) has friends who like to eat dinner with other friends, and 3) has friends who want to contribute to healing the world. Dining for Women chooses a grassroots organization every month (Women for Women this time around), prepares information packets, reading lists, and often a video from the featured organization and sends it to more than 170 chapters in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

Making that one-to-one connection

Check out our interview today with Trish Tobin, chief marketing officer for Women for Women. Before Trish took that job, she went on a trip with Women for Women to Rwanda, where she met women who were participating in the program. Looking back, she calls that making "the ultimate connection." She was so surprised by how she and the women she met related to each other that she ditched her corporate job and hasn't looked back.

Now, she's using her amazing marketing skills to try to create those moments of connection with people all over the world -- those of us who can't necessarily meet a Rwandan woman in her home, but who can connect with her another way: through global media.

Media can save the world: YouthAIDS

It's not often I read something on CNN that makes me want to jump out of my seat and cheer -- actually, that would be never -- but today, it happened!

The site published a story today about Kate Roberts, a young advertising executive who realized that while she was an expert at selling stuff to kids, she was only selling things that hurt them, not helped them: gum, soda, cigarettes. Junk. It was, in short, a colossal waste of global media -- and of her own unique talents and abilities.

So Kate ditched that lucrative career and founded YouthAIDS. Now she builds media campaigns "that use pop culture, corporate America, and celebrities" to get life-saving information to people all over the world.

It might seem a little weird to you that I'm writing about this on HumanKind. And pointing you to the mainstreamiest of mainstream media sources, no less. But I was so blown away to see one of our core messages -- the incredible power of global media can actually be wielded for good -- appear so explicity on a web site that gets millions of hits every day, and I wanted to share it with you as an example of what good media with massive reach can do.

Just don't click on the gossip headlines. (Hah!)

Looking for a movie to see tonight?

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that Darfur Now, opening today, falls into the category of media that actually helps.

It's a movie about tremendous suffering that'll overwhelm you, yes, but most important to us at HumanKind, it's also about what's being done in Darfur and what's needed from the rest of us and what's possible: By demonstrating the progress that specific ordinary people have already made, it proves it's possible to make progress in an overwhelming situation, to create healing. There's power in saying it's possible. Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"It shows how the work of six people can make a difference in Darfur, and how our voices united can bring an end to the unspeakable horrors the people of Darfur face every day. It follows the achievements of a Darfuri woman, a community leader in West Darfur, a UCLA graduate, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, a U.N. humanitarian aid worker, and an actor and activist." (Don Cheadle)

Not all of those people are larger-than-life! Most of them are like you and me, just in different jobs and with different backgrounds. We can relate, and we can be inspired. It's opening day for Darfur Now. If you live in a city where it's opening, show that you're all for media that helps, not hurts, and buy a ticket.

Trivia: The movie is from a company called Participant Productions. Their tagline? "A whole new kind of action flick." Pretty cool, huh?