Over 28K!

My dad likes it when I update the thermometer. With some hours I've put in, a big donation he sent to an orphanage they support in Africa, and the Briefcase Relay I talked some friends in to running tomorrow (in support of the foodbank)... the thermometer has just surpassed $28,000. That's a really crazy huge number. 39% of that is real dollars- which is still a crazy huge number.

Hopefully there will be photos from the briefcase relay- there will be costumes. Wish us luck!

Meandering Update on How to Finish Strong

There is a lot to say when you are an intermittent blogger, and most of it, I probably won't take the time to express fully. Even with the moving target of trying to wrap up this effort by my 31st birthday (in July), I'm still trying to figure out what I have to do to make it ALL the way. There is about $4500 or 136 hours left to raise. I'm learned a lot in the last year, and certainly enough to know that while it is acheiveable, I need a plan.

Another one of the things that I have learned is that I really enjoy charity projects when they feel comfortable and relevant, more than some big symbolic effort. Namely, I would much rather have to sit down and plan a menu and shopping for 30(!) homeless youth than go to some one off gala type event. There are fundraiser's for organizations happening all the time, but I would rather have a few groups that I care deeply about and know how to impact positively. (Obviously, this does not include running 5ks.) Friends of Youth has been a great organization for me to support because their mission is good, I feel like it has changed the way I think about my own community, and it lets me do something I enjoy doing anyway (cooking with my family).

One of the reasons that I need a plan, however, is that I am expecting to change where I am spending my volunteer time soon. At the end of the month, I will be passing the torch at HiveBio. While I hope to have some ongoing relationship there, I have found I need a more free time and headspace than that position has afforded me. I'm also planning to stop volunteering with AWIS, in an effort to focus my professional networking on organizations that will connect me with professionals in my field. For recordkeeping, the two major sources of my volunteer hours will be ramping down quickly, and I still need to get something in place to meet that last $4500.

Always the inspiration, today my little sister is participating in a Kidney Walk to support kidney patients . It's the type of event that doesn't require lots of preparation, but can be fun with a team, and gives a clear direction for how to get people to help you out. Send money here. Get your friends involved- for the multiplier effect. I'm planning to sign up for at least one fundraiser 5K this summer, which should fill that niche for me (and hopefully a small team). But I'm also going to need some large-ish volunteer projects. The challenge will be balancing my new sentiment that volunteer work is impactful on the volunteer- what you spend time on becomes who you are- with my hope of getting more people involved, and the logistical limitations of trying to pull this all off by July 21. I would happily accept ideas for how to make this happen at any time.

This is still happening

My father just reminded me to update the thermometer. Much to say on the many things that have been going on- science fairs, finishing my tenure at Director of Education at HiveBio, seeking a replacement for the AWIS newsletter, planning some more 5Ks.

Perhaps the best thing to say is 84.95%. It's getting really close.

A Day of Service

I didn't used to get Martin Luther King Jr Day off. I have no particular habits for this day (today), but last year I learned that many people take the day as a day of service. It's an awesome way to memorialize a man who worked so hard for peace. 

"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'" 
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This year, in my current job, I do get Martin Luther King Jr Day off, and I thought I would actually participate in a service project. You know, try out a new organization, meet new people, learn about a new issue.

I emailed my family and asked who would want to tag along, and through the United Way my Dad found a school that was looking for some help with a construction project and that sounded just right to him. My mom opted to go with him, which is lucky for this school, because the two of them are like a construction machine when they get going. I ended up not being able to participate, but they stopped by afterwards to let me know how it went (and get some help on another project my Dad is working on for me. Thanks Dad). They spent 8 hours (!) climbing ladders, sawing framing and generally building windows. Awesome. 16 hours added to the thermometer... and just like that the 70% mark was crossed.

I still want to find an excise to join someone else's service project, but in the meantime, I've got another date for dinner at Friend's of Youth, an both AWIS and HiveBio events on the calendar.

We just surpased $20,000

Just when I was starting to wonder if I could get the focus to finish out this project, I am feeling quite renewed. My mom reminded me about all the OTHER giving that has taken place in the last month (who can resist the $10 bag of groceries that Safeway just gives to the foodbank. It's so easy!), I made a big ol' pot of chili for the shelter, and I spent Sunday in the lab getting ready for some very exciting classes and Voila! $20,000 mark.

Actually, today's total is $20,206.

What's nice about a project like this is that there are milestones. It's trackable, and fairly obvious to me that progress is being made. Big numbers just keep rolling past! There is less than a third of the project left.

I am, perhaps, ready to let go of the illusion that this project might ... how do I put this?... make sense to anyone else. I've had a hard time explaining why I am doing this, what I am doing, how other people should do this with me. The number ($30,000) is arbitrary. My particular way of measuring it is arbitrary. I've come to realize that I'm not the sort of person who is going to organize pub crawls, charity events, or major work parties where I need buy-in from a lot of people anyhow. Although it's not what I expected at the outset, it's actually pretty wild to see what a big difference a relatively small number of people can make without a lot of major sacrifice. No one is $20,000 in the whole. My dad has become a regular blood donor. My brother has a standing tutoring appointment at a middle school. My friends were easily convinced to run some charity 5Ks with me. I got to spend some evenings cooking with my mom. And good work was done.

 I'm trying to think of something cool to do on MLK Day this year. I like the notion of a day of service, and I'm hoping I can find an excuse to try something new. More updates as that comes together.

Re-resolving to Meet This Goal

Being 30, I'm starting to warm up to the parts of myself that aren't going to change. I tend to think of it more in the context of recognizing my strengths, but these come hand in hand with weaknesses. For example, I'm a starter. I love starting new projects, getting new things off the ground and the experience of diving in to new experiences. It makes me a bit bold about novelty. But in contrast, I am not such a great finisher. The top of my desk (and most of my office) is littered with projects I have started, that I have sunk too much time on to completely abandon, although I have quite clearly done just that.

I knew this about myself going in to this crazy project. I was particularly attracted to the craziness of it. But I also knew that at some point I'd get far enough along that I could see the end coming along, and just sorta bail, confident in the knowledge that I would get there eventually. Id join a few groups, and then forget to track, and... well, whatever. To prevent this behavior, I was looking for things that I could engage in regularly, to help me keep up the momentum.  Dinner for Friend's of Youth has been one of those. 5Ks were another. But... I've kinda lost momentum on the other aspects. Finding small ways to stay engaged (and tracking them), getting my friends and family to help with these things, and putting it on the blog has fallen by the way side a bit. 

This is in part because I'm busy. But even more so, it is probably because I need to find volunteer activities that are a good fit for the kind of life I want to be leading. That was (supposed to be) at the core of this project, that I could use this as an excuse to get involved in my community in a way that feels natural.

And maybe I should get a bit more honest with myself about the life I'm realistically going to lead, instead of the life I think I should lead. Let me be honest, the work I am doing with HiveBio, which is very cool, and exciting, and novel is SO hard on me. It turns out, I HATE being in charge. I stress out about decisions, I'm reluctant to tell people what to do, and I would rather talk about venereal disease than money. These are all tasks I'm called on to do fairly often in my role. I should probably figure out how I can transition to instead doing something I'm good at, so I'll feel better about the work. Moral of the story- don't kill yourself doing something you suck at when it would be better for everyone if you did something you were good at instead.

As I enter the new year though, I don't just want to be shirking my responsibilities and waiting for this thermometer to rise on it's own. Instead, I'm going to get back to blogging, which requires me to have something worth blogging about. I'll be getting back to bugging my friends and family to helping me raise the last $10,000 on the thermometer, hopefully before I turn 31. That's something to feel good about.

Happy New Year!

Almost half way there!

As I expected, finding a job is cutting into my time for planning and executing wild, philanthropic adventures. But the thermometer keeps ticking along regardless. In the last few weeks, my dear Karen AND my Dad donated blood without me even pestering them to death about it!  Saving lives and eating cookies!

In a month where I have had more money to leverage than time, I was able to support several friend's philanthropic efforts, including Paramita's Alzheimer's Walk, Karl's AIDS walk, and Ian's Half marathon for his local children's hospital. It's been really fun to get involved in some of my own walks this summer, but I also know that it can be awesome to have people help make your fundraising goals.  And all of those are great causes!

I've also been chugging away at my 'regular' volunteer activities. (More meatballs to the shelter this week) In the next month, I will have used up my current contract, so I have a suspicion that next month will be structured the opposite: more time than money.  We'll see if I can figure out the best way to leverage that for some Good.

And let's just take a look at that thermometer. It is SO CLOSE to 50%. Want to help me push it over the edge? I am looking for help for a particular project this weekend, please let me know if you are free and in the Seattle area Saturday.

Metrics!

Really, who doesn't love metrics? There is lots of pithy wisdom about the importance of measurement in success, but let's not beat around the bush. I love graphs.

Here is a graph that shows how the thermometer has been moving over time.

Fig 1. Dollars raised over time. This is what rocking looks like.

It's ok to be impressed by the increasing pace that it moves at. It's cool to wonder what the big gaps or wide leaps are about. I've got this all in Excel so I can look at exactly that. It's a little dizzying to try to project when we might just bust the thermometer. Assuming the month of my actual birthday was an anomoly, I think I will probably be hitting about 10% a month- or be meeting my goal in about 6 months. SIX MONTHS. That's like.... well, that's a bridge we will cross when we get there.

In the meantime, I've been pitching in hours to get HiveBio going, and enjoying the heck out of that. puts me in touch with lots of ambitious, energetic folks with great ideas. That is one wonderful thing that this project has brought to my life.

Something Amazing: 40%!!

Saturday morning, we somehow talk ourselves, our friends, their parents and my parents to get get up early and go to a small 5K, the Bridge to Adoption 5K. It had been quite a hectic week, since both Matt and I have been busy with HiveBio stuff, but we wanted to run this event.

Fig 1. Before the Race. Matt and Julie are saving every ounce of energy.

1) It's super close.
2) Jeffrey and Matt ran last year, and came in 1 and 2.
3) Adoption is even more on everyone's minds of late.... and this event is fundraising for the adoption of a second child in the organizers family.
4) As always, the multi-person multiplier seemed in my favor here.
Since I was with my parents as I was registering, they agreed to come and walk, under the condition that we would all have breakfast together afterwards. It's a nice run through Blyth Park, and although Matt and Jeffrey both put up better times than last year, someone else beat them.  But, hey, we won gift cards in the raffle, and Julie even won a pair of new shoes in the raffle.  How great is that!

Fig 2. Post-race, and post-breakfast. A good time was had by all.

And then I came home, and added the tally to the spreadsheet. 7 people at the 5K, my time at HiveBio, Matt's time with the HiveBio computers, the value of the computer themselves...., and holy cats! We just hit 40%!! Seriously, more than $12,000 raised for charity.

While it is obvious to me now that I need to spend some time explaining what I am doing with HiveBio, I also want to spend some time reflecting on the momentum we have currently. I've mentioned this before; the best ways to volunteer time are the ways that a most compatible with your lifestyle. I can easily ask my mom and grandmother to help me make dinner for the shelter because they like to cook. I can easily convince Jeffrey to run a 5K (who in turn can get the rest of his family to tag along), since he loves running anyway. I filled up our garage with old computers, and Matt was keen to get fixing them. My plan for the rest of the year is to highlight diferent causes that I like to support, and hopefully this will help spring to mind ways that others can help as well.

100 Volunteer Hours

Today I spent the afternoon in some volunteer work I needed to catch up on. I am the editor for the Seattle Association for Women in Science (AWIS) newsletter, which means that at least quarterly, I have to sit down and edit some documents, exchange flurries of emails and get some files organized. It's not unlike my real job (as a writer), and it's nice to be able to schedule it for when I have time. What I'm getting at here, is this was a fairly routine experience.

And as I was updating the totals on my spreadsheet (which I love doing), I noticed it updated to 104 hours. That's a lot of time! And since what I really love about the spreadsheet are the metrics, let me break it down for you. From the totals on the thermometer (currently $7,345.27), which is combined hours and dollars, about half of that is hours, and half dollars. About 57 of those hours, I've been involved in (I will track combined hours for something Matt & I or myself and others do, so it's less lines on the spreadsheet).

Just for the record, I think we can compare the amount of volunteer time I've racked up this year to the amount of volunteer time I did last year, which was basically only my work with AWIS. Or ~4 hours a month. In the 5 months since I started tracking, I've basically doubled my own efforts, and some how talked others into matching my volunteer efforts.  Go us!

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That being said, having spent a sunny Saturday in my office, I've got to get serious about finding some outdoor volunteer opportunities. And it looks like the pub crawl is going to fall through- but I'd like to get a group together for some type of volunteer project: trail maintenance? flash mob at the blood bank? 5K? I'm not sure, so if you have ideas, let me know.

Another HUGE Milestone- 20%

Big news- we hit 20% of the goal last month.  That means that in May, we did 10%.  THat's huge! If we can sustain 10% of the goal every month- we'll be done in EIGHT MONTHS.

Of course, there were some (great!) reasons that May was so strong that may not be true through the summer. Seattle Big Give encouraged me to give away a fair part of my donation budget early. My brother's volunteer gig with Austin Partners in Education is on summer break (thanks Noel!). There were Mother's Day gifts in donations.  So, we gotta get/stay serious about keeping up this momentum through the summer.  I'll be looking for some trail work myself, and some more 5Ks.  But mostly GIANT, gushy Thank YOUs to everyone who has helped push the thermometer up this high, this quick!  It's awesome!

Share the Love!

I took dinner to the Friends of Youth shelter at the Landing earlier this week. The best part was being able to share that doing-good feeling with my mom and grandma, who happily joined in to help out.  (Also, cooking with my mom seems to reduce that feeling of existential kitchen crisis, where I wonder, "Why am I here? Do I even know what cooking is??")

I knew it would be more fun, and less chore like to have my Mom helping in the kitchen. But I was surprised by how good I felt about sharing the experience.  I always feel really good about taking dinner over there- it's something really tangible that I am doing for my community. It's really nice to share that feeling with someone I like, and to feel like we are the sort of people who do good things in the community.

I was planning to write a post about how I want to look for more ways to share that good feeling, but my folks beat me to the punch on Mother's Day.  While we were sitting down to a Mother's Day brunch, my Dad turned to his mom (my saintly grandmother), and said, "Your mother's day gift is a donation to Donors Choose."  I couldn't have been happier if the gift had been for me.  Or if I actually got to read the books that my grandmother picked to buy for a local classroom.

I think I'm starting to understand what they say about good deeds multiplying.

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Have you noticed our totals?  Just inching past the $4000 mark (!)

Now would be an awesome time to sign up for the Crawl for a Cause- raise money for charity, and hang out with me for my birthday.  It's going to be grand!

I'm donating blood this week. I'll try to write an update about the importance of blood donation, but schedule yours today!

10% to Goal!

Great news, we are 10% of the way to goal!  Hooray for charities!

I'm including a graph of progress so far, because, who doesn't love metrics?




Figure 1. The first $3,000 have been raised.  The graph shows progress towards goal over time, with combined hours and dollars being presented as Normalized $.

A couple explanatory notes.  You may notice small jumps or packed data points at the beginning of the month.  For cool people like my brother who report to me a monthly total, I just assign those the first of the month for data tracking reasons.  It does make it look at if there are some days that are more popular for volunteering.

Also, You'll notice the last month or so has been much more productive than the first 3 months of the project.  This gives me some confidence that with momentum (and support!), we can make this ambitious goal.  I'll include another update of lessons I've learned in the last month or so that will really help.

What pushed us over the edge?  My mother-in-law taught a 6 hour class to 4H kids on how to make sock monkeys.  Cheers to her for supporting kids learning important life skills!

State Science Fair!

I just got back from a great weekend of hanging out with friends and SCIENCE!  This weekend was the state science fair WSSEF in Bremerton, WA.  It's two days of all ages science (K-12).  More than a thousand projects were entered from all around the state, and more than a hundred judges were there to critique and appreciate the work of those students.

Two of those judges were my friend Karen and me.  We saw some great projects, we met some great students, and generally had a good time.  I'll hope to get back to why this type of volunteering matters soon, but I wanted to updated the totals today.

Science fair day is a long day for students.  Anxious enthusiastic students wait for friends, family, and most nerve wrackingly, judges to talk about their projects. The state fair is a two day event, with judges ranking students, then comparing rankings and evening assigning special awards.  I think I talked to 9 projects on Friday, and 12 on Saturday.  This is how Karen and I wracked up nearly 24 volunteer hours over the weekend.

The coolest part about science fair is getting to talk to students to encourage their interest in things they are already enjoying.  It's really impressive how much time and effort parents, teachers and mentors are able to put into this type of event.  When Karen and I left, a dedicated group of volunteers was stuffing award packets- a process that would probably take hours as the night wore on.  It's a great feeling of community, and I'm so glad we got to help out!

Donating Blood

Just a quick update to say that I finally managed to get in for my next blood donation.  I had an appoint at the blood drive happening at work, and I got an email from the donation coordinator that there were blood shortages.  Blood shortages!  Are you eligible to donate?  If so, your donation could save a life, and it is needed.

I could seriously use a blood donor buddy though- I really hate needles and blood.  I'm taking application for virtual or in person blood donation partners.

With an hour of me bleeding, and my parent's recent donation to Donor's Choose, we are broaching 3.5% of the way to goal!

The Project Takes Shape

When I started daydreaming about this project, my little sister (who works at a non-profit, has been a Vista volunteer, and is basically a subject matter expert in charity and philanthropy) told me it was a pretty crazy idea.  Well, the original idea was kinda dumb actually: it was just me, running this crazy marathon of projects for charities, mashing out 2.5 charities every month.

She had some really awesome ideas to fix that.  Like, make it more social.  Make it accessible to people (she suggested business cards with a website). Find some way to get other people involved by paying it forward.

But the one thing she really impressed on me was that this could be really valuable to charities I cared about if I didn't do a terrible job.  She told me to pick ONE charity, and figure out what they need, get to know them and their team, and do ONE thing really well.  She discouraged me from starting my own spin-off projects: there is a Friends of Youth nearby (they support foster kids and homeless teens), I was pondering starting a tutoring program there.  Why?  Wouldn't the people who work with those teens everyday know what their real priorities are?  I somehow doubt it is SAT prep.

(I can't let go of the grandeur of 30 for 30, but I can spread out the insanity by asking for your help)

I told her I hadn't figured out how to set the scale of the projects, but I wanted to set it too high for me to just "buy my way out" every month. (I worry that the day before I turn 31, I'll be eating $50 worth of girl scout cookies and making $10 donations on my cell phone to every charity I can find. This isn't bad, it's just lacking in the grandeur I was hoping for.) She said $100 with no string attached can be an awesome gift to a small non-profit. A lot of their money comes from grants which must be used for specific priorities, or from donors who have really specific ideas about what it should do.  And there can be a budget gap between "what we have" and "what we need" that must be really frustrating.

Anyway, my little sister helped me decide to do the project this way. Big Goals.  No strings attached money. Supporting tiny charities if I love what they do. And asking for help.  Asking my friends and family and total strangers to join me in this crazy journey.

And that's when I made up my mind to blog about it.  It occurred to me, not for the last time, that I have NO idea what I am doing.  And that's really exciting- the older you get, the less that happens. So I am going to blog about it, to share my experience, share what I am learning and how it is changing me. 

Oh, and I made my first donation today.  A friend of mine is doing the polar plunge to support the special Olympics, and that rocks. We are officially 0.13% to goal!