40 Days of Giving

Tax on Businesses: Some Numbers Crunched

2011-11-21T07:52:00.001-08:00

Today, it looks like the "Super Committee," which was tasked with making a $1.2 trillion reduction in our national debt, will fail. Though a lot of different messages have been coming out about why this group failed (among them, apparently, the startling revelation that John Kerry talks too much), certainly one sticking point has been that conservative members of Congress are uniformly opposed to any sort of repeal of the Bush era tax cuts.

Do Tax Cuts Hurt Business Investment?

This obsession with tax cuts has always struck me as peculiar. The basic argument seems to be centered around the idea that tax cuts on the wealthy and on corporations result in freeing up more money for corporate growth and job creation. But I question this. A couple of months ago, I got into a discussion on a friend's Facebook page on just this topic and made the following comment:

I always wonder ... Who are these job creators who would be hiring, but are afraid they can't afford their taxes? I always hear things like, "Businesses can't afford to hire more people and/or expand their business because of their tax burden" ... except that any sort of business expansion comes off the top, BEFORE TAXES. If you want to expand your business, doing so incurs no tax burden whatsoever, doesn't it?

One person on the thread responded with what seemed to be a reasonable explanation:

Lets say that your profit margin is 10%. You have decided that it will cost you 2% of that profit to hire a new employee with the goal of expanding business. If your tax rates might go up in the next year or two that will reduce your profit margin enough to eat up most or all of the cost of that new hire, you might decide to wait until you either know for sure that your taxes are, in fact, going up, choose to hire anyway, or decide not to go for it. Its most likely the uncertainty that is keeping those folks on the sideline (are the Bush tax cuts expiring? Are they not? etc)

There's an instinctive logic to this argument. If the amount of money that you have goes down, then surely the amount you have to spend on your business is going to drop. Surely, it hurts this reinvestment to increase taxes, right?

Some Tax and Growth Scenarios

This conversation took place a good two months ago, but it's been sticking in my craw since then. Something about the numbers just didn't sit right, so I decided to actually work it out. Let's consider this situation from multiple different scenarios:

Scenario A: 35% corporate tax

This is the current scenario, as outlined by the individual above. The total net profit of the company is 10% of the total revenue the company brings in. Working backward from that, some quick math shows that, at a tax rate of 35%, we get the following as percentages of total revenue:

Business expenses: 84.61%
Profits: 15.39%
Taxes: 5.39%
Net Profit: 10%

Scenario B: 38% corporate tax

If the only change is an increase of 3% on the corporate tax rate, but the total revenue brought in remains constant, then we get:

Business expenses: 84.61%
Profits: 15.39%
Taxes: 5.85%
Net Profit: 9.54%

Scenario C: 35% corporate tax + 2% investment in growth/new jobs

Now, let's consider the situation where the business wants to expand their operations (including hiring some new employees) by reinvesting about 2% of their revenue into expansion:

Business expenses: 86.61%
Profits: 13.39%
Taxes: 4.69%
Net Profit: 8.7%

Scenario D: 38% corporate tax + 2% investment in growth/new jobs

The final scenario is the one which, according to economic conservatives, would be unlikely to happen. Scenario C is the one they think is very likely - leave taxes alone, and businesses will be motivated to invest and create jobs. If, however, you increase taxes by 3%, then the numbers that follow are so intimidating that businesses would rather stick back in Scenario B than move forward.

Business expenses: 86.61%
Profits: 13.39%
Taxes: 5.09%
Net Profit: 8.3%

Assumption: Constant Revenue

Now, before delving into these numbers too deeply, let's consider the implications of keeping the revenue the same in all these scenarios:

1. That business in scenarios 3 & 4 is re-investing an extra 2% of their revenue back into the business. Presumably, this is being done with a plan to expand their business operations and, in turn, increase their total revenue. Still, it's possible that these plans will take a while to pay off, so it's realistic to assume that they'll have to front this money for a while without seeing benefits from the work.

2. The business in scenarios 2 & 4 exists in a world with a 38% tax rate, so it's possible that the overall effect of this tax rate drags the economy down a bit (as economic conservatives claim) and, in turn, lowers their total revenues or increases non-tax expenses in some unforeseen way. Still, this claim is highly speculative and I don't know a good way to put a number on how the economic impact of 3% taxation would affect this hypothetical company, so I just assumed the total revenue stayed constant.

The Analysis

Back to the actual numbers, then. You'll notice that despite the fact that they've reinvested 2% of their total revenue back into the business, in none of these scenarios does their Net Profit drop by 2%. This is because, as I mentioned in my Facebook quote earlier, businesses operate from a very favorable tax position: they pay their expenses before they pay their taxes. Individuals don't have this option (usually). If I spend 2% of my money on a personal item, I have to pay the full tax on the 2%. This means that for someone in the 10% tax bracket, who has a job where they pay 7% into Medicare & Social Security, each dollar they get comes with a 17% tax on top of it.

An individual spending 2% of their gross income on their needs, therefore, actually has to take 2.17% of the total money they've earned to do it (excluding sales tax). A corporation spending 2% of its gross income on its needs costs a mere 1.3% of the revenue that it's brought in. This is assuming the tax rate stays consistent at 35%, of course. An increase of 3% taxation means that 2% costs the company a whopping 1.7%.

This, incidentally, is why every individual should have their own home-based business in something they're passionate about.

There are a number of ways to consider these numbers, and choosing which one is largely based on your political stance.

Interpretation 1: Tax Increases Cost Money

Scenario B results in less net profit than scenario A and scenario D results in less net profit than scenario C, so a conservative would argue that the increase in taxes causes a drop in the profit earned by the company (and, as a result, by the individual shareholders). This is a perfectly valid interpretation and fits the facts, although it is a very narrow interpretation, completely ignoring any potential benefits from a 3% corporate tax increase.

Interpretation 2: The Tax Incentive

The problem is that conservatives don't just argue that the corporations will lose money, but also that it will be too expensive for them to invest in growth if their taxes increase. This doesn't hold up with these numbers, however. In the above scenario, if the taxes stay at 35% it costs 1.3% to reinvest 2% into their business. If the tax is raised by 3%, however, the drop from 9.54% to 8.3% is 1.24%.

Why does this happen? Because, again, businesses pay taxes based on their after-expense income.

In a sense, lowering taxes actually gives less incentive to growth, because as a percentage, reinvesting in the business doesn't get you as much bang for your buck.

Interpretation 3: The Growth Incentive

Keep in mind that the overall goal we want is to have businesses grow, meaning that either Scenario C or D is preferable to either Scenario A or B. It turns out that getting the 2% is what causes the big penalty to the net profits, not the 3% tax on profits.

Still, the fact is that - taken by itself - the 3% tax increase makes it just a little bit less cost-effective, in absolute dollar terms, to take the risk to grow your business.

But then, the point of raising taxes wasn't to promote growth ... it was to increase tax revenue. The argument that it will instead drive down growth just doesn't seem particularly justified, at least based on this particular example. If the business wants to grow, the 3% increase in taxes just doesn't have much bearing at all.

Education, Building Community, and Individual Growth

2011-05-18T06:16:00.000-07:00

Education is one of the most important things that we can do as individuals or as a society. Through education, the mind is transformed, given the nourishment to explore new avenues of thought.

A quality education isn't just the province of teachers and the students, as much as we'd like to relegate it to them. It is something everyone has to take part in, throughout an entire community. Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tennessee, is a school where the creation of a supportive educational community has led to amazing things, as recently cited in Barack Obama's commencement address (read the speech or watch the video).

Just a couple of years ago, this was a school where only about half the students made it to graduation. For a long time, just a handful headed to college each year. But at Booker T. Washington, you changed all that.

You created special academies for ninth graders to start students off on the right track. You made it possible for kids to take AP classes and earn college credits. You even had a team take part in robotics competition so students can learn with their hands by building and creating. And you didn’t just create a new curriculum, you created a new culture -- a culture that prizes hard work and discipline; a culture that shows every student here that they matter and that their teachers believe in them. As Principal Kiner says, the kids have to know that you care, before they care what you know. (Applause.)

And because you created this culture of caring and learning, today we’re standing with a very different Booker T. Washington High School. Today, this is a place where more than four out of five students are earning a diploma; a place where 70 percent of the graduates will continue their education; where many will be the very first in their families to go to college. (Applause.)

I discuss some of the intellectual benefits of education elsewhere, but here I'd like to focus on even more ephemeral benefits of education, including some which matter even more than better mental acumen. President Obama goes on to highlight these ideas as well:

And finally, with the right education, both at home and at school, you can learn how to be a better human being. For when you read a great story or you learn about an important moment in history, it helps you imagine what it would be like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to know their struggles. The success of our economy will depend on your skills, but the success of our community will depend on your ability to follow the Golden Rule -- to treat others as you would like to be treated.

We’ve seen how important this is even in the past few weeks, as communities here in Memphis and all across the South have come together to deal with floodwaters, and to help each other in the aftermath of terrible tornadoes.

All of these qualities -- empathy, discipline, the capacity to solve problems, the capacity to think critically -- these skills don’t just change how the world sees us. They change how we see ourselves. They allow each of us to seek out new horizons and new opportunities with confidence -- with the knowledge that we’re ready; that we can face obstacles and challenges and unexpected setbacks. That’s the power of your education. That’s the power of the diploma that you receive today.

You can see the impact of this way of thinking resonating from Obama's education - both his formal education and his family life - but I think that Michelle Obama's story is even more relevant, because it seems to have taken her longer to realize the course that she wanted her life to take. In a recent college commencement address in Iowa (with video also available), Mrs. Obama outlines the path her own life took as she searched for inspiration:

... that process of discovery doesn’t stop when you leave this campus. I know that from my own experience. Back when I graduated from college, I was certain that I wanted to be a lawyer. So I did everything I was supposed to do. I got my law degree. I went home and got a job at a big firm in Chicago. By all appearances, I was living the dream. But the truth is, all the while that I was climbing, I knew something was missing.

Sure, I was working up in a tall building downtown, but when I looked out across the skyline of the city, even though I could see the community I’d come from off in the distance, I was so far up, and so far away, I couldn’t feel that community. I felt like I was beginning to lose that connection to where I had come from. And I realized that I didn’t want to climb anymore. I wanted to be grounded, working with the folks that I knew, folks like the ones I grew up with. I wanted to be mentoring young people, I wanted to be helping families put food on the table and a roof over their heads, I wanted to be giving folks the kind of chances that I’d had.

So I did something that shocked my friends and family, and added about a decade onto my student loan debt: I quit that job. I left that high-paying firm to go work for the city government. And from there, I moved on to lead a nonprofit organization called Public Allies, helping young people pursue public service careers. I wasn’t making nearly as much money and my office wasn’t nearly as big or as nice, but I was working with terrific young people and colleagues who inspired me.

I found that I would wake up every day with excitement, with a sense of purpose and possibility, because I was finally doing something that made me feel fully alive. And graduates, that’s what I wish for all of you today – for you to find that career, that calling, that makes you feel alive.

What I like about this passage is that it is supportive of education while also pointing out that just getting advanced degrees for their own sake will not lead to happiness or fulfillment. You have to really find the things that you love and then pursue those. College degrees, and even advanced degrees, may lie along that path, but they may not.

Whatever one's views of the Obama's political objectives, the course of their life is certainly inspirational, especially for anyone who wants to work to serve others. Their overwhelming commitment to the goals of education should be commended, even by those who normally like to focus more on fiscal concerns. An educated populace is the best defense we can have against a failing economy in the future, while a failing educational system will devastate every aspect of our society.

I Have No Enemies

2010-09-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

I have no enemies. There are people out there who want me, or those I love, dead for some abstract reason, but such a person is not my enemy. I wish them no ill. I have no deeper desire than that they find something in their life that brings them pure love, joy, and peace. I wish for them - as I wish for my sons, dearest friends, and myself - nothing but the best that the world has to offer.

(Originally posted this on Facebook, where it was composed on impulse, but decided to repost here.)

The Gift of Family Time

2010-09-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

Throughout the 40 Days of Giving project, I realized that one of my biggest issues is with giving time. I am fairly self-sufficient, so don't need a lot of time devoted to me in order to feel needed, nor to feel a connection to others. A few hours here and there, and I'm honestly good.

I just don't need to go through the sorts of rituals that most people go through to establish their emotional ties to each other. Surely my friends know that they're my friends, and I don't need to invite them over to make that clear. If they wanted to see me, they could just as easily ask me over. The fact that they don't doesn't mean that I don't think they like me. I assume they do, unless something happens which indicates to me that they have stopped liking me.

Because of this willingness to have my relationships by mutual understanding rather than through actual interactions with people, I sometimes joke that I have Asperger syndrome.

Having a family, of course, doesn't quite allow for that. For reasons that I don't quite fathom, Amber and the kids like having my direct attention for more than just an hour or two a day. It's really quite baffling, since I'm not that interesting.

But there's where the conflict arises, because I'm something of a workaholic. I always have a bunch of projects going on (and, in fact, at present am approaching something of a train wreck as many deadlines approach all at once), and while I'm happy to schedule time for family events and activities, just planning generic family time that has no real point has never made much sense to me.

However, with schedules and family life growing more hectic - my elder son in kindergarten, my freelance work, my day job, Amber's school, Amber's internship, Amber's new job with Lia Sophia, a 10-month old baby who's closely approaching the walking stage, and so on - it's becoming more crucial to set time aside.

So we've begun setting Monday evenings as Family/Date Night. We haven't quite worked out what this entails, other than that we are not allowed to schedule any non-family event for Monday night. So far, it's been nice.

We also set this weekend aside in a similar fashion. On Friday, when I finished work, I came into the back yard and set up two tents. We camped out the last three nights, and have spent most of the weekend outdoors. We considered going out to a nearby campground but, frankly, money is kind of tight these days.

It's been a great weekend, filled with a continuous campfire, sleeping bags, s'mores, roasted hot dogs, bugs, and other outdoor adventures.

And, in the midst of all of this, I've still gotten some things accomplished. I wrote a blog post for About.com on multiple universes and one for Black Gate on a possible The Sandman television series. I've cleared over a hundred pages of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker (quite good so far, though not as action-packed as I was expecting from a steampunk zombie tale). I'm also making my way through the pile of role-playing games that I have to review for the upcoming issue of Black Gate. And now this blog post.

In short, I've actually gotten about as much done during a camp out weekend as I normally get by hectically holing myself up in the basement for a couple of hours and getting as much done as I can. But instead of being a frantic rush of activity, it's been nice and leisurely, interspersed with time spent around the campfire with Elijah, roasting marshmallows. Even Amber commented that watching me work yesterday was a lot different from how I normally seem to work, and it looked (and felt) more relaxed, while I got just as much accomplished.

Back in February, I reviewed The Generosity Factor, which listed the Gift of Time as one of the many ways to give. This strikes me as one way of doing that - focusing on the here and now, and detaching a bit to give some time to those you care most about.

Or, to put it in a more intellectual way, consider this interview with William Powers, author of Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. In it, he suggests (as many others have done over the years) that our modern society is not built to adequately embrace the connections among people that we desperately need for happiness. Like Thoreau, he believes in building a bit of space for contemplation. His family practices disconnected weekends - Internet Sabbaths - which is something of a sacrifice in this connected age.

I'm not sure if I've quite reached the point of embracing weekend-long Internet Sabbaths, but it seems to me that putting tents in the backyard every once in a while is a good place to start. It's a gift not just to your family, but to yourself.

What other ways have you found to really set some good quality time aside, especially when life is at its most hectic? How do you make sure that you can give the gift of family time?

Changes in the Way We Give

2010-08-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

On this morning's The Today Show, there was an interview with the founder of Living by Giving's founder Kate Atwood. She talked about a great trend where people ask for donations given for their birthday, instead of gifts. There are a number of ways to do this, but I think it's a great idea. If you're like me, you really don't need more stuff. (Of course, you may want more stuff.)

In addition, today's USA Today (what's with all the "Today" titles?) had a Special Report on "Corporate Philanthropy" in their Money Section B. It had some interesting information, including a list of 11 companies that donate over 5% of their profits to charitable causes. I will admit that I was kind of surprised that Chik-fil-a wasn't included, since S. Truett Cathy was a co-author of The Generosity Factor and strongly advocated tithing 10% of income, even as part of corporate policy. It's possible that they give this much and just didn't fall under the companies analyzed in the article ... or that Cathy gives on his personal profits after extracting them from the business in the form of a salary.

Anyway, here are the links to some of the giving stories from today's USA Today.

Unity Church on Giving

2010-08-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

The wonderful people of Unity Church have done a nice profile on the project. The article, Giving It All Away, is available on their website. They based the article on reading the blog plus a couple of e-mail exchanges with us to flesh out the details.

Presbyterians Affirm the Charter of Compassion

2010-08-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

It was late in the evening on November 12, 2009, a little more than 24 hours after my son had entered the world. Mother and child both lay sleeping, but I was wide awake. I opened my laptop, checking the mail that had accumulated in the last couple of chaotic days, and find an e-mail from TED announcing the formation of the Charter for Compassion, as part of the fulfillment of Karen Armstrong's TED wish.

This e-mail (or, more specifically, the Charter of Compassion that it introduced me to) started the cogs in my brain working, and ultimately led me to come up with the idea behind the 40 Days of Giving project. I think it's a great idea, and firmly embrace its tenets. The day after my son was born, I affirmed the Charter for Compassion ... and to date, over 50,000 people have joined me, including the Dalai Lama, Desmund Tutu, Paul Simon, Queen Noor of Jordan, Meg Ryan, and many other people (some famous, most not).

And now, apparently, so does the entire Presbyterian Church (USA), who earlier this month affirmed the Charter of Compassion. (It's mentioned in a bullet list at the end of the article, but there's more detail here.) According to the press release from the Charter:

The PC(USA) will send the Charter to every congregation, where it will be used to help embody compassion in education, worship, and community events. Congregations are already using the Charter as a focus for adult education classes and plan to invite a diverse array of religious leaders to share with the PC(USA)’s congregations how compassion is lived in their own traditions.

So, this Sunday morning, I have to ask ... Why hasn't every religious denomination affirmed the Charter for Compassion? Why haven't you?

P.S. - On a related note, Karen Armstrong appears to have a new "vook" (a video book) available entitled A Compassionate Life in 12 Steps. It looks interesting, and costs a mere $4.99. I'm going to wait until I finally receive my free iPad, and then check it out ... and I'll let you all know what I think of it.

Karma Update: I Won a Free iPad!

2010-07-31T22:09:00.000-07:00

I haven't been particularly diligent about updating this blog, I know, but this recent news was of such import that I thought it was worth sharing:

I won an iPad!

How I Won an iPad
My company has recently had a couple of contests which have offered iPad 3Gs as prizes. I signed up for their Twitter contest, but did not win. Then I signed up for the Facebook contest ... and I won!

The iPad itself hasn't arrived yet, due to a backorder situation, but still ... very cool! I'm not saying that this is karmic payback for the giving experiment, but the iPad is cool, I wanted one, and I would not have shelled out that much money for a fancy electronic toy. I'm not saying it's karma, but I'm not saying it ain't, either!

Karma's a Bit... Weird
Also last week I had a flat tire, which was unrepairable and required the purchase of a new tire, but that was just a little over $100. And twice my car refused to start and required a jump, so very likely needs a new battery. Still, in total, I consider myself way ahead on the rewards versus losses chart.

Microfinancing Student Loans

2010-07-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

I recently stumbled upon a new take (or at least new to me) on microfinancing, in which you offer relatively small amounts of money to impoverished people, so that they can help themselves out of poverty and pay you back. These programs have proven incredibly successful since they were initiated by Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank as a means of providing them in his native Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank and Yunus were jointly awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below."

Student Loans

Many people have looked into new way expand the microfinancing model into new areas, but this is one of the most interesting that I've see. Vittana allows you to search for a student in a country that does not have many college loan opportunities, so that you can help microfinance student loans.

I don't have the experience with Vittana that I have with some other microfinance organizations discussed below, and since Vittana's new there's little on record about it. They don't yet have a Charity Navigator profile and only a very barebones GuideStar profile.

Crunchbase - Vittana Profile
Huffington Post - Faces of Vittana, March 26 2010
Politics Daily - Crowd-Funded Student Loans: Vittana Brings Microfinance to Campuses Worldwide, April 28 2010

What is Microfinancing?
In short, it provides those in extreme poverty a way to get money for start-up capital to get ahead in their small, entrepreneurial businesses. For example, Yunus found that poor craftswomen were being charged such extreme interest rates by loan sharks to borrow money that, by the time they bought the materials and paid back the interest, they had no money left. Even worse, many money lenders demanded that the women could only sell their wares to them, which essentially gave the money lenders a bank of slave labor ... for as little as $27, as he discovered. Yunus paid this money out of his own pocket to break the hold the money lenders had on the women, and sought to expand the program.

However, because these were poor women, they could not get loans from any other source. Many were illiterate, and therefore had barriers to completing the required paperwork to get loans. His story of expanding this program is really inspirational, as you can learn in his Nobel Lecture. Here's an excerpt, discussing how the emphasis of our current economic system robs us of some essential elements of our humanity:

I am in favor of strengthening the freedom of the market. At the same time, I am very unhappy about the conceptual restrictions imposed on the players in the market. This originates from the assumption that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives − to maximize profit. This interpretation of capitalism insulates the entrepreneurs from all political, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental dimensions of their lives. This was done perhaps as a reasonable simplification, but it stripped away the very essentials of human life.

Human beings are a wonderful creation embodied with limitless human qualities and capabilities. Our theoretical constructs should make room for the blossoming of those qualities, not assume them away.

Now, microfinance is becoming a very popular form of philanthropy. Individuals can take part through Kiva (a non-profit which provides no interest back to the individual lender) and Microplace (a for-profit which does provide an interest-yielding return on the investment). There are some other differences, too. On Kiva, you choose a specific person or group to loan money to, while on Microplace you're investing in a lending note that will be provided through a separate agency to needy people in the region chosen without ever knowing precisely who the money actually goes to.

There are several nice aspects to microfinancing. First, you don't actually lose your money. Assuming that the borrowers don't default on you (and the overall default rate is low, at around 2%), the money is paid back. You can either re-loan it out to a new borrower or withdraw it. This makes these sorts of programs a nice place for socking away some extra money as part of your nest egg. It's not highly leveraged, and is far less volatile than the stock market.

Second, it's not a hand-out, but instead a business agreement. There is no social stigma or loss of dignity for someone who accepts a business loan.

Third, the systems in place allow you to really have a lot of options in how you direct your money, moreso than with some other charities. In general, a charity is either local or global, and either way you don't have a ton of say-so in how your donation is spent. This, however, often lets you target a specific type of entrepreneur or borrower, so that you can be sure you're supporting a project that you really want to support.

Finally, the benefit of microfinance is that it's based upon the actual needs of the local people in impoverished areas. They need the money to achieve necessary goals, and are asking for the money. It isn't a case where someone in the United States just decides that these people need a certain sort of service. (Not that there's anything inherently wrong with these programs, such as One Laptop Per Child, but the fact that they are not locally-centered is a bit of a drawback.)

What do you think about Vittana, or about microfinancing in general? Have you had experiences with any of these programs?

Charity Navigator Upgrade

2010-07-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite resources to check prior to donating to a new charity is Charity Navigator. They rate non-profits on a four-star rating system. Each organization has an overall rating, which is obtained from evaluations of two sub-categories:

Organizational Efficiency
Organizational Capacity

New Accountability System
This week, though, Charity Navigator announced an upgrade their site involving a new rating system which begins to add a dimension of accountability that has been missing from the existing rating system. Here is a description of the new accountability and transparency system and the factors that will now contribute to their analysis.

The first charity that they've rolled out with this new accountability rating system is Nurse-Family Partnership. Their only negative mark on accountability is that the organization does not post their latest Form 990 (the form that non-profits must file with the federal government) to their website, which is an ethical best practice but not an actual requirement for non-profits.

Issues with Current System

There are still some issues with the current evaluation system, of course, as with any evaluation process. For example, Heifer International has a bit of a hit on the site, having only a three-start rating, in part because:

The CEO makes a fairly large salary ($258,246)
They spend a large percentage of their budget on fundraising (16%)
They don't have a big Working Capital Ratio (they couldn't run off of their savings if donations dried up)

However, when you consider that this charity is a massive international project, requiring a substantial amount of coordination among diverse groups, the CEO's salary doesn't necessarily seem out of line. And they don't have much working capital because the majority of the money is immediately spent on livestock, per the organization's mission. Their expenses are directly linked to the donations, in other words, and if donations dried up, then the purchase of animals would also slow down in proportion. The work of education and the Pass on the Gift program would continue in these cases, but the purchase and distribution of livestock would cut back significantly, so they'd last a lot longer than their current financials would really indicate.

The current rating system doesn't take all of this into account, and there are other issues - some of which are even more important - which have been left out.

Other Non-Profit Vetting Resources
Guidestar - Guidestar's mission: To revolutionize philanthropy and nonprofit practice by providing informaiton that advances transparency, enables users to make better decisions, and encourages charitable giving.

GiveWell - GiveWell attempts to look beyond the financial data, to evaluate organizations on how well they effectively accomplish their mission. I admit, I haven't delved into this site too much. They are, admittedly, fairly strict in their evaluations - of the over-400 charities they have evaluated, only 11 have received any stars in their rating system.

Philanthropedia - Philanthropedia brings together experts in fields such as climate change, education, and microfinance (as well as some San Francisco Bay Area local issues) to evaluate charities seeking to have an impact on these issues. They have created "Expert Mutual Funds" based on these suggestions, which have distributions among the top organizations for each issue. Donations to a fund are split accordingly among the various individual organizations, but you only have to worry about going one place to donate (which also helps keep track of things for tax purposes, if you happen to itemize your deductions).

Other Resources of Note
Charity Navigator Blog
Tonic - Getting the Most Bang for Your Charitable Buck
Newsday - State eyes possible fraud in car donation charities

The Face of Empathy

2010-07-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

If you've ever known an older couple who just look like they fit together, you aren't just imagining it. Our bodies are wired to recognize and mirror the emotions of others, including the physical way those emotions manifest, and this results in these similarities, according to biologist Frans de Waal in his book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society:

Mood transfer via facial expressions and body language is so powerful that people doing it on a daily basis literally start to look alike. This has been tested with portraits of longtime couples: One set of pictures was taken on their wedding day and another set twenty-five years later. Presented with separate portraits of these men and women, human subjects were asked to match them on similarity. For the set taken at an older age, they had no trouble deciding who was married to whom. But for the pictures taken at a younger age, subjects flunked the task. Married couples resemble each other, therefore, not because they pick partners who look like them, but because their features converge over the years. The similarity was strongest for couples who reported the greatest happiness. Daily sharing of emotions apparently leads one partner to "internalize" the other, and vice versa, to the point that anyone can see how much they belong together.

While I certainly don't want my wife to begin "converging" toward my own ugly mug, I do think there's something beautiful and profound about this scientific evidence. It shows that the connections between us reach every level, down into our very flesh.

Despite being profoundly (and thankfully) emotional and mental, love is also, if you'll pardon the phrase, skin deep.

Gates, Buffett, and Philanthrocapitalism

2010-06-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of weeks, there's been no shortage of coverage about Bill and Melinda Gates, together with Warren Buffett, offering a Giving Pledge. The goal: to convince their fellow billionaires to pledge to give away 50% (or more) of their net worth to charity during their lifetime (or, at the very least, upon their death). If you've missed the coverage, then here is some of it.

Fortune - The $600 billion challenge, June 16
Fortune - Billionaire peer pressure: Behind the Buffett-Gates challenge, June 16
NY Daily News - Bill Gates and Warren Buffett ask Oprah, Bloomberg, other billionaires to give big money to charity, June 16
Charlie Rose interview, June 16

(This Bill & Melinda Gates video is from January 2010, before the challenge was made public.)

Coincidentally, this announcement came as I was reading the book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop & Michael Green. (The newer version of the book, according to Amazon.com, has been rebranded with the subtitle "How Giving Can Save the World" and an introduction by Bill Clinton.) The book begins, understandably enough, with Buffett's 2006 decision to give the majority of his vast fortune to charity - the bulk of it to the Gates Foundation, for their work in world health and development.

In the Charlie Rose interview on this new challenge, Buffet lays out some of his philanthropic thoughts (also detailed in this article):

So the truth is I’ve had everything in life, everything
in life I’ve ever wanted.  I have never given away any
money that’s caused me to give up a movie or dinner or
trip to Disneyworld or anything of the sort.

So it’s cost me nothing.  So I have these little pieces
of paper in safe deposit box which I bought about 40 or
45 years ago and they’ve grown in value enormously.
And what they are is they’re claim checks on something
in the future.  

I don’t have anything I need in the future.  All kinds
of other people have all kinds of needs.  And it’s a
way of cashing those claim checks in a way where
people’s lives are changed for be the better.  Mine’s
already changed for the better.  It couldn’t get better.

If those little pieces of paper translate whether it’s
into children avoiding diseases, becoming better
educated, people having a better life in their own age,
whatever it may be, that’s terrific.  I think a lot of
people feel the same way.

This is a profound statement, and certainly true ... for billionaires.

For most of us, of course, choosing to give something does mean that there are some sorts of desires that we have to pass up. People with this degree of wealth don't run into this problem (financially, at least), but when you think about things on a global scale, this situation extends to the majority of people in America.

Worldwide: The poorest 75% of the world lives on only 25% of the resources! At least 80% of the human species lives on less than $10 a day.

By extension, living on $3,650 a year means that you are among the wealthiest 20% of the people on the planet Earth! (Note: This is 2005 data, so the number would be a bit higher now ... but not much.)

Depressing, isn't it?

So the arguments that Buffett make are all, by extension, arguments that could apply to the majority of us. We can all afford to give a bit more, even if all we can give is of our time or our sympathy.

Elsewhere in the interview, Bill Gates recounts an early dinner party where these three billionaires gathered with other billionaires in an effort to help convince them to give more. The group of billionaires share their stories of philanthropy - how they got involved, what causes they're committed to, and so on - and there was a tangible energy and enthusiasm among the group, which Buffett and the Gateses wanted to harness. Gates makes the observation:

And one thing more I would like to say is no one said that they felt bad they’ve given the money. Everybody felt more fulfilled, were able to use their creativity in some special ways.

I would certainly agree with this. There have been a handful of people who have come forward to me, saying that they were motivated give in part thanks to my 40 Days of Giving project. Not a single one of these people has said, "You know, I gave this money, and just think it was a waste!"

The amazing thing about this isn't just the money itself (although Carol Loomis makes a strong case that this will profoundly increase the money going into charitable giving). Many billionaires are self-made entrepreneurs and businessmen, like both Gates and Buffett themselves, and if they turn their eye toward philanthropy, it's unlikely that they will do so in a passive way. The sheer amount of innovation, brainpower, and overall resources that this could turn toward philanthropic goals is astounding.

And this is the the whole point of Philanthrocapitalism, which talks about the way that these powerful capitalists can leverage their talents in that area toward philanthropic goals. A similar case was made by David Bornstein about social entrepreneurs in How to Change the World.

And these sorts of thinkers are crucial, because the problems we face today - climate change, oil spills, clean energy, clean water, diseases such as malaria and AIDS, rogue states, terrorism, and so on - literally cannot be solved solely by throwing money at them. These are real problems that require careful thought by innovators, and it's important to get the innovators engaged.

That is the real goal of the Buffett-Gates challenge, because they know that they are in a position to turn serious people onto these issues. The money can be used for good, but it's the human capital that they really want. They want solutions ... and as businessmen and innovators, they know that you can never predict where the real solutions are going to come from. They want to get as many people as possible into the marketplace of solutions.

It's saving the world, free market style. You've gotta love it, America!

Oenophilanthropy

2010-06-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

Oenophile (or Enophile): Someone who appreciates wine. (Wordnet)

Philanthropy: Voluntary promotion of human welfare. (Wordnet)

Oenophilanthropy (or Enophilanthropy): Appreciating wine in a way which actively seeks to promote human welfare. (Coined at 6:02 pm Eastern time, June 6, 2010, by AZJ. Feel free to use to your heart's content, but please link back to this posting!)

So let's imagine - just for the sake of argument - that you like wine. And let's assume that you're the support of person who likes to support worthwhile causes. How can these two things be linked together?

Well, I suppose that one option would be to establish some sort of wine-tasting charitable function to raise money for your favorite cause. And certainly that's a clever and worthwhile goal.

But another action that even the laziest of oenophiles could perform is to orient your wine-buying activities so that the money goes to businesses that themselves support philanthropic activities.

And there's certainly no shortage of them, as I learned when my mother handed me a page form Food and Wine magazine with the clever title "Grape Causes." (Although I think that Oenophilanthropy is clever, too.) They discuss some great wine-related giving programs:

Wine to Water: This group of oenophilanthropists have done just what I suggested above: raise money through benefit wine events, such as tastings, and use the proceeds to support water access projects around the world. The lack of clean, fresh water is one of the biggest world-wide problems, affecting over 1 billion people worldwide. The organization also produces their own wine label as a means of generating funds.

Indego Africa: This organization sells fair-trade handicrafts, with proceeds going to the Rwandan artisans who craft the items, as well as providing training in entrepreneurship, literacy, and computer skills. How does this impact the oenophilanthropist? Well, they have wine coasters and wine bags.

Boisset Family Estates' Fight Against Hunger: Each bottle of wine sold by the Boisset Family Estates winery results in the donation of three meals for families in need! This is an astounding donation, but it may be over. Though the Food and Wine report is from April 2010, the website itself indicates that this was in place for June through December 2009, with no indication (that I can find) that the program has been extended. They exceeded their goal of 1.2 million meals!

Fledgling Wine: A joint project of Twitter and Crushpad's custom winemaking, this new wine label is created to provide funds for the wonderful Room to Read project. Room to Read provides local-language books to impoverished areas around the world.

O Wine Company: 100% of the net profits from this wine goes to fund scholarships for at-risk youth. In 2009, the owners signed a contract with Oregon State University's Science and Math Integrated Learning Experience (SMILE) program to fund 5 scholarships over 5 years, resulting in a total of 25 needy students who will achieve financial assistance from O Wines.

Korks 4 Kids: This wine cork recycling program uses proceeds to support programs that help children, focusing initial efforts on the Autism Society of America (ASA). The organization's Rubber 4 Rugrats program also recycles rubber-based goods, such as tires, to raise money.

Help for Haiti: Wine producers were among the many people donating to Haiti relief, of course. The Spirit of the Americas (funded by Diageo) donated more than 45,000 pounds of food to Haiti. Constellation Brands provided medical supplies through an ongoing partnership with InterVol.

Andrew Returns with Word of Other Givers!

2010-05-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

After nearly a month-and-a-half absence, I'm back to the blog. I wish that I could say the absence was entirely due to my immense giving efforts, or because I was hard at work on the book, but the fact is that I have mostly been distracted by the day job and the coming of spring.

And, to be honest, after 40 days of giving away my entire income, I was slightly burned out, so needed a break from blogging about the subject, for at least a little while. Through this sabbatical, I have had some time to work on the book. From now on, I will continue to use the blog to detail great giving opportunities, as well as to present my thoughts on giving.

My colleague in giving, Brigid Slipka, has been more diligent about continuing to chronicle her giving thoughts and activities on her Actually Giving blog. If you haven't checked it out, it's truly a great, thoughtful read, and well worth the time. Brigid isn't the only giver out there, of course, or even the only giving blogger, and I figure that my return to the blog is as good a time as any to cover some of the other major voices out there talking about this subject!

A Year of Giving
A Washington, DC, gentleman named Reed is doing a Year of Giving project, which involves giving $10 a day for the entire year. Amazingly, he started this project when he got laid off, which shows far more commitment than even my full-income-for-40-days giving plan! If I didn't have an income, I have to admit that I'd find it really hard to give. Kudos to Reed!

Reed is clearly also a more social than yours truly, who tends to be fairly introverted and hesitant to approach people he doesn't know. Reed gives the $10 to individuals by walking up to them and having a prolonged conversation. On his Year of Giving blog, Reed chronicles the stories of these recipients, including a page of people that he's encountered who need some help beyond what he's in a position to offer. With his year-long timeline, he's even caught the attention of CNN.

One of Reed's goal appears to be to establish June 15 as a Worldwide Day of Giving, where as many people as possible give $10 (or more, if able) to a complete stranger. I wholeheartedly endorse this project, and hope that the readers on this blog will join with Reed, myself, and others across the country and world in this endeavor!

Giving One Day's Wages
Eugene Cho believes in giving, so he started an organization called One Day's Wages, which tries to motivate people to give their wages from a single day toward solving problems of severe poverty in the world. The organization was founded by Eugene and his wife, Minhee, who clearly believe in their mission - they donated 100% of their 2009 income (a total of $68,000!) to the cause of fighting extreme global poverty. They continue to give to the organization, trying to reach a personal goal of giving $100,000. This is a major "put your money where your mouth is" step, and lends them a great deal of credibility when they ask others to give just one day's wages.

How much is one day's wages? It turns out to be just about 0.4% of your income. This is certainly an amount which could be given away without a severe hardship on most people, so is something worth considering. And, of course, if you have a more specific charity that you'd like to support than Eugene's, then you can take this philosophy of giving and use it toward the charity of your choice. My guess is that once you start giving, though, you'll find that one day's wages aren't nearly enough, and you'll begin looking for ways to give more.

29 Gifts
Gifts of money are nice, but of course they aren't the only way you can give. In fact, on an interpersonal level, I'd argue that they aren't even the best way to give. Enter Cami Walker, the author of the wildly successful giving book 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life, who began her giving activities while having trouble dealing with the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis. The gifts she describes are more spontaneous giving activities, which are not focused on the giving of money. Her first gift was, in fact, a supportive phone call to a fellow MS patient. As she details the story, she had amazing mental and physical benefits from this emphasis on giving, and she's founded a 29-Day Giving Challenge to spread the message that she's learned..

This confirms my research - both the reading that I've been doing, and my personal experience with my own giving project. Giving really does have profound, scientifically-proven implications that it will improve many aspects of your life.

Yes, after 40 days I was slightly burned out ... but it wasn't a bad kind of burned out. I imagine that it is sort of how one feels after running a marathon. You're very happy that you've reached the finish line, you probably want to curl up into a nice bed for a few days, but you're immensely satisfied at the sense of accomplishment. That was me.

Now the fatigue has worn off, and I'm looking for the next marathon, the next way to get the rush that comes from giving to others. I've got some great ideas, and I look forward to sharing them with you.

What are your ideas? What givers have motivated you? What is your giving story?

Radio Interview & Dollhouse Essay Contest Winner

2010-04-02T05:08:00.000-07:00

A couple of things have happened this week which may be of interest to those who have followed the 40 Days of Giving project.

First, on Monday, I was on the Baltimore radio show Midday with Dan Rodricks, with Baltimore Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen and Joyce Davis, an author focusing on Islamic culture. The three of us were on to give different cultural perspectives on the act of charity, and it was a fascinating discussion. You can listen to the whole interview by following the above link and scrolling down to the Monday, March 29 entry, the 1:00 - 2:00 hour, and clicking on the entry ... or you can just click here.

Second, my essay "The Redemption of Topher Brink" was a winner in the Smart Pop Books Dollhouse essay contest for essays about the relatively short-lived Joss Whedon television series Dollhouse. This means it will be in the upcoming anthology Inside Joss' Dollhouse. This is especially rewarding because, in a breakdown of the submissions, it was revealed that nearly 20% of the essays were based on the character of Topher Brink, so I knew that editorial concerns would mean that no more than two or three of them (four tops) could be chosen. So it seemed that I was likely in sort of a contest-within-a-contest. Given the clear popularity of the character, I'm looking forward to seeing what fans think of the essay.

And, finally, I just now got an e-mail announcing that I am officially on the Be the Match registry, so if someone needs my bone marrow, we'll find out about it. Signing up for the registry is completely painless, and any pain from actually donating (if you're ever needed) will be for the specific sake of saving someone's life.

First Reflections - By the Numbers

2010-03-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Over the last 40 days, Amber and I have given all of our actual realized income to others - mostly in the form of donations to worthwhile non-profit organizations, but also in some more personal ways, such as giving out gift cards to a local grocery store, some generous birthday gifts, buying breakfasts for random people at a restaurant, and so on.

We have kept some money, as I outlined at the beginning. For example, we used the child support we receive from our oldest son's biological father to help with groceries, childcare, and other expenses. We also have a rental house which clears about $50 a month in profit, after the mortgage and other regular expenses are paid, and we put that $50 back for maintenance expenses. And we of course didn't give away money that we didn't get - so my paycheck deductions for taxes, insurance, 401(k) contributions, and so on were all done before the money was given away.

So we had two net paychecks from my day job and a monthly payment from About.com which we gave away. In addition, shortly into the project, we learned I was getting a bonus, and decided to give that as well ... but, again, taxes, 401(k) contributions, and some other things were taken out of that, and we only gave the remaining balance that made its way to us.

I say all of this to make it clear that we really focused on giving away the money that came into our lives during these 40 days, in an effort to stay true to the spirit of what we were doing. Even the $100 I received as the first payment on our sold pickup, which was given to me a few days prior to the start date, was mostly given away.

So now that it was all said and done, I was curious ... how much did it actually cost us financially?

Fortunately, I keep my financial records in Quicken Home & Business, so it's easy to check. This tracks everything - retirement accounts, business accounts, student loans, car loans, mortgages, checking accounts, savings accounts ... I even track how much I have in PayPal on this thing! So I can pull up a report which tells my net worth at the start of the project and my net worth at the end of the project, and figure out exactly how much my net worth changed over the course of giving all of our money away. (The only thing that isn't taken into account is any depreciation on our home or vehicles, or any other physical assets that we have.)

The difference in our overall financial picture, after having given away 40 days worth of income, is ....

$674.37

That's right. From February 15 to March 29, our net worth dropped by exactly $674.37.

But over the course of the project, I also taught a writing workshop which I haven't yet been paid for ... so once that's taken into account, the actual cost is less!

And that's in the immediate aftermath, not even taking into account anything else that may come along as a benefit in the coming weeks!

How is this possible?

Well, my first answer is: I'm not really sure.

I was expecting to be down about $2,000 or so dollars, to be honest, when I ran my original pre-project estimates. That was with us being incredibly frugal ... which we weren't. We normally are fairly frugal (or outright cheap), with a substantial portion of our income going toward debt repayment and savings. Once we unlocked the "emergency fund" and began living off of it, we didn't really exercise a ton of restraint. With the amount of time I was devoting to work and to the project, and Amber being in school full time, and a four month old baby, we spent much of our time fairly exhausted ... so if one of us suggested eating out, the other one typically jumped on the idea.

Since I knew it wasn't from frugal money management, I looked at the accounts to see where the increases were. They were pretty exclusively in our retirement and investment accounts, which is understandable, since these are the only accounts that can go up without putting money into them.

There was some inflow into these accounts, of course. The money that came in was from my 401(k) contributions and the company's match, on two paychecks and the bonus I received. In addition, there's a strange event I haven't been able to investigate yet, where more shares were deposited into my retirement account! I believe this is a result of my company's profit sharing plan, but I'm not sure. I'll have to investigate this further.

Still, these contributions account for a little bit over half of the increase in my retirement and investment accounts. The rest can be attributed to only one thing ... the stock market going up during this time.

Here's the curious thing about these numbers. Once I figure up the actual amount our net worth is down over these 40 days, and the amount we gave out, I notice an interesting relationship. We lost only about 10% of what we gave.

For the math challenged, let me provide an example. (These aren't the actual numbers involved, because I don't want you all knowing my exact salary.)

This would be like giving away $7,400 dollars and then finding that your net worth only dropped by about $700!

It's truly unexpected, and this almost ten percent ratio is a bit chilling. To quote my friend Annabella, "It went from serendipity to spooky." A unexpected tenfold increase in giving is not something that I expected.

I need to let it sink in a bit more to really have an opinion on this.

But your opinions, of course, are more than welcome!

Day 40: The Finale, or the First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

2010-03-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

So today I woke up with a sense of relief that this crazy roller coaster ride which I got us on was finally coming to an end. Don't let this seem as if I'm disappointed in the experiment - far from it, I think this has been one of the best experiences of my life.

Still, the fact is that by setting a goal to give in this way, I turned it into a bit of a chore. From time to time, I'd reach the end of the day, exhausted, realizing that I hadn't really given anything ... and I can honestly say that, at those moments, I wasn't really a cheerful giver. So, while goals are nice, and it's good to set aside a portion of your income, I don't suggest turning it into a chore in any way.

But the project was what it was, and today it ends ... and my work of turning it into a book which people will want to buy begins. I'm actually really looking forward to it, and I have a great deal of confidence that the giving experiences I've had in my life and in this forty days will prove compelling enough to get the attention of a publisher.

So ... on to the day 40 gives:

First, some catch-up. You may recall that we were buying Joy a membership in the Aspire Indiana Farm, to provide her massive family with fresh vegetables over the summer. I went onto their website and signed Joy up, but did so by entering her contact information, including her e-mail. They sent a confirmation e-mail to her, but I need the invoice number from that e-mail in order to actually pay for it. It's been two weeks, and I'm still waiting on that invoice number. So I wrote a check to Aspire Indiana Farm for the amount of the CSA and am sitting it aside to pay for Joy's invoice once I get the number.

Similarly, my sister's birthday present (swim lessons for her 16 month old daughter and herself at the YMCA) continues to go unpaid, because she hasn't gone to the YMCA to find out the cost. So I just wrote a $50 check to the YMCA and am mailing it to her, which should be enough to cover the lessons.

With those expenses caught up, we were able to look at the money left over today and decide what to do. First things first, we stopped by the grocery store on the way to church, which was have a potluck lunch, to pick up our food.

Then, following lunch, we went out to my mother's house and I unloaded things from the back of her pickup truck. She'd moved up from Vincennes to Anderson (a three hour move) last fall, but hadn't been able to bring some of her outdoor supplies, including some spring flowers and bulbs, and so Amber drove down with her yesterday to collect some of those things. The truck, therefore, needed unloading today ... and I did that in relatively short order.

After Mom's truck was unloaded, I then proceeded to my dreaded give of the day ... Locks of Love. Yes, you are correct, I came nowhere close to reaching my $10,000 goal for Heifer International in 40 days, and originally I set this as a condition for me to contribute my hair. The problem is that it just didn't work, so I was left with a decision ... either give up or not.

We decided not. Amber and I remain committed to raising the $10,000, even if we now realize that a 40 day time limit is perhaps a bit limiting (at least in our current situation). And since we will raise the money, I figured I might as well go ahead and donate the hair now and get it over with. So now .... the before photos:

And the "after" photo (more to come):

It feels strange to be without the tail, and I'm certainly not too sure how I feel about the new do (although Amber claims she likes it), but ... it was (relatively) painless, and the hair will be used to make a wig for a child with medical hair loss, which is a far better use than being on my sorry old head!

For that matter, my hair will probably be a bit healthier now and this may prevent the slow thinning that I was beginning to notice. So, once again, this act of giving holds within it a reward, which has been a recurring theme throughout this experiment, and is of course the very concept that inspired me to start it in the first place.

And having started it, it's now time to finish it ... which means that the last bit of my income has to go away. We gave a $25 tip to the hairdresser who performed the cut above. (The Great Clips hair salon chain, or at least the one we went to, do not charge for Locks of Love donation cuts, so in order to tip the stylist on the debit card we use for our giving fund we had to buy some hair product. It cost under $10, which is less than the haircut itself would have cost.)

When I got home, I was ready to pay out the last of the money ... and then the phone rang. Our local firemen association was soliciting donations. Yes, they could have some money. (If they'd called 20 minutes later, they'd have been out of luck.)

The final two donations are in honor of my friend Robert J. Sawyer, the science fiction author who wrote the novel FlashForward, which provides the basis of the ABC television series of the same name. (He's known for many other things, but at the moment that's the biggest one.)

Early on, I reached out to a handful of friends and asked for some ideas of charities they like to give to, so that I could profile them. Unfortunately, the 40 days slipped by faster than I really anticipated, and I didn't get to focus quite as much on profiles of individual charities as I would have liked ... but still, these two charities are incredibly worthwhile, so I decided to split the remains of our giving money between them:

Note: Rob is Canadian, so he donates to the Canadian branch of these charities.

I recommend Rob's 1997 novel Frameshift, which features a main character who does, in fact, suffer from Huntington's Disease, a horribly debilitating and ultimately fatal neurological disorder, as a enjoyable way to learn further information about the disease. (And yes, I do realize that's a slightly ironic choice of words.)

To learn more about Diabetes, just follow a modern western diet of fast food and high fructose corn syrup ... you'll get it eventually and learn all about it.

And with those donations ... the 40 Days of Giving project is officially complete, but the giving does, of course, continue. In the coming days, I'll be posting some immediate reflections on the whole experience but one thing is certain - this experiment is just the beginning. Amber and I are continuing to raise money for Heifer International, and other charities, and we're looking for ways that we can get the proceeds of the book (once it's published) to help promote further giving as well.

I think some of the results of this project will absolutely fascinate you. Stay tuned!

Day 39: Breakfast of Champions

2010-03-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

This morning, Elijah and I went out for breakfast at a small local diner, Eva's Pancake House. After having breakfast, I walked up to the counter and told the manager of the restaurant that I would like to pick up the tab for everyone in the restaurant. This amounted to me paying for 9 meals (plus our own, but that didn't come out of the giving fund), and on top of that I tipped each of the waitresses $25. (Waitresses who were on multiple tickets did not get tipped multiple times. My hope is that the customers were so thrilled by having their meals paid for that they tipped generously on top of the amount I paid.)

Let me tell you, though ... if you want to be treated like a king, try a give like this. Early on a Saturday morning at a relatively low-traffic restaurant, it wouldn't even cost that much money ... especially if you cut the tip down to a normal 20% or so. (If I'd done the give about 20 minutes earlier, when we got to the restaurant, I'd only have had about half as many tables to pay for.) People came up to me to shake my hand, talking about how appreciative they were.

"I was having breakfast with my mother and sister. This just made our day," one woman told me.

A guy came up and said, "My kids wanted to thank you," and two teenage boys offered their thanks and asked questions.

One waitress said she had goosebumps over it. "God bless you! And he will!"

This was a big change over some of the earlier personal giving experiences. It's enough to give you a bit of an ego ... which makes it probably just as well that I saved this one until the end of the experiment. If I'd had an experience like this early on, I might not have given to any charities ... I'd have been out there giving every cent of the giving fund to people on the street.

The waitresses and some of the customers got my website info, so if any of you stop by, I'd love to hear from you in the Comments section about what you thought or felt about the experience.

Just one more day to go!

Share Your Giving Experience

2010-03-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had an experience where giving has seemed to, remarkably, result in a reward?

How has giving (either as the giver or the receiver) impacted your life?

On this blog, I've been sharing my own giving experiences and thoughts, but that's just one life ... and one of the things this has helped me learn is that one life is fairly meaningless unless it's connected to other lives. So, in that spirit, I'm asking all readers of this blog to share their own stories of giving by leaving a comment on this blog post.

Please, when leaving your story, keep in mind that this is a public site and anyone can view the posts left here, so personal information should be left out of the post. (If you wish to share something very personal, or would like a response from me, contact me at azjauthor@gmail.com.) Some of these stories may be included in the book 40 Days of Giving, so by posting you are giving permission for that, but anything that goes in the book will be edited and any personal details will be removed.

Day 38: Educational Giving

2010-03-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

Education is very important to me, and in fact to my whole family. Both of my parents were teachers. (My father still is.) My grandmother was a teacher. I've worked in the educational field for over a decade ... five years in the classroom with Project SEED, and now for over five years with an educational publishing company that focuses on educational assessment.

In my opinion, education is the single most important political issue there is. Every election, my most intense analysis goes to the candidate's stance on education (assuming the position has anything to do with education - for example, I don't really care too much about the county coroner's educational stance).

Why is this more important than the wealth of other issues? Because, simply put, a good educational system, which teaches young people to think critically (a skill often sadly neglected at home), puts us on a firm foundation for solving all other problems ... including the problems that haven't even come up yet! Raising an ignorant, unthoughtful generation of students just pushes problems off so that the next generation can mess things up worse.

The Status of National Education
As I mentioned, my current occupation is in educational assessment. This is at the heart of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. One of the issues, though, is that each state has different standards to be assessed. In addition to creating inconsistencies in American education, this also increases costs, because each state has to create (or pay a company to create) educational and assessment materials.

Recently, several states (along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) have decided to voluntarily join together and work on a set of common standards. The Common Core State Standards Initiative has just released their draft version of English-Language Arts and Mathematics standards that would apply across most of the country. These are not federally-mandated standards, though ... they're a voluntary set of standards that are being developed to provide a foundation for the instruction in each state (except for Texas and Alaska, who aren't a part of the process, probably in part be because they feel they already have adequate standards).

The draft versions are now open to the public for comment, so one of the best things that I can think of to help education nationally is to review the standards and offer my own expertise by commenting on them ... and to urge everyone else out there to do the same. This may well provide the basis for the next wave of educational reforms, so it's important that we see that these common core standards reflect the education we want our children to have.

Project SEED
Another way to help is to support programs that promote academic excellence. Project SEED is a great non-profit, and since I worked for them for five years, I fully know that they get great results. SEED has been using Socratic teaching methods to provide instruction in advanced mathematics to elementary and middle school students since the 1960's. This program really enhances the ability of students to think mathematically, and has been shown in a number of research evaluations to have a powerful, prolonged positive impact on student performance. The following video, which shows some student activity, is probably the best way to get an idea of how the program works.

Unfortunately, I also know enough about how Project SEED works to know that small donations don't really do much toward getting more instruction in the classroom. Even a donation of $500 (a very large donation on my budget) wouldn't do a ton to help actually provide any additional benefits to students (although I'm sure it would be appreciated as a way to defray some of their operational expenses). It takes several thousand dollars to fund a class, which means their funding needs to come in bigger chunks - either from portions of school budgets allocated toward this excellent classroom instruction (and professional development) or possibly grants to cover the costs.

Having said that, I certainly don't mean this as a discouragement for any educators (or parents and citizens, for that matter) out there who want to seek Project SEED expertise in their own community. These grants do exist, and since Project SEED provides both classroom instruction and professional development, this means that professional development funds can be used to help train the teachers in these instructional methodologies. If you're interested, then I urge you to contact Project SEED to find out more and perhaps get a demonstration at a local school.

Every Child is Gifted

Growing up, I was always tagged with the label "gifted." I was in the advanced classes, and excelled at them. I sought out learning experiences for fun. At age 16, I left home to attend the Indiana Academy of Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, a state-run residential high school for the top gifted and talented juniors and seniors in the state.

I was a geek, in other words, and (eventually) proud of it.

However, my time in Project SEED convinced me of one simple truth - every child is gifted, and it's only because we draw such distinctions that we become convinced that any child is not gifted. Any child - if given the proper opportunities and encouragement, would find and embrace their gifts ... and even if the child doesn't display gifts in a certain area, if nourished, they will at least develop skills in those areas.

In other words, I now hold the firm belief that there is no such thing as a child who is inherently bad at mathematics ... or, for that matter, anything else.

Would every child be gifted in science or mathematics? Would every child want to be? No, of course not. But they would all grow to cultivate the unique gifts that they do have. And it is the cultivation of these gifts that turns them from gifts into brilliance, as beautifully described time and again in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success.

If the Beatles hadn't practiced for many hours, they may have been gifted musicians, but they wouldn't have been able to revolutionize rock and roll. All great musicians are great because they have devoted themselves to music. No one just lucks into it on the basis of exceptional natural ability alone.

If Bill Gates hadn't been able to cultivated his computer skills, he may still be a bright guy, but he wouldn't have been able to transform our modern world with technology.

The fallacy that Gladwell ably debunks is the idea that some people will succeed no matter what environment they're placed in. There is no such thing as a true prodigy, who will thrive even in a situation where their gifts are not nurtured. A gift that is not nurtured will wither ... no matter how great its potential.

Similarly, a withered ability that is nurtured will begin to flourish. The brain, which contains the skill sets that we develop in life, is amazingly flexible. The plasticity of the brain (as it's called) means that we can always pick up new skills, and research is showing that while it may get more difficult as time goes on, this ability never really stops.

For example, I'm a horrible musician, but that's in part because it's never been particularly important to me to develop musical skills. Despite some time in middle school band as a percussionist, I never devoted as much time to learning music as, say, reading. But if I decided - even now at age 33, or a decade or two from now - that it was really important for me to play the guitar or piano, or even to sing, I would be able to do learn how to do it. It might be tough, but it's a skill that's reachable. I could even, I'm sure, become competent or even good at it, if I put the proper time into the developing the skill. It would, however, take me years to develop this into an instinctive ability and master the skills.

Compare this to, say, a Miley Cyrus or a Mozart, whose musical ability has been nurtured since childhood. Both began working in music early so that, by young adulthood, they were each expert professionals in their particular musical crafts. (Gladwell discusses Mozart but, understandably, doesn't draw the parallel between him and Miss Cyrus.)

While Project SEED utilizes innovative strategies to reach the gifted mathematician within each student, an organization called All Kinds of Minds is dedicated to major school reform, seeking to transform the educational methodologies of American teachers so that they can connect with the many ways different students learn. It is rooted in the principles of Dr. Mark Levine, as outlined in his book A Mind at a Time, which lays out recent research in learning styles. By teaching educators about the profound variability in student learning styles, they hope to create a school system where every student will actually have a chance to thrive. That is certainly a goal worthy of support, which is why they got a check as part of today's give.

Local Education Support
In addition to giving to a national educational non-profit, I'm also offering up a donation to the Anderson Education Foundation, which provides grants for classroom instruction opportunities in my local area. There are a lot of these private non-profit foundations created for the purpose of supporting the local public school system ... and as we all know, our school systems need a lot of help.

If you live in Indiana, you could go to the Indiana Association of Public Education Foundations (IAPEF) to find out whether there's such a foundation in your area.

Outside of Indiana, you can look into the National School Foundation Association to see if there is a local chapter listed among their affiliates. (Some Indiana public education foundations, such as in my hometown of Vincennes, are listed on the NSFA site but aren't members of IAPEF.)

These would also be great organizations to approach about the possibility bringing consultants from Project SEED, All Kinds of Minds, or other innovative educational programs into your local communities to help with professional training and development. Where the school system falls short in providing adequate funding, maybe these organizations can help ... if their local communities support them.

Days 36 & 37: Giving Across America

2010-03-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

A check to the National Audobon Society was the Day 36 give. (What can I say - they sent me a solicitation in the mail! Besides, I like trees.) No muss, no fuss.

In addition, I went to the bank and picked up four cashier's checks for the Day 37 give.

Early on in the project, I thought of randomly picking a name from the phone book and sending them money. Then I realized that I didn't want the person showing up at my house, so I struck on the idea of sending it to someone in California. But still, I really didn't think that sending a check, which contained my address, was a good idea. And sending cash wasn't a great option, because I needed to be able to document the giving, in case someone (either a critic or the IRS) someday questions the honesty of my account.

Giving really shouldn't require this much thought!

Anyway, I decided that a cashier's check was the best option, since it didn't have my address on it.

Now it was just a matter of getting the address. I have a friend in California, so decided to send her a message over Facebook and have her select a name and address randomly from her phonebook.

It seemed appropriate to send the check across the country, and a mental image came into my head of the envelope crossing the country, sort of showering psychic charitable energy all over the place. Crazy, to be sure, but it was a nice image, and it took root.

Then I began thinking, "Well, why just one, then?" If I could do it from Indiana to California, I could do it some other places, too. I began thinking through my list of friends and found some other ones from around the country who could help me find names.

I ended up with a set of four names from four "corners" of the country - California, Massachusetts, Alaska, and Florida. Once I had the four cashier's checks from the bank, it was just a matter of writing a letter explaining the situation. Though the checks had no strings attached, I did ask that they get in touch with me to let me know what they felt about getting the check, if they were willing. I provided my name, e-mail, and phone number. (I was hesitant about the phone number, but figured the checks might go to someone who didn't use e-mail, so I should provide an alternate contact.) So they're all ready to go. (They'll actually get mailed out on Day 38.)

In my mind is an image of positive energy flowing out all over the country, with these four points connected by people sharing this curious experience of receiving money in the mail.

Is there any reality to this image?

I guess it depends ... how real is a metaphor?

As someone who loves science, I believe in the power of metaphor to describe reality. As a human being, I hope that this particular metaphor has at least a little bit of reality to it.

Day 35: Public Television Give

2010-03-23T19:51:00.000-07:00

Today our give was to our local PBS station, WFYI. We got a solicitation in the mail. It turns out that they lost about 50% of their state funding this year, amounting to a shortfall of nearly $250,000 ... on top of an already tough year economically. We can never really give too much to them because, since we cut out our cable television, it's pretty much the only television that we allow Elijah to watch. He's very engaged with their programming, and remembers a lot. For example, one day he pretended to be a meteorologist (and pronounced the word almost-correctly) because he'd seen it on Sid the Science Kid.

For reasons beyond this, PBS has a special place in my heart this year, because they've actually helped with one of the big changes which has startled me during this whole process. As I've described earlier, my mother is losing a ton of weight (a figurative ton, that is)... and I attribute it largely to a PBS donation last fall.

PBS Donation Gives Back
Last year, when I donated, it was during their regular annual drive and we qualified for some gifts in exchange for the donation. I really wanted the National Parks: America's Best Idea series ... 12 hours of gorgeous footage of our national parks, along with their history. But Amber had other ideas. (It's okay, I eventually recorded the National Parks series on our DVR and got to watch it. Absolutely gorgeous!)

Amber decided that we should get a set of Wayne Dyer materials, as a Christmas gift for her mother. Her mother, she said, really liked him and it would be a nice gift. So we checked off the box to get the Wayne Dyer book Excuses Begone!: How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits, along with the related CD and DVD of his PBS special on the topic.

Now, honestly, I'd never heard of this guy, but it was clear he was some sort of self-improvement guru, and over the last couple of years I've grown to appreciate that these guys can be helpful, so I wasn't opposed to getting it ... but neither was I particularly enthusiastic about it.

I grew even less enthusiastic as it neared Christmas and the stuff wasn't showing up. We got two postcards stating that WFYI was back-ordered on their reward materials, and we'd get it when it arrived in stock. So as we neared Christmas, this gift just wasn't ready, so we went ahead and got Amber's mother some other set of gifts, thinking that the Wayne Dyer stuff could be set aside for her birthday.

The package arrived a couple of weeks after Christmas, when I was in the process of preparing for the 40 Days of Giving project. I sat them out on the table, and quickly found that the CDs had been opened up and placed in the car, where Amber was listening to them as she drove around town. "Mom won't mind," she told me.

I began to listen, and was fairly impressed. Though Dyer is a spiritual guru, this particular set doesn't require a lot of spiritual commitment - it's just common sense. Basically, he urges people to look at what excuses they use and then consider whether they are really certain that excuse is true. He cites some new research in epigenetics (very cool stuff), which indicates that even our genetic code does very little to lock down the behavior of our biology. Even the most solid excuse - "It's in my genes" - seems to no longer be valid.

Given that these excuses are never 100% certain, you then have a choice of whether or not to believe them. Some of these very excuses came up when I was in the planning phases of this project, as I began to look at the logistics of actually carrying it out.

"It'll be too hard." Well, maybe or maybe not. Instead of assuming it will be, why not assume that it won't be, and run with that?

"I can't afford it." Again - maybe or maybe not. Why not think "There's a way I can afford this" and then begin looking for it.

As I said, none of this is particularly spiritual ... although the implications of Dyer's epigenetics talk is that you can positively think your body itself into a better situation, potentially curing cancer or losing weight with some positive thinking.

And that's where my mother comes into the story.

One day, I'm listening to the disks while I drive my mother to the foot doctor. I had to pressure her to go, despite the fact that she had a gaping, oozing wound on her foot. She'd gotten a large blister on her foot, rubbed them together in her sleep one night, and caused it to split open. Her feet were regularly swollen and red, and I was concerned about circulation problems. She was also diabetic. She needed her foot looked at, so I was dragging her to the foot doctor.

During the drive, she listened to the CD, just as it was talking about a study where the placebo effect was shown to work even in place of surgery. A group of people with arthritis in their knees were split into three groups. Two groups received surgery to alleviate the problem, but the third group received only incisions, but no actual surgery. Then all three groups, thinking they'd had the surgery, went through physical therapy. The group that thought they had surgery, but didn't, recovered at exactly the same rate as the ones who had actually had the knee surgery! The pain was relieved, the movement increased, at exactly the same rate. The surgery itself, and the skill of the surgeon, appeared to have no actual impact on the patients' outcomes.

Upon questioning, I told my mother that this was some guy from PBS, Wayne Dyer. Then I took her to the foot doctor.

Amber and I continue listening to the Excuses Begone! disk, and are fairly impressed. Amber has already decided that her mother wouldn't really like it, because he's kind of "New Age-y" for her. For example, at one point Dyer says, "You are god," as a means of demonstrating how much power you have to influence your own life. Well, for a fundamentalist Christian, that just doesn't fly, so we decided to keep the Wayne Dyer stuff ... and I became quite a fan.

At one point I said to Amber, "My mother should really listen to this."

Well, it turned out she didn't have to. The Wayne Dyer Excuses Begone! special was on PBS, and Mom happened to catch it while flipping through channels. Realizing that it was the show I'd mentioned, she watched it.

What happened next was nothing short of astounding.

Since String Theory for Dummies had come out, I'd occasionally made reference to the fact that I looked forward to the day when I could write full time. Each and every single time this topic came up, my mother immediately pointed out that I'd be foolish to give up a job with such good benefits and pay. (I was making nearly as much after 5 years with the company as she'd made teaching school for 25 years! This isn't a sign of my immense wealth ... it's a sign of how badly teachers are paid.)

Then, just a few days into the 40 Days of Giving project, I went over to her house. She said, "I saw that Wayne Dyer show, and I wanted to tell you something." She looked me in the eye. "If you ever decide that you want to quit your job to write full time, you won't hear a word of complaint from me."

I was absolutely stunned at this total reversal. For my entire life, Mom had emphasized the importance of having a secure job with benefits. This was the woman who had told me, as a young child, that if I wanted to be a writer, I'd better have a job that could pay the bills.

Something about that PBS self-help show had clicked the tumblers into place for her. And that was just the beginning. I came by her house a week later and noticed some new exercise and diet materials. Within a few days, the change was noticeable: Mom was losing weight.

My mother had, for well over a decade, weighed well over 300 pounds. At her heaviest, she reached 370 pounds. She'd moved up to be near us in the fall and had put some weight on since then. Now it was coming off ... and coming off quickly. When she went to the doctor about two weeks into the 40 Days of Giving project ... and she was twenty pounds lighter than when she'd moved. We estimate that, in just two weeks on her diet, she'd lost nearly 30 pounds.

And she has, since then, continued to lose weight ... although it has, thankfully, leveled off. (We don't want the poor woman to waste away.)

Just today, in fact, she reclaimed some property from me because of how much she'd lost. When we'd gone to Florida this summer, she'd bought me a "Grumpy Gator" t-shirt. She'd wanted one, but the largest size they had was XL, which she hadn't fit into. She bought it for me with the understanding that when she lost the weight to fit into it, she could have it back. Neither of us honestly expected that I'd have to fork it over.

I've never been happier to give up anything in my life.

And this all started with a show on PBS that convinced her she didn't have to just accept the excuses she'd been using for so many years ... so giving some money to them is, I figure, well worth it.

Day 34: White River Watchers

2010-03-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

Today's give is to a local organization which has done some great work helping to beautify the White River. Their name, appropriately enough, is the White River Watchers of Madison County. I was able to volunteer with their 2009 White River Fall clean-up, which had me walking up and down the White River dragging trash out of it. Just the group I was with - consisting of about a dozen people on foot who covered less than a mile of the river - found, among other bits of debris, four or five tires, a giant tractor tire, a set of bed springs, and one large, empty oil barrel that had rusted through. (Other groups - two entire school buses full, as I recall - loaded up in canoes and traveled the river that way to find and clear other trash.)

Amber didn't accompany me, because at the time she was very pregnant. But we did, later that day, take Elijah for a walk down by one of the river's tributaries and he was able to practice casting his fishing pole (with a rubber fish weight tied onto the end of it). We saw a lot of trash in that area, and talked to him about how important it was to not litter, especially in the river. We explained to him that even though someone else had left the trash there, it was our job to help clean it up, because if it was left there it would make the Earth and the fish sick.

While we do our part with our son, the White River Watchers (founded in 1997) performs outreach with local schools, as well as performing chemical tests on the White River water supply, to supplement their clean-up activities. They've received numerous awards and recognition for their work, including the 2004 Governor's Award for Excellence in Community Service and Volunteerism for the Environment. Their mission, "to protect the White River ecosystem for the present and future use of all by means of community involvement and education" is one that Amber and I can both get behind 100%.

(For those wondering about the Day 33 give - it was Sunday, so we gave a tithe to church and brought a pie, and spent the rest of the day spending time together as a family.)

Day 32: A Gift to the Past

2010-03-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, I had horrible self-esteem. Looking back on it, I'm honestly not sure where this came from. I have pictures. I wasn't ugly, though I thought I was. I wasn't fat, though I thought I was. I had tons of friends, so shouldn't have been lonely. There was really no rational basis for any of these thoughts, but I had them ... in spades.

In fact, at one point in my junior year of high school, it got so bad that I lost nearly all of my friends ... because I stupidly, in a moment of unbridled (and unjustified) self-pity declared, in front of three friends, "My life sucks. I just don't have any friends!"

Of course, I wanted them to reassure me. I wanted them to say, "No, we're your friends. We like you."

Instead, they got justifiably pissed that I was completely negating their friendship, and wanted nothing to do with me. Especially the girl who I was interested in ... and who, at the time, was even interested in me back!

Still other friends turned away from me as well. One of the sweetest girls I ever knew said that she just couldn't stand to spend time with me, because it was like I was a "psychic vampire" who just leeched all of the positive energy off of people.

Because I was in this funk, people were deciding they didn't want to be with me. My irrational fears were making themselves become reality, in possibly one of the most tangible ways I've ever experienced in my whole life. I was horribly depressed and couldn't think of any way out.

And that's when a senior, Sunshine, took the time to help me out. Sunshine basically became a mentor, helping me work through some of my issues and figure out how to view myself in a way that had some measure of self-respect. And, as I began viewing myself with respect, my relationships began to slowly mend. Others began to, once again, view me with respect.

So I decided today to give to something designated by Sunshine, who is now an intern Unitarian Universalist minister, focusing on anti-poverty work with grassroots organizations.

When I asked Sunshine where to give, though, I didn't immediately get a definite answer. In the socratic way that I remembered so well, I was offered a set of possibilities, none of which was right and none of which was wrong. (While this was great when I was trying to "find myself" in high school, I'm not particularly sure it's the best way to designate a donation.) Here are the options I was provided:

A Unitarian Universalist social action fund
Unitarian Universalist denomination giving
Her own local church, West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, in Rocky River, OH. (The West Shore sermons, including some from Sunshine, are available online.)

Of these, I figured that the local church probably needed some funding the most. (Sunshine confirmed this on a follow-up e-mail.) So today, the give goes to West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church... because a decade and a half ago, Sunshine offered a helping hand to a very confused, desperately needy kid.

It doesn't even begin to repay what I owe.

200 Fans - Time for a Shameless Plea

2010-03-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

You've helped us reach 200 Facebook fans on the 40 Days of Giving fan page, which is nice. Great, in fact, given it only started about a month and a half ago, and I honestly haven't promoted it too much. (In comparison, my Andrew Zimmerman Jones fan page has just over 465 fans, but that's been around since last November. It focuses more heavily on my science writing, so has a different potential audience.)

But 200 is a significant number, because it means it's very easy to do math in your head. $10,000 (the amount we're trying to raise for Heifer International) is also a nice round number. In fact, if you take $10,000 and divide it by 200, you get ... $50 per fan.

In other words, when you (and everyone else reading this blog) raise $50 for Heifer International, then our $10,000 goal would be reached.

So that's exactly what I'm asking. Each and every one of you can commit to raising $50 for Heifer International - either by donating themselves or collecting donations from others ... by next Sunday, March 28, when the 40 Days of Giving Project ends.

This is totally do-able. I'm certain of it. Most people blow $25 going out to dinner, so if they can be convinced to stay home instead, they won't even notice the lack of money.

If you're willing to aim higher, then do so ... because we all know that the vast majority of people will fall short, or not even try. Becoming a fan on Facebook is about the easiest thing in the world to do, and so I don't expect everyone to accept this call to action.

But if even half do take up the challenge, and if I am able to motivate a few people to go above and beyond, then we can reach the $10,000 goal by our deadline.

So call your friends, call your family, and see if they'll be willing to contribute to making poor families around the world into farmers who can feed themselves, and gain some income, in a self-sustainable way.

You can make a difference for generations to come ... but the first step is trying.

And remember - if we reach our goal by midnight on March 28, I will cut my hair for Locks of Love, where it will be made into a wig for children with medical hair loss. Further, I will provide rewards to anyone who collects over $500 toward the team goal!

Day 31: The Postman Gives Twice

2010-03-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

The mail brought us two different giving opportunities over the last couple of days - one of them local to Indiana and one more global in scope. So we took advantage of both of them.

The Gift of Song and Laughter

For several weeks, Amber has been attending a yoga class at the local Unity Church of Anderson, and I've attended a meditation class there. We've gone to a couple of services, as well, and are finding it a relatively good fit for what we're looking for.

Well, last night when Amber went to Unity for yoga class, something unexpected happened. An envelope had come to the church addressed to me, in the care of the pastor. The pastor knew that Amber attended the yoga class, so left it for her there. Presumably the pastor, having learned of our project, passed the word along to some sort of mailing list or forum or something, and someone sent a response to the only address that they knew - to the church from which they'd heard about it.

Both Amber and I were thinking the same thing, because we'd been really trying to figure out how to get to the $10,000 goal for Heifer International. Could this possibly be a check for Heifer? Would it just fall into our lap like this? Did things like this really, truly happen? Was The Secret actually right?

This was actually a fairly foolish way of thinking, but not because such a thing is absolutely outside the realm of possibility. (I still check the mail expecting a $10,000 check, just in case.) The fact is that the envelope was 6" x 9" and padded, which was way more than what would be needed for a check.

Still, it could have included a book or a pamphlet or something, along with the check.

There was hope.

Right?

Well, it wasn't a check.

But it was a very nice gift: a CD by a comedic singer named Greg Tamblyn, called Analog Brain in a Digital World. There was a note included which commended my efforts and also directed me toward track 12, "A Brief History of God (G-String Theory)." The CD was really funny, and we're both very pleased to receive it. (Although, again, if you wish to send a $10,000 check, I'll be checking the mail for it daily. Apparently, if you address mail to me at Unity Church of Anderson, it will find its way to me.)

The musician, Greg Tamblyn, also suggested in the note that I should check out the charity TreesForLife.org.

I guess I knew where I was giving the next day (i.e. today).

As it turns out, Trees for Life is actually a really great charity. They have the highest possible rating on Charity Navigator, and they have a similar "pass on the gift" philosophy to Heifer International. (In fact, Heifer was founded by a member of Church of the Brethren, and Trees of Life indicates it has a connection to Church of the Brethren's volunteer arm. Also, their web pages follow fairly similar layouts. I'm not sure yet if the connection is more substantive than that, though.)

When founded in the early 1980s, Trees for Life focused on planting fruit trees in impoverished regions. Since then, the organization has grown into supporting a wide range of locally-initiated projects around the world. Since the programs are initiated by members of the community, they automatically have a local base to work from in getting community involvement, and aren't just outsiders who are trying to implement their own ideas.

Plus, as with Heifer International, this charity gives you a sort of "shopping fix" while you're donating, because you get to add things to your shopping cart. Your donations can now include gifts of trees, books, libraries, cook stoves, learning centers, computers, and various educational materials.

Masonic Giving
In the standard mail today, I also received a letter from the Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons. The Indiana Freemasons were sending me address labels, and asking for a donation.

This is actually a fairly standard ploy to gain responses. Marketing people have figured out a lot of ways to heighten our likelihood to respond to something and I think it's good that we all know about it. (For a more comprehensive list, interested readers should look into Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Way to Be Persuasive.) Providing a minor gift - address labels or a notepad, for example - increases the likelihood that a recipient will respond to the mailing. Adding a personal note, handwritten, on the letter also helps. And a sticky note on the document? You bet - it helps personalize the mail and, therefore, increases the possibility that the person will positively respond.

One of the major persuasive strategies is getting people to make a small concession in the beginning, such as putting up a small yard sign, before asking for a bigger concession, such as a monetary donation. Since people have agreed, there's a psychological predisposition to respond favorably to a subsequent request. (Did you become my fan on Facebook? Then you should donate to Heifer International!)

If you live in the United States, you likely received a notice about a week ago letting you know that the census was coming and you should respond. (You have responded, haven't you?) This is the same sort of thing. In fact, a friend of mine who works in marketing called this a "fluffer," presumably because it gets the recipient ready to do the real work you're asking them to do. (If you don't know what this has to do with the word "fluffer," you'll need to look that up on your own. Kids may read this blog.)

Still, completely aware of all of these tactics, I went ahead and donated to them. Just because these persuasive tactics are used has no indication on whether or not the organization is worthy of the donation. Really, if an opportunity to give comes up during the project, I don't see that I can really pass it up. (Only 9 more days, charity telemarketers!) So they got a donation from us today, as well.

Day 30: Reaching Out to At-Risk Youths

2010-03-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

Today, Amber and I drove down to Indianapolis to interview Mary Byrne, the Executive Director of a local charity that I'd heard about through a friend who had, several years ago, volunteered there. It's the Indiana Youth Group, an organization that focuses on providing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning (LGBT) youth a safe, accepting environment where they can get mentoring and interact with other kids going through some of the same issues they're having.

One reason this is so important is that LGBT youths are about 8 times more likely than heterosexual youth to commit suicide, according to Ms. Byrne. Similar increases are evident for other negative behaviors, such as smoking, alcoholism, drug addiction, and unsafe sex. In a recent episode of PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, the following disturbing statistic was also cited:

"Nationwide, 20 to 30 percent of homeless kids are LGBT. In New York City it is one in three, according to Zak Rittenhouse, who works in a homeless shelter for gay and straight youths."

While these facts are incredibly alarming, there's reason for hope. According to Byrne, a recent study showed that virtually all of this is related to the rejection these youths receive from their parents, family, schools, churches, and other social circles. When looking at LGBT youth who are rated as having high acceptance, the instances of risky behavior drop to be virtually identical to heterosexual youths. [Update 3/19/2010: The study is entitled "Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults" by Caitlin Ryan, David Huebner, Rafael Diaz, and Jorge Sanchez, published in Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.]

This reminds me of some other evidence I've discussed before, in We Are Not Killer Apes!, where I pointed out the strong role that environment plays on our altruistic behaviors, as demonstrated by various primates who show major behavioral shifts when there is a corresponding change in their social influences.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who grows up being rejected by the people who are supposed to love, care for, and support them will be more likely to internalize that rejection and manifest it in risky behaviors. After all, they're continually being taught that they're worthless, so why not act like they're worthless.

This is very personal to me, because my father is gay. I've never really discussed his own formative years in this regard, but for me, this created a lot of confusion while I was growing up. Was my dad a bad guy? Since he and my mom were divorced, I didn't see him that often, but he certainly didn't seem like a bad guy. Was he going to hell? Was he evil? What did that make me? Was my very birth a mistake? Was I gay? Was that why I had trouble talking to girls? Maybe they were sensing something that I didn't know about myself. Was I going to hell?

So yes, to answer your question, I have always over thought things.

The point is that even though I'm not gay (despite my profound love of showtunes), the fact that society puts such a stigma upon being gay had a lot of bleed-over emotional impact on me during my formative years. In fact, it's really just in the last couple of years that I've had anything positive to say about any aspect of Christianity, because I associated it so strongly with incorrect and unfounded attacks upon my father's worth as an human being, and, by extension, my own.

All of this negativity is due to a social atmosphere where rejection is the dominant motif. But if you change the environment to one of acceptance, while these youth will still have many hassles to deal with, they are less likely to internalize the negativity as part of their identity. They're less likely to take the labels provided by others and hang it around their own neck, because they'll see that there are alternatives.

That is really what drove the creation of the Indiana Youth Group in 1988. A group of volunteers from an Indianapolis crisis hotline for homosexuals got together in one of their living rooms to discuss a problem: when gay teens called in, they didn't have anyplace to send them for appropriate counseling or help. There was nowhere for these children to turn with their problems.

So they created one.

Today, the Indiana Youth Group serves kids from ages 12 to 20. (They also have a transitional program, helping those ages 21 through 24, so they don't just have to kick them to the curb.) Byrne recounted a busy period last year when the IYG was averaging 85 youths hanging out at the facility each evening, many of them playing volleyball (badly) in the court in their back yard. The majority of the IYG participants are from the older end of the spectrum, because the IYG facility doesn't sit on a bus line (they're trying to find a new facility more accessible to non-driving youths), but Byrne says that even for those who don't come, she thinks that just knowing the facility is out there may provide some emotional support. The IYG also now has an outreach coordinator who works with LGBT groups at high schools across the state, so that they're supporting those who can't make it in for their activities.

The majority of Indiana Youth Group's funding comes from grants, and about 15% comes from their fundraisers - just last Saturday they held an art auction, which included both professional artists and pieces created by the youths who frequent the IYG. The remaining 25% - 30% of their funding comes from the donations of individual supporters ... which includes, after today's give, Amber and myself.

Byrne says that, for her, the major benefits from giving her time to help others have been the rich relationships that she has developed. Maybe some are paying forward a mentorship that they once received at a crucial time in their own lives. Still others, she notes, support their work as a way of trying to help the next generation avoid the same problems they had to deal with.

I can relate to this. The negativity related to homosexually left me conflicted for years, just because I might have picked up a few gay chromosomes somewhere in utero! Kids who are actually feeling these emotions must have it way worse than I did, and if any of them can be spared isolation because of it, I say it's a noble effort. We're created to live with others, as communal beings, and being forced to seal some portion of yourself off is not - can not - be a healthy lifestyle. It hinders our ability to truly connect not only with others, but also with ourselves. The teenage years are where we really begin to determine who we are going to become and that process of self-discovery is hard enough in the best situation.

Kudos to the IYG for providing these kids with an environment where they can be who they were meant to be ... themselves.

Parental Giving

2010-03-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

On the PBS show Faces of America, they are exploring the family histories of a number of amazing Americans. One history being explored is of the famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. They were able to track down a genealogy, including biographies and even naming conventions for generations, that had been lost and rediscovered in China. The oldest record they could find was for the ancestor Ma Lin-Guan, born 1435. The following is from the episode "Making America" where they explore this record:

(Reading from the genealogy record about Ma Lin-Guan) Living an upright life and without holding an official post, he accumulate virtue and cultivated goodness, and thus he laid the foundations for the family for 10,000 generations to come. To pass on good fortune to the descendants, isn't that what it's all about. Isn't it?

(Yo-Yo Ma's commentary) That's what I'm trying to do is live an upright life without holding an official post. Actually, I'm just trying to stay upright (laughter).... That's the best we can do as parents. It's not passing wealth, but passing, you know, certain values. In this case, virtue ... and good fortune.

Work and Family Balance

On March 2, as I was getting ready to head into the office, my four-year-old son walked up to me, and asked me not to go. We play this out every once in a while, so I gave my standard response, "Well, I have to go to work, so they'll give us money and we'll be able to buy food."

This time, he was having none of it. "Just tell them you don't need to work. We have enough money."

I sat down, smiled at him, hugged him, and then said, "You know, even if we didn't have any money, we'd still be pretty happy, right?" He nodded. "You know why?" He nodded. "Yeah, cause we've got family," he said. "Yeah," I said.

Then I went off to work for the day.

That's what we have to do to live a reasonable lifestyle today. I am very fortunate, because my job allows me to work from home much of the time, but I have so many irons in the fire that it still means that the time I'm able to devote to my family is one of the major sources of tension between Amber and I. Writing a book takes a lot of time, and when you have a full-time job in addition to that, well ... that's a lot of time you're devoting to goals outside of the family.

I think that I balance it fairly well, but sometimes - like when my son says things like the above - I do wonder if I'm successful. It's important to always remember that giving begins at home ... which is why this afternoon I will be conducting the Mentos geyser experiment, as well as maybe the egg in the bottle experiment ... no matter how much time it takes.

Day 29: The Gift of Time

2010-03-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

I missed yesterday's give because Amber had the debit card that we use to access the giving fund, and she went to bed early. She went to bed early again tonight, and once again I'm hesitant to wake her up to get the card, and I don't know where she's left it.

Still, overall, today was successful on the giving front. We packaged up the books which had been requested from a Day 5, and finally got them in the mail. (Sorry for the delay on that.) Amber also set up the food drive boxes that she's getting together for the Student Leadership Academy at Ivy Tech Community College.

I am taking this week off from the day job to focus on this (and other) writing projects, so you'd think I'd be getting a lot done, but not today. At around 1:00 pm, Amber rushed home because our car, which is in need of an oil change, was making curious sounds - so I went to Sears for an oil change, taking How to Change the World along with me for company. The oil change went relatively uneventfully.

Then I got home just in time to give a family member a lift to the hospital, because he couldn't drive himself. On the way home, I got a call from Amber, asking if I could come to my mother's to help move a few things. This turns into a substantial activity that takes the majority of my afternoon, as I moved a major pile of wood from her front yard, where it had been left when a tree was removed, into the back yard.

When I went to pick Elijah up from daycare, and was on the way back to my mother's to continue moving the wood, I was fairly upset. Frustrated, my brain was firing off in its usual way, "I really should be at home working on the book. I can't believe I'm wasting my time moving wood. This is not helping me at all on the project!"

Then it hit me - this was the project. I was helping my mother with something she needed done. That, and that alone, was my project for the time being. The book, I reminded myself, will be written. Now it was time to move the wood.

Time is one of the hardest things for me to give, because I feel like I have so little of it. I work a full-time job and run my own business, which essentially includes (at any given time) two distinct part-time jobs (About.com and whatever other writing project I'm working on). But today, I felt not only willing, but glad, to be giving up my time for this task. There was a strange peace in it (except for the brief period of time where Elijah attempted to argue with me over whether or not he was allowed to play in the truck bed with an unstable mountain of firewood), and that was nice to reach.

Anyway, end of story: I got the entire pile of wood moved, and now on to the next day of giving ....

Social Entrepreneurs

2010-03-17T22:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Amber and I went to see our lawyer about the possibility of starting up a non-profit, which would focus on helping establish community gardens around Anderson ... as a means of providing fresh vegetables, beautifying the community, and building stronger community relationships.

We left with a pile of paperwork, and the inclination that maybe non-profit status wasn't the way for us to go.

What It Takes to Become a Non-Profit
Becoming a non-profit corporation is not incredibly hard, but it's also not for the faint of heart. You file your articles of incorporation, which turns you into a non-profit corporation. This requires a fair amount of paperwork and, in Indiana, a $750 filing fee - reduced to $300 if you anticipate having a relatively low income your first year. (I forget the exact cut-off, but I think it's less than $25,000 in the first year.) In addition, there are some paperwork and fees associated with securing a unique corporate name within the state.

This makes you a non-profit corporation, but doesn't make you tax exempt. To do that, you have to file separately, both at the state level and then with the federal government for 501(c)(3) status. This allows donors to deduct their gifts as charitable donations. More important for our purposes would be that it would allow the non-profit entity to apply for the many community development grants which only allow 501(c)(3) corporations as applicants.

Beyond that, there are some annual filing requirements and such. It would mean getting an accountant, because it's a bit more than I can handle myself with TurboTax. (One person we spoke to suggested always having an accountant on the board of directors, to work pro bono, which does seem like a clever idea. If accountants are aware of this gambit, I'm sure they run from invitations to join these boards.) To apply for many grants, there have to be regular audits of your organization's financial records.

Check out more on starting a nonprofit at the About.com Nonprofit website.

Fiscal Sponsorship
Through all of this, I began to wonder how much of this hassle was really needed to do good work in the community. To be sure, if you're going to need a lot of supplies (or staff), then you'll probably need access to lots of grant funding over a long term, which means an established organization with 501(c)(3) status is very helpful.

However, a community garden primarily needs start-up capital (and land); the year-after-year upkeep could be handled by membership fees from members of the community who wish to participate. You'd need at least one person at the beginning to devote themselves to getting the thing up and running, but eventually it would be run entirely be volunteers from within the specific neighborhood.

So establishing a 501(c)(3) for this particular activity may just be overkill. What if we sought out an existing 501(c)(3), whose mission was in line with community gardens, and could convince them to let us write a grant on their behalf to provide funding for this activity? In fact, if the organization is well enough established, they may have experienced grant writers on staff, or know of some who can be asked to help. And, since the organization would presumably already be one which is local to the neighborhood in question, it would have a vested interest in seeing that neighborhood thrive.

There is, in fact, a name for this type of joint activity: Fiscal Sponsorship. Though it may sound a bit shady, it's actually perfectly above board (assuming, of course, that you're actually performing the work for which you're getting the tax-exempt money). Under this scenario, a non-profit acts as the sponsor of another organization without tax-exempt status - specifically so that the non-exempt organization is able to access grants and tax-exempt funds, such as donations.

Social Entrepreneur
There's still another possibility, and one which wouldn't have occurred to either Amber or myself in relation to community gardens on our own. A social entrepreneur is someone who uses entrepreneurial methods (sometimes including a successful for-profit business) to achieve desired social outcomes. Author David Bornstein profiles many amazing social entrepreneurs in his book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.

It's unclear to me how small neighborhood community gardens could really fall under the rubric of a profitable social entrepreneurial activity, but to others it must seem natural. In the last two weeks there have actually been two people who - unsolicited, mind you! - offered up that they might be interested in investing in such a business, if we could figure out how to make it profitable.

While I don't know have a vision for a community garden business, the idea of social entrepreneurship has taken a strong hold with me in other ways. I had been considering starting a non-profit of some kind eventually - more of a private foundation, which funded other activities - but in reading Bornstein's book, it became clear that this wasn't really necessary. As a for-profit business, I can still designate funds toward philanthropic activities, grants, scholarships, awards, and so on, seeking out worthy recipients on my own.

Surprisingly, the philanthropic arm of Google - called Google.org - is apparently set up as a for-profit entity, although one of its functions is to manage grant-giving, including from the tax-exempt Google Foundation. Philanthropy is so central to Google's vision that their founders made "making the world a better place" (as well as "don't be evil") part of their corporate mission when announcing the IPO of their stock back in 2004.

And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google's equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems. - "An Owner's Manual" for Google Shareholders

Corporations like Google are not successful despite their commitment to making the world a better place, but specifically because of this commitment. It makes good sense all around. Bornstein makes it clear that he sees social entrepreneurs as "transformative forces."

... it takes creative individuals with fixed determination and indomitable will to propel the innovation that society needs to tackle its toughest problems.... an important social change frequently begins with a single entrepreneurial author: one obsessive individual who sees a problem and envisions a new solution, who takes the initiative to act on that vision, who gathers resources and builds organizations to protect and market that vision, who provides the energy and sustained focus to overcome the inevitable resistance, and who - decade after decade - keeps improving, strengthening, and broadening that vision until what was once a marginal idea has become a new norm. - David Bornstein, How to Change the World

An ambitious goal, which many would certainly mock. But if even a few of these visionaries can make it work ... that's a world I want to live in.

Answering the Critic(s)

2010-03-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

As a writer, I don't think you ever really feel like you've "made it" until you have a strong critic. Well, I now have one! Yeah me!

Motivated by the Herald Bulletin newspaper article, there is one individual (who I shall call "The Anonymous One") who has decided that I should be the temporary target of his ire. I am pleased to serve in this capacity for him because, quite frankly, it seems like he needs something like this in his life to feel complete.

He brings up a number of excellent points, which I would like to take some time to address.

1. A Religious Sacrifice

"... to describe [this project] as a Lenten sacrifice is a despicable sacrilege. Any TRULY religious philanthropist would give anonymously to a worthy cause, rather than make a public display like a foolish braggart, hoping to make money on a future book." - The Anonymous One

I agree with this completely and, had I ever described this as a primarily religious effort, I would certainly feel the same way.

But I didn't.

In fact, here is the precise quote from the Herald Bulletin article, taken from the interview with me about the project. After explaining that I came up with the idea and the title, 40 Days of Giving, I said about my choice of timing:

"You begin thinking '40 days,' and immediately Lent pops in your head. So I decided to start on Ash Wednesday."

The choice of Lent is clearly, from this statement, not a strongly-held religious statement about my own desire to sacrifice for religious reasons, but a matter of symbolic convenience. It is not a "Lenten sacrifice" in a religious sense, nor do I particularly think of myself as a "religious philanthropist." In fact, I specifically describe myself, in the interview, as a skeptic.

The Anonymous One certainly cannot be faulted for believing that I was trying to position myself as a religious giver, though, because the article emphasizes that aspect of the story far more than I was comfortable with. The photo caption says that it's showing us "explain the Lent-based reason for handing out grocery gift cards." The first line of the article reads, "Andrew Zimmerman Jones is taking his Lenten sacrifice to his wallet."

Honestly, when I read that I fumed for about 5 seconds. I wasn't "taking my Lenten sacrifice" anywhere ... if I hadn't come up with the idea for this project, I wouldn't have been sacrificing anything for Lent. It really is a bit of a misrepresentation of how I want the project to be perceived, and there it was in the very first line of the article! (From a writing standpoint, though, it is a good hook for the story, so I don't particularly blame the writer for framing it that way.)

2. Giving to Bad People

"The people who accepted your offer did NOTHING that you knew of to be rewarded for, in fact, they may well have been (for all you knew) thieves, crack addicts & prostitutes who were more worthy of PENALTY (the OPPOSITE of REWARD!)…

…or are YOU declaring yourself a DEITY who is capable & worthy of passing judgment upon those who you bestowed your Holy Gift Cards?" - The Anonymous One

Giving to worthy people is an issue that's come up (in more civil forms) a number of times between Amber and me. Part of my initial conception of this project was that it would be giving without really worrying about where it's going. In other words, if I chose to give in a certain way, I'd give to whoever showed up, without any form of judgement on my part. If this means I'm buying gas for someone in a Hummer, well, them's the breaks.

(The one time I faltered on this goal was at the first grocery store give, where I was about to walk up to a woman with three children to offer to buy her groceries. I glanced in the cart and noticed that it was full of pretty much nothing but junk food and soda. I didn't offer to buy her groceries. We all have our limits, I suppose.)

I actually made a poor taste joke about this to a guy at church this weekend (which, I suppose, I'll pass on in poor taste here). Let's say that I go out and do something nice for people, and one of the people I help is a serial killer. Should I not do the project at all because there's a possibility I might do something nice for a serial killer? What if I do something nice for him when he's on the way to kill someone and my act of charity makes him decide not to kill someone that day? "You know, rather than killing someone, I'm going to sit here and enjoy this nice ice cream cone that guy bought me," or something like that.

Yes, it's an extreme case. But what's the alternative? Don't help anyone? Because any help you ever provide to anyone could be used in ways that you don't particularly like. It could, ultimately, benefit someone who is "bad."

And that brings us to a second problem that I have with this criticism - I don't believe in "bad people." I used to believe that peoples' nature was somehow innate, and that there were roads that you went down that set you for life. I don't really believe that anymore. The longer I live, the more evidence I see that people can - sometimes with great effort or only under extreme circumstances - choose to change a lifetime of bad behavior, with the proper motivation.

Certainly, there are people (such as our hypothetical serial killer) who do absolutely horrible things, and these people need to be arrested or stopped ... but I don't believe that there's anything inherent in their nature that's bad. They do bad things, and they may even be driven by strong impulses to continue to do bad things, but are not necessarily themselves bad, and in different circumstances I believe that same person could probably be convinced to make good choices.

Consider the example of Jabbar Gibson, a man with multiple felony arrests. He is currently awaiting trial on a number of charges, including a 2006 arrest for possession of cocaine, heroin, and a revolver. This is one of the quintessential examples of a "bad person" that I might accidentally help during this project, to be sure.

Yet why does anyone care about Jabbar Gibson, in comparison to the many other drug-related felons in the country? It's because on September 1, 2005, twenty-year-old Jabbar Gibson (already a felon) commandeered a bus in his hometown of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina headed toward the city, loaded up 70 passengers from his impoverished neighborhood, and drove 7 hours to Houston. They arrived well before any government-sanctioned evacuation efforts reached Houston. They had to stop the bus for gas three times, and did so by passing a hat around to get gas money.

Jabbar Gibson made (and continues to make, by the look of things) a lot of bad choices about how to live his life. From all accounts it's probably better for a lot of people that he's in jail right now. However, when Katrina hit, he made the right choice, a choice which helped others. Does this make him a "good person?" Not necessarily, but it certainly makes it harder to make the case that he's a "bad person."

So I don't agree that there are bad people out there. And if I help someone who is making a lot of bad choices ... well, I figure those are the people who need the most help.

3. Socialism!

"Your “gifting” could easily be perceived as a thinly-veiled “experimental” microcosm of a welfare state & of your enthusiasm to participate in such a socialist debacle" - The Anonymous One

I won't go into much more depth than this, but did want to make it clear. Socialism implies that the government controls the majority of wealth and the systems by which the wealth is distributed among the citizens. The acts of giving are random, non-systemic, and non-governmental - therefore, the project is not an experiment in socialism. I'm not a socialist, nor do I support socialist causes. I am, in fact, not a member of any political party or broad-based political ideology. I support individual ideas and policies on their own merits.

Days 24 - 27: Catching Up

2010-03-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a hectic weekend. Okay, so here we go on the update:

Day 24 - Friday, March 12:
I presented my speech "String Theory for Everyone" to the monthly gathering of Central Indiana Mensa (CIM). It was well received, and I sold several copies of String Theory for Dummies (as well as one copy of Heroes and Philosophy). I kept enough from the sales to restock the sold books, but donated the profits toward the CIM scholarship fund.

Day 25 - Saturday, March 13:
Amber and I spent Saturday morning at a public meeting on proposals to improve mass transit in our area of Indiana, where we encountered our state senator and various other local officials. An interesting (if slightly long-winded) time was had by all, but it was interesting to be involved in discussions relating to the public sector ... and a bit startling how many of these people now recognized Amber and myself from the newspaper article that morning!

In the afternoon, I went to Muncie with Elijah to see the interactive science show, Doktor Kaboom! I had an interview set up with the Doktor before his show, for the About.com Physics site. That morning's Anderson Herald Bulletin had a picture of him on the cover, because apparently he had performed at Anderson Community Schools the day before. I took the front page of the newspaper to him, as well as a copy of String Theory for Dummies.

Now this is a bit of a key point, because I personally suspect that a month ago, I wouldn't really have thought to have brought him a copy of the newspaper. If someone had suggested it, I probably would have thought, "You know, that's probably something he'd like to have." Instead, as soon as I saw his picture on the cover, I thought, "I should take him a copy of this." Part of the goal of this project - making the act of giving instinctual - does seem to be taking place, at least on some level. (The gift of String Theory for Dummies is always mildly self-serving, of course, since I do hope that people will like it and review it.)

Also, my sister's birthday is coming up on Monday, but she was in town visiting on Saturday, so we announced her gift to her. Instead of the normal token (and cheap) gift that we normally get, because we're unable to think of anything else, we decided to get her YMCA swim lessons with her one-year-old daughter. It should be a very nice bonding experience. (I thought of this while watching the group ahead of Elijah at his YMCA lesson finishing up. Again, that instinctual giving thing is kicking in!)

Day 26 - Sunday, March 14:
I'm a major geek. I mean a really big geek. And once a month, I get together with my geek friends to ... you guessed it ... roleplay. That's right, some full-on old-school roleplaying. The game varies - at the moment it's a Mage: The Ascension campaign, but we've been playing regularly for about four years now, I think. (Twice a month for a while there, until several of us got lives.)

So, as part of the 40 Days of Giving, it occurred to me that it would be nice to treat my geek buddies to lunch. I bought a couple of pizzas and some appetizers at Art's Pizza in Anderson, then drove it down to Indianapolis for the game. There was much appreciation, since they don't have Art's in Indianapolis, and so we're frequently deprived of it.

For the record - Amber thought this was a lame give, but I'm sticking by it.

Day 27 - Monday, March 15:
This morning ... dreadfully early this morning, especially given daylight-saving time ... the family loaded up and drove down to Panera Bread, where we had placed an order for an assortment of bagels. We got our order for take-out and drove it back across town to Eastside Elementary School, where we had already gotten permission from the principal to provide the breakfast to the teachers. We set them out in a break room off of the cafeteria, then left ... like nocturnal bagel-wielding elves.

This one, honestly, made me feel pretty good. Both my parents are teachers, and I spent 5 years teaching, so I know there's nothing that provides more satisfaction in that tough job than when you realize that someone actually appreciates you. Hopefully this helps start their week off right!

First 40 Days Media Coverage

2010-03-13T06:45:00.000-08:00

Authors thrive on free publicity, which helps get the word out about a book. I am very fortunate to find that I've gotten publicity well before the book was ever released, which is a nice little feather in my cap, and a testament to the power of this project. Check out the story at Anderson's local newspaper, The Herald Bulletin. The picture is, I think, a bit unflattering, but the one in the newspaper version of the story, which was taken as we were giving out gift cards, is much better.

Let me know what you think of the interview!

Working through my emotions

2010-03-12T18:15:00.000-08:00

The Personal Journey

If you have been keeping up with the blog it is obvious that Andrew has been the one most active in all of the blogging. And up until about three weeks ago (like I mentioned in a previous blog), I had been resisting the idea of actively participating in the writing.

Now to be completely honest with you, writing wasn't the only thing that I had reservations about. When Andrew first approached me about giving away our income for 40 days and keeping a blog about it, I had very little trouble getting on board. I had a few questions about why he wanted to do it and how we were going to balance our own monetary responsibilities and the giving, but overall it sounded good to me. This is exactly the kind of thing that I love to hear about other people doing, so why not us. I have always been a giver.

But, as soon as I said yes, the doubt and reservations began to pour through my mind and I secretly began losing my enthusiasm. Yes it was a great idea, and I love giving … but this … this was extreme and I had never been a radical giver. I’d never been a radical anything!

I thought that it would be interesting to read about this journey. And when someone would ask about what we were doing with the project I felt good in saying we were doing an experiment in giving for the next 40 days. It sounded great. Generous. Kind. Good. All things that I strive to be. But I secretly felt from generous. I felt disgustingly stingy and downright annoyed that I was giving my money away. It's my money. What if I need it? We just put in new windows!

Oh, how I thought that I was above all this kind of thinking.

This was a huge wake up call for me. Giving away 10% wasn't a stretch anymore, but giving it all away had me fearful of being broke. Literally. I haven’t missed the 10% of my income that we regularly gave away because it had become a habit to me. We would write a check to a good cause and forget about it until the next payday came around and then do it all over again.

What is so radically different about this project is that we aren't just giving out of our plenty but that we are giving everything. We are paying our bills out of our savings and taking away from our safety net in a time in which we have a growing family and bills to pay. Honestly, it scared me.

It scared me for a myriad of reasons. What if Andrew loses his job? What if something breaks down? What if he gets the urge to sell it all and wants us to eat locusts!

I can remember from Sunday school hearing about Jesus telling the rich man to sell everything and to follow after him, but I never thought about that in the context of my own life. I’d always been taught that Jesus’ teachings were to be taken in a very personal, life-changing way, but I never thought about what he said to that rich man in the context of my own life. What does it mean for me to give away everything and to live in the moment … even just for 40 days?

There have been so many questions that have been running through my mind since we started this journey. The questions about self. Like who am I really? What truly matters to me? Then there are the selfish questions, the truly ridiculous ones like, "Well if he does want to sell it all and eat locusts, who will take care of us?” Yes, a more spiritual person might say that God will care for you, that He will provide for all of your needs, but honestly I imagine that is tough leap of faith to make.

And then I had to take a deep breath and relax. It will all be ok. And I have some things to work out. But I will be fine.

Since my semi-crisis, Andrew and I have done more talking and I am still seeking answers to my own questions. But I am on board, completely and fully. I have no idea where the next few weeks will take us or what the next months or years will have in store for us. But I know that now, the moment that I am in right now, is all that I have. And in this moment I will do all that I can, for my family and for others.

Day 23: Feeding a True Giver - Joy's Story

2010-03-12T04:44:00.000-08:00

Ever since hearing about it last fall, Amber and I have been extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of buying into a local community supported agriculture (CSA) program, which is being run through our local Center for Mental Health. In a CSA, you buy shares in the farm and pick up your portion weekly throughout the summer. In the case of this particular CSA, you have the option for signing up for a brief spring session (April and May, which includes mostly winter greens) or a full summer session (June through October). The prices come out extremely reasonable, given the amount (and diversity) of organic food which you get. We opted for a single share, though I think that, if it goes well, we may go for a double share next year. Our goal is to transition our eating more to vegetables anyway, so it seems like a reasonable way to get our supply.

Our local CSA is the Aspire Indiana Farm. You can find a CSA, farmer's market, or other locally-grown option near you through the Local Harvest website.

What does this have to do with giving? Well, early on in the project we decided that we'd like to buy shares for someone into this program, preferably someone with a large family. Almost as soon as we decided that, an opportunity presented itself.

Joy's Story
One of Amber's classmates - let's call her Joy - recently became the guardian of four children. In addition, she has four children of her own. So, according to the math, she is living in a household with 8 kids, and they range from ages 4 to 17. Plus a 41-year-old husband. Joy is 30 and a cancer survivor.

The story of how Joy came to be guardian of these children is both tragic and inspiring. The children's father passed away last June, leaving them in the care of their mother. She had some issues, including drug-related ones, and ended up being arrested. The four children were placed in state custody. They were fortunately able to be placed the same foster home.

Unfortunately, the foster home they were placed in was headed by a woman of incredibly poor judgement. She was dating a convicted sexual predator, knew it, and allowed him to spend several nights over at the house. Three nights a week, in fact, so that he would spend just enough nights at his own place that he wouldn't have to tell his case worker that he was living in the same house as a bunch of kids.

The kids, of course, were not pleased about this, but they felt like they couldn't report the foster parent, because then they'd be moved to a new foster home, and there was absolutely no guarantee that they'd be able to stay together.

Enter Joy who (somehow - that part of the story I haven't gotten yet) learned about the situation and decided that it was unacceptable. She was an at-risk youth, raised by an alcoholic mother, and just couldn't leave the kids in that sort of a situation. "I just felt like I could show them a different path," she said.

Despite the challenges, Joy finds the experience rewarding and is glad she took on the challenge. When asked what the biggest reward is, she replied that it was the ability to help teach them things that, in their former life, they'd never been exposed to. "Every time they learn something new, because they don't see the world like we do."

Joy wanted the opportunity to show these kids a different path, and now they're in a household where the mother is going to college instead of jail. I don't know if it'll be enough, but I do know that it's a noble effort. Way to go, Joy!

(Note: The above is based on a brief phone discussion/interview with Joy. I am hoping to get a more lengthy opportunity to talk to her in the future, so the account of this story in the book should be much more detailed.)

A Gift of Fresh Food
One of the biggest challenges for Joy has been supplying the family with fresh fruits and vegetables. When the family consisted of 6 people, she made a priority to budget for some fresh foods, but jumping up to 10 means that they're pretty much forced to go with what's on sale. Fresh fruits and vegetables, sadly, are usually much more expensive than boxes of macaroni and cheese.

When Amber happened to overhear Joy discussing this, it was a no-brainer. We got in touch with Joy and offered to pay for her family's double-share in the Aspire Indiana Farm over the summer session. It's a small repayment for such an act of generosity, but I'm sure that the universe will reward her even more in the future.

The Gift of Touch

2010-03-10T19:07:00.001-08:00

Early on in the experiment I had my mom over for the afternoon. We spent the day as usual, talking about nonsense, watching Elijah play, and cooing over the baby. There was nothing particularly different about the day until the end of it.

That evening I was making baked potato soup and Mom was helping me with this and that. One of the great things about my relationship with my mom is that we are able to share time around the house. It doesn't matter whether it is mine or hers, we can just be "at home" wherever we are when we are together. I have to say it is particularly nice when she comes to my house though, as she quite often helps me with the kids which gives me some free time to catch up on much-overdue chores. In return for her help, I usually make a meal that she can share with our family that evening. It is an unspoken trade, one that I think we both benefit from. (For me both Quality Time and Acts of Service, as I'll get to later.)

Anyway, to get to the point of the story, that night while I was cooking dinner the urge hit me to give mom a hug and tell her that I love her. It went something like this: "You know that I love you right? *hug* I know that I don't always show you in the ways that you like, but I do." I went on to admit that at times I can be somewhat of a pain in the ass and can be abrasive, but truly stressed to mom how much I love her.

You see, the thing is that I tell my mom that I love her all the time. Everyday I call her, sometimes twice a day, and always end each call with a meaningful, "I love you." But I don't touch her. Not often, at least. I don't really touch anyone besides my husband and sons.

Touching people doesn't do much for me. There isn't a warm fuzzy feeling that comes over me when I hug people. It's more of a nauseated kind of feeling. I honestly don't know why I don't like it. I just don't. When I go in for the hug I feel awkward, when I am hugging I feel anxious and and a bit creeped out by it, and when it is over I feel much better (and not in an "ah that was wonderful" kind of way but a "thank god that's over with" kind of way).

But for some unknown reason, on that particular day, I chose to hug Mom.

In the midst of cooking, I had left the kitchen to talk to Andrew. When I came back, my mom wasn't there. She was in the restroom and had been in there a while.

"Mom?" I ask. "What are you doing?"

She took a few minutes and then came out all red-eyed. I'm thinking, "Oh shit! What did I do now?" When I ask her what is wrong I get some dismissive remark, but I won't let her alone until I get the truth. She was crying in the bathroom for Pete's sake. Then she said, "Thats the first time in years that I have felt like you love me."

I was blown away. "What do you mean the first time in years? I tell you all the time!"

And she replied, "But you never show me. You never hug me."

I hugged her again, but felt awkward this time, because touch kind of bugs me but I do love her and wanted her to know it. "Of course I love you. Geeze mom!"

And back to cooking we went.

Then the next day it hit me, "AH HA! That's it, she needs touch to feel loved."

I know that this was obvious from the night before, but the night before all I could see was that she didn't think I loved her and I tell her all the time. But by the next day I had time to process things and I got to thinking about the book The Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman. In it he talks about the idea that everyone has a primary love language (and usually a secondary as well) and that they are often different from our parents, children, and spouses.

That was it! In this viewpoint, she has a different love language than I do. Dr. Chapman talks about the importance of recognizing these variants and trying to show the people in our lives the love that they recognize best.

The five love languages are as follows:

Words of affirmation - Unsolicited compliments can build these folks up, whereas insults can shatter them emotionally.
Quality Time - Full undivided attention with the TV off and chores aside is what some people need.
Receiving Gifts - Not to be mistaken for materialism, these people flourish when they are shown love through well thought out gifts. It doesn't matter if it is a handmade card or a much longed for gift, it is all about the thoughtfulness behind the act of giving.
Acts of Service - Helping with chores and taking something off of their "plate" can be received as an act of love to this person. Laziness and broken commitments can be heartbreaking for them.
Physical Touch - Holding hands, caressing, and pats on the back are all ways that this person gives and receives love and affection.

Note: This ties in with some other sources Andrew's been reading, such as The Generosity Factor, which indicates that two ways to give are of our Time (which relates to Quality Time and Acts of Service) and Touch (Physical Touch, obviously).

No wonder this act of affection was so important to my mom, her primary love language is Physical Touch and I haven't shown it unless I have been forced to. Because I am someone who needs Quality Time and Acts of Service, it hasn't occurred to me to touch her more often.

And for mom helping me out with chores or spending time together hanging out at my house are both things that she doesn't as willingly dish out either. We have both been missing the mark when it comes to meeting each other's emotional needs. And, in many ways, I think that we have both left each other feeling unloved.

I called her that next day to tell her what I realized and apologized again, trying to stress to her that I do love her and that I will try and show her more physical affection. I hope that she too will realize that when I ask her to hang out, or if I offer to do the dishes or bring up her trash cans, that those are my ways of telling her how much I care as well.

Needless to say, that evening taught me that while giving money to those in need is critical to improving the state of the world around us and the lives of those in it, it is also critically important that we meet the emotional needs of those we come in contact with as well. And for my mom the best gift that I could have given her was neither a meal, nor my time, nor a $100 bill, but a simple hug.

Day 22: Grocery Giving, Take Two

2010-03-10T14:28:00.000-08:00

Let's imagine that you were walking into a grocery store and a man, along with his beautiful wife and baby son, walk up to you. He (or his wife) offers you a $20 gift card to this very grocery store (where, presumably, you are about to spend money). No strings attached. Do you accept?

Well, in our informal study this morning, it turns out that about one-third of the people would turn it down.

Era of Mistrust

Amber and I offered $20 gift cards outside of a local Pay-Less grocery store (not to be confused with the shoe store chain), located in one of the more economically-challenged neighborhoods in town, to people as they walked into the store. We were able to ask 18 people, and 7 of them turned us down. (One of the men who turned us down, however, came back as leaving the store and asked if he could have one.)

So, out of a total of 18, only 12 agreed to accept a free $20 gift card.

One of the most memorable exchanges came from a woman I'm thinking of as the Zen master of acceptance. I said, as she approached, "Would you like a $20 gift card?" Without pausing or even slowing her stride, she took the card and said, "Thanks." There was no hesitation whatsoever. She just accepted the experience for what it was and kept moving.

Others were a bit less fluid or immediate in their acceptance. Some wanted to know more about what we were doing, with some measure of skepticism, but not enough to reject the notion out of hand. When asked for more information, we just explained that we were finding different ways to give for a period of 40 days, and this was one of our ideas.

One woman, upon being offered the gift card, said, "Hold on, let me get my friend!" She went out to the car, where her friend had been waiting while she went into the store. The friend, who originally seemed somewhat disgruntled about being asked to leave the comfort of the vehicle, changed her tune when we explained what we were doing. "People just don't do things like this anymore. No one does anything like this," she said.

So 6 people, when offered a free gift card, turned it down. The immediate question one may ask is, "What the f*** is wrong with these people?"

The overwhelming sense that I got was that people just genuinely didn't believe us, or didn't believe that there were no strings attached.

Full disclosure: In fairness, today there was actually a slight ulterior motive. We'd been interviewed a while back by a freelance writer for our local newspaper, the Anderson Herald Bulletin, and I got a call yesterday from a reporter that they'd like photos to go with the story. We'd long been planning to do this sort of a giveaway, and it seemed like one of the most photogenic options. So there was a newspaper photographer nearby taking pictures, discretely, of the people who accepted the gift cards.

Still, I honestly don't think that the people who turned us down actually noticed the guy with the camera off to the side. Even if they did, I'm still not sure what that would have to do with their willingness to accept the money. They could ask, "What's up with the camera?" or say, "I don't want my picture taken," and still gotten the money. They genuinely showed absolutely no interest in being given money.

Is it possible that these people were so overwhelmed by their own belief that good things just don't happen in their lives that, even when extra money is literally held out to them, they are incapable of accepting their good fortune?

Studies would indicate that this might actually be the case. In The Luck Factor, psychologist Richard Wiseman recounts a study where two participants are asked to walk down a street into a cafe. One of the participants was a person who considered himself lucky, while the other considered herself unlucky.

Prior to each participant's journey to the cafe, the researchers placed a 5 pound note (this was, apparently, in England) right outside the cafe's door.

What was the result?

The lucky person noticed the 5 pound note immediately and picked it up, striking up a conversation with one of the confederates in the cafe and buying him a coffee. The unlucky person, on the other hand, walked right past the 5 pound note without even noticing it, and sat alone in the cafe, speaking to no one. Though they had exactly the same potential for experiences, the lucky person was able to take advantage of them while the unlucky person was not.

Feeling unlucky tangibly makes you less likely to experience good fortune, even when it's right in front of you. Your senses, emotions, and thoughts just will not let you even draw the good fortune into your life. Among the many intriguing correlations that Wiseman sites are the following, which he uses to define his "luck profile":

Lucky people tend to be more extroverted; unlucky people tend to be more introverted
Lucky people tend to be more relaxed; unlucky people tend to be more anxious, worried, and neurotic.
Lucky people are open to new experiences; unlucky people don't like trying new things

This is, I think, what these people experienced as they walked past us, without even asking questions about why a strange person was offering them gift cards. They were not open to the new experience, and many of them looked a bit anxious as they passed us by.

And I'm betting that, if you asked them at the end of the day whether anything unusual happened today, they would say no. For them, things like that never happen.

They didn't just turn down the card ... they turned down the very possibility that the gift card actually existed.

"The Man" Tries to Bring Us Down
Actually, we bought 15 of the gift cards, which means we left with 3 gift cards remaining. Our intention was to give away all 15 cards, but we were thwarted ... by some administrator (assistant manager or something - I couldn't see the actual title on her badge) who didn't like us standing out front, giving away gift cards (which we had purchased there) to patrons, encouraging them to spend money and have positive feelings about their store. In essence, we were offering free advertising for the Pay-Less (if I were given free gift cards at a store, I'd be more likely to return), and still, they wouldn't let us do it.

The reason offered was that there was "no solicitation" on the premises. We explained that we weren't soliciting anything, just giving away gift cards to their own store. The woman replied that she appreciated us buying the gift cards, but we "couldn't" give them away, citing the photographer as one of the reasons. He offered his card, and explained that the article would run on Saturday, but she was still adamant - we could not give the gift cards away in front of their store, even though we weren't trying to get anything from the people.

Full disclosure: I offered my business card to a couple of people who expressed some measure of interest in what we were doing, as a means of expediting the exchange. "If you want to find out more, you can go to the website." But this was the extent of any "solicitation" going on. If I'd been really thinking, I should have offered my card to the manager when she asked us to leave ... this was one Scrooge that could have used some uplifting.

In fairness to the woman, she may have been ordered to chase us off by her own boss - I don't know how high up in the hierarchy she was - but still, it means someone had a problem with us giving away gift cards, in the midst of an economic recession, outside of a grocery store.

We had talked to a couple of other employees, who seemed to think the idea was very cool, so I wonder if they didn't pass it along, meaning no harm, only to have the telephone game reach someone who decided that such behavior could not be allowed to continue. Possibly the person who made the decision had no real idea what we were doing, and wasn't particularly interested in finding out.

I have little sympathy for this sort of mindless bureaucratic mindset. Regardless of what the policy is in place, there's a person who has to make the decision about whether or not to intervene in this sort of situation. Perhaps, had we pointed out that we only had three gift cards left, the person could have been talked into letting us stay ... but I wasn't inclined to help people spend money at their store.

There are two other Pay-Less stores in town, and we'll hand out the other three gift cards at one of them.

And the Pay-Less which told us to leave will never get our business again.

This reminds me a of a story from Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture. He recounts a story where, as a child, he went to Walt Disney World and accidentally broke a $10 Disney salt-and-pepper shaker set that he and his sister bought for their parents. While in tears, an adult suggested to them that they take it back to the store. They did so, told the truth about what happened (he dropped it), and got a new salt-and-pepper shaker set to replace it, free of charge.

The Pausch parents were so impressed by the story that, as they performed volunteer work with English-as-a-second-language students, they regularly brought bus loads of these students from Maryland to Disney World, because they considered it such an incredibly positive experience. Randy Pausch estimated that his family spent, over the years, more than $100,000 on tickets, food, souvenirs, and other expenses at Disney World in the time since someone decided to give away a $10 salt-and-pepper shaker to a couple of kids.

As Pausch hints, it's highly unlikely that modern policies at Disney World would allow any employee to give away a souvenir for free to replace one broken by a kid's carelessness.

Little acts of generosity can have a big impact, and sometimes the policies in place remove the ability to perform these little acts. If you're in a position of leadership, you could be missing out on a lot of good opportunities if you enforce the letter of a policy, even in cases where the spirit of the policy doesn't apply.

Of course, if you're in a position of leadership, you are also in a position to cultivate a culture in which giving opportunities are embraced at all levels, rather than avoided, and see what transpires. Who knows, you may just inspire someone to build a windmill in Africa.

Day 21: Midpoint Update

2010-03-09T23:28:00.000-08:00

We're halfway through the experiment so far, and it's certainly been interesting. It seems like a good time to reflect a bit on some of the highlights of my life during the period of the experiment:

1. So far, we have designated one paycheck from my day job and one About.com check for giving purposes.

2. Prior to the 40 days, while we were tithing and giving our auto-deductions, we unexpectantly sold our pick-up truck. In addition to the money from the sale itself, which we're being paid in installments (the first $100 of which went - not quite cheerfully - for giving purposes), we also received a check a couple of days ago for about $60, as a refund from our insurance company for cancelling our policy.

3. We received word that I was getting a bonus at work which, coming as it did during the 40 days, was designated for giving purposes. (This was fairly cheerful on my part, and a bit grudging on my wife's part, which is interesting, since anyone - especially my mother - will tell you that she's a far nicer person than I am.) My previous bonus, in 2008, was about one-sixth of my paycheck. I've received a promotion since then, so this bonus was substantially higher. (Since co-workers read this blog, I won't go into more detail than that - you'll have to buy the book to find out more!)

4. We have raised a paltry $360 for Heifer International, which is quite short of our $10,000 goal! Maybe I should throw some of my own money into the fund, like how performers fill up a tip jar? Please donate now, and help us meet our goal! (In addition to making you feel good, it will help me convince publishers that I can viably market this book.)

5. I've been offered the opportunity to present a writing workshop to local gifted/talented students, which will pay a modest sum.

6. I've received my annual raise at work which, I am told, is relatively high compared to the average. To give some perspective without giving away too much detail about my salary, the increase in my annual pay (gross, not net) is about equivalent to my net take-home pay from an ordinary paycheck. (Was that confusing enough for you? Good.)

7. I have received various intellectual/spiritual/emotional insights into my own character, the nature of my relationships, and my views on society, only some of which have (thus far) made it into the blog. My wife and I have grown closer, partly through two fights ... which have helped me learn that though we fight rarely, we are actually very productive fighters, and come out of them closer than we were going in.

8. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, my mother has been going through her own transformation which, though not directly related to the experiment, I cannot help but feel is a blessing that's connected to it... though honestly I wouldn't even have thought to have asked for it. She is eating healthy and has shed much of her weight, and for the first time in over a decade weighs less than 300 pounds. This comes out to around 40 pounds lost in just about a month of deciding to live a healthier lifestyle. She is able to walk more easily, pick up her grandchildren with relative ease, and her demeanor has become energetic, vibrant, positive, and hopeful. She's gone to a hair salon, getting her hair colored and styled, and is talking about possibly volunteering in the community. It's like reclaiming a life that's long been dormant!

So that's the state of things. In the next couple of weeks, I do hope to get back to some more thought-provoking posts. Lately, I feel like they've just been short posts identifying the giving we've done without a lot of reflection ... which brings us to today's give!

Today we gave to the Alberta Children's Hospital Foundation, to support young Connor's effort to shave his head for cancer. Connor is the son of my friend James Fell, author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy's Guide to Getting in Shape. James should be very proud that his son's willing to do something like this for someone else ... but then, they're Canadian, and from what I can tell, that's just the sort of folks they make up there.

Day 19: Patron of the Arts

2010-03-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

Today, while waiting for an oil change at Sears, I wandered through the Mounds Mall in Anderson, only to discover that local teenage artists were having an exhibition of their work. There were clay sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs. It occurred to me that during the 40 Days of Giving, I could devote at least a bit of this toward becoming a patron of the arts ... by giving some of the money to young artists.

There were specifically two of the artists whose pieces stood out to me. I went to the organizers, letting know that I was interested in potentially purchasing the artwork. I provided my contact info, and then left and called Amber to let her know my idea. She made the very valid observation that handing checks over to high school students is probably not a good idea ... but maybe they need gift cards to an art supply store, or perhaps could use some help in the admission fee for an art school or summer art program.

Hopefully, they'll contact us and we'll be able to find out how we can help.

Day 18: A Nice Tip

2010-03-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

This morning, Elijah and I went out to breakfast at our local Big Boy prior to his swim lessons. We had a good time. I wrote a check for the tip out of the giving fund, tipping over 300% of the cost of the meal.

If you're keeping track, you'll notice that there was no actual giving on Day 17. I posted about the Day 16 giving early in the morning, and I did send out the letters containing the Day 16 giving. In addition, I sent an e-mail out to a bunch of co-workers soliciting donations to our Heifer team. Between work and family obligations, I just didn't fit any new giving experience into the day.

Also, as I was preparing the documentations for my corporate match on my college donations and the Indiana Repertory Theatre, I realized that there was a teensy problem. The corporate matching maxes out at $3,000 total for all donations, which means the more I match art donations the less there will be to match the human services donations that are being auto-deducted from my paychecks. So no more matching of any of these donations in the future - if I only get $3,000 in corporate matching, I need to be sure that it gets leveraged for the organizations that I feel are doing really crucial work. I love Sesame Street as much as the next dad, but PBS just isn't as important as creating sustainable options for starving families in the third world.

One challenge of this project is that, while giving is very joyful, doing it in this sort of fashion creates an obligation which can become a bit tedious. After a day of work, and then with various other writing obligations to meet in the evening, the last thing I want to do is figure out where some money is going to go to, no matter how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel. Sometimes, I just want to sleep!

Speaking of which ... zzzz....

Day 16: Catching Up on Giving

2010-03-05T05:32:00.000-08:00

I took the day off work yesterday to help watch the kids, because our normal daycare (my mother) is travelling for the week and we weren't able to come up with any viable alternatives. Among a day of preparing pasta from scratch and practicing magic tricks, I had a bit of time to begin cleaning up my basement office which had, frankly, gotten a bit out of hand.

While cleaning, I found a number of requests for giving that had come in the mail and been shoved into a pile on the desk. So I ended up giving a bit to both my alma maters - Wabash College and Purdue University. These donations are also matched by my company, I think. (My company is very good about offering matching gifts.)

Also, I found a mail from Discover Indy, which publishes coupon books to benefit various non-profits. A couple of years ago, when it was called ZooBook, I ordered one of these. This year, they sent it to me without asking. The book has long since been lost, but I'm still getting bills trying to get me to pay for it. I kept intending to send one of these back saying, "I didn't order this! I'm not paying. Take me off your list."

Instead, though, I figure I might as well just pay it. (I'm still going to write on the bill that I don't want them in the future, though.) The money does go to support charities, after all.

Day 14 & 15: A Call to Give - Twice!

2010-03-03T20:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (Day 14) was slow on the giving front, though Amber did take cookies to her class at Ivy Tech Community College. I did, however, spend the day at work listening to the audiobook The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, which provides an intriguing counterpoint to my motivation for exploring giving. (More on this in a coming post.)

Come into today (Day 15), Amber and I had no idea really what we were going to give. Come evening, however, two giving opportunities came our way, both taking the form of phone calls. The first came from the Police Protective Fund, which I have given to in the past. In fact, this sort of tele-charity, which contacted me about donating, used to be the only kind of charity I ever really gave to. Since making charitable giving a priority, however, I haven't been particularly enthusiastic about giving money to them.

In fact, I was about ready to give my normal, "No, thanks, we're already giving enough," when I remembered the project. The whole point is that there is no "giving enough" for these 40 days, after all. So I agreed to give the Police Protective Fund $50.

Then, just an hour or so later, the phone rings again. This time, it is the Indiana Repertory Theatre. This is a really great organization in the Indianapolis arts community and, again, one that Amber and I have chosen to support in the past. They, too, were calling to ask us to continue providing additional support for their various educational programs. I agreed to donate $200, and then discovered that donations are being matched by the Lilly Endowment. My company also matches donations to arts and culture organizations, so in total my donation is being tripled - a $600 gain for the Theatre, at only $200 expense to our family!

Given the level of donation, it turns out that Amber and I will receive invitations to a donor event sometime next month, and we'll be able to invite some guests. This is great, because it provides us with the opportunity to share the experience with friends, and possibly encourage them to begin giving to a worthy cultural organization in our community.

We Are Not Killer Apes!

2010-03-02T03:34:00.000-08:00

A while back, I read (and blogged about) a quote from Robert Ardry about how humans are killer apes. The quote eloquently marvels at our amazing capacity for compassion, given that we come out of such a powerful competitive instinct in the wild.

Well, as I am learning from reading The Compassionate Instinct, while we are killer apes, we are also so much more than that. Yes, there are violent tendencies that are within our fundamental nature, but there is also the intense capacity for compassion, gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness, which appears to be just as ubiquitous and fundamental to our nature as the unsavory elements of our character.

A series of essays culled from the pages of Greater Good magazine, The Compassionate Instinct does a great job of making even the most hardened cynic feel that there's hope for us to overcome our inherent tendencies toward greed and violence.

Primates Show Us the Way
For example, studies have shown that in a situation where more violent and less violent primates are combined together into one social group, instead of bullying the less violent primates, the more violent primates actually begin adopting the more peaceful attitudes!

Even more amazing (though more technical), this isn't just mimicry. The primates use different "reconciliation" behavior ... it's just that the violent primates use their species' own reconciliation behavior more frequently than they did prior to being socially mixed with the less violent species. They actually integrate the more peaceful lifestyle into their species' own behavior. Other studies have shown that these sort of effects are relatively long-lasting, even when the social situation that created them is removed.

Even when there is a genetic explanation for this drift toward non-violence (for example, the more violent members of a society die off), the more peaceful effects continue to last as new outsiders join the less violent group. The environmental factors appear to largely supersede the possible genetic tendencies toward violence.

In another study, it was shown that specific reactions on the part of female primates to violent male behavior can be changed very quickly. A species where the females respond to violence by reconciliation ("smooth talking") the men and one where the females respond by cowering had their females swapped. Within an hour, the females of each species learned that their life-long behavior pattern did not work in this new environment, and they adapted to the behavior suited to the other species.

This demonstrates the profound way that the environmental influences our behavior, both for better and worse. In fact, the majority of the book is devoted to essays on how to modify our own environments - at home, at work, and in government - to cultivate more virtuous reactions.

The Troubling Act of Killing Humans
Even among humans, who for a long time were thought to be the only animals that killed their own kind (it isn't true, we now know - other primate species also exercise what can only be deemed warfare), it's amazing to discover how little we like killing. In a World War II study, it was learned that only about 20% of soldiers on the front line of a combat situation actually used their weapons with the intent to kill any of the enemy. The others focused on rescuing wounded comrades or completing a mission objective, or just fired wide or high.

In fact, simulations of historical battles have shown that these percentages appear to be consistent with them as well. If 100% of the soldiers involved had actually been firing with the intent to kill the enemy, the simulations indicate that the body counts should have been much higher than they were. It seems that among even soldiers, there has always been an ingrained desire not to kill others. (I say "even soldiers" not to imply that they are less human or that their temperament lends itself more readily to killing, but just that they are the one class that we think of as most capable of killing others, even if only by the life-threatening situations they find themselves in as part of their occupation, where the killing of others would seem to be the most permissible.)

The problem, as outlined by Lt. Col. David Grossman, is that since World War II the military has learned how to desensitize soldiers from this instinct, so that by Vietnam our soldiers had a combat engagement rate of as high as 95%. He attributes this high rate of killing as the reason why so many soldiers suffer from negative psychological effects (such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in Vietnam and even later conflicts - because humans have a natural aversion to killing, and while we may condition it out of them long enough for them to perform their job on the battlefield, the aversion will show up for many in the form of negative psychological effects.

Grossman (who taught psychology at West Point and authored On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society) is hopeful, because while the mind is averse to killing it is also highly flexible and resilient. Many soldiers will not develop any psychological problems, and the ones who are psychologically wounded by killing on the battlefield have many options for help. With the proper treatment, he believes that these wounded soldiers can be healed of the cognitive dissonance that they feel at having been trained to kill in a way that other soldiers in civilized history have not been.

Creating Joy
It seems appropriate to end this discussion with a quote from Alfred Egendorf, author of Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam (emphasis mine):

Only together will we create a culture that supersedes the cycles of battle and retreat - not through our fear of war but through mastering a superior way to live.

The seed of this culture is the determination within individuals, and then small groups and communities, to devote our lives to the greatest vision of all time: not to wait for a savior one day to deliver us; not to wait for a government to pass truly just laws; not to wait for a revolution to right the wrongs of a cruel world; and not to mount a crusade to overpower some distant source of evil beyond ourselves. Each of us, singly and with all the others, is answerable for creating joy through the way our lives unfold, here and now. And once this purpose becomes primary, we can turn to the endless job of bringing well-being to others, justice and integrity to our government, and instituting constructive programs for change here and elsewhere. When inspired in this way, we don't have to wait for the final outcome before we're nourished. There is no finer way to live or die.

As this project unfolds, I am learning, if anything, that this purpose does need to be primary. Creating joy in our lives, and the lives of others, is the one thing that for which we are answerable - to ourselves, to others, to our society, and to any higher power that may exist out there. The rest is just smoke and mirrors.

Introducing Amber

2010-03-01T19:03:00.000-08:00

Hello all! This is Amber here, Andrew's wife. After several weeks of toiling over the idea of helping Andrew keep a blog and participating in the book writing process, I have finally given in and decided that it is indeed something that I want to do. Better late than never, I suppose.

First things first.

What do I think about giving away our income for 40 days?

To be completely honest I initially thought "Are you freakin' kidding me? We just bought new windows (not to mention the new baby and 4 year old who are quite expensive to keep around)!"

I kept thinking how on earth can we afford to do this? And then it hit me, we'll never be able to "afford" this, but we are young and we are able; and no matter what happens at the end of this project I'm hoping that we will be better people for it. That was enough for me to get on board. "Yes, honey, give away all of our money for the next forty days."

As the project neared, I became more and more apprehensive about what was about to happen. I could feel myself becoming very aware of my place in our family. I am a wife, a mother, and a student, I am not the bread winner, and a lot of days that leaves me feeling less than equal and not in control.

To be clear, my not working was a choice that both I and Andrew very consciously made, so that I could go back to school full time.

Prior to knowing Andrew, I had been through a nasty divorce which left me a single mom and broke. I worked two minimum wage jobs to keep my home and food on the table. During that time I learned to be both humble and strong, both qualities that I didn't have before then. For those reasons I cherish that period in my life.

However, when I met Andrew, I was still in the struggle and that was when I shared with Andrew that I wanted to go back to school and finish my degree. He fully supported me from the start and when we were married he insisted that I get the degree that I wanted so badly. The decision to go back to school was one that effected everyone in our house hold. Andrew had now taken on the joys and burdens of a family. We chose for me to go back to school full time, which kept our son in daycare and kept me from working my regular full time day job. And because we value our family time I didn't pick up an evening job. All of the financial burden is on Andrew. This has been a huge adjustment for me, because I don't like not being in control. And if I earned the money, I would "feel" in control. Man, did I think being broke was humbling, now I am learning to share responsibility and not rule the roost!

Needless to say, these past few years with Andrew have taken us both for a ride (and for me for quite a personal journey). Learning to share responsibility, which I thought was all my own, learning to trust someone else to help make good judgement for our children and our future, trusting that no matter what comes our way that we can do it together, thats why I can do this project with Andrew. I believe that this will help us grow to become better people and parents.

Days 12 & 13: A Thwarted Give

2010-03-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (Day 12), Amber and I went to a church located in her mother's neighborhood, where we are trying to establish a community garden. The hope was to meet some people at the church who may be interested in getting involved, and perhaps even helping them be the ones to establish the community garden. Since we went to this church instead of our regular one, we gave our tithe check to them, which is probably good - it was a much smaller church than our regular one, and probably needed the money more.

After that, Amber and I spent about an hour walking through the neighborhood, asking people if they'd be interested in participating with a community garden if we can get one established in that neighborhood. This makes a total of more than three hours this weekend spent soliciting support for this project, and the response has been mostly favorable.

Then Elijah and I went out to the family swim time at the YMCA, and generally had a good day. I also got a decent amount of reading done, so have some great topics for upcoming blog posts.

Today (Day 13), started off with a bang. I learned that I'm receiving a bonus from work ... which, of course, I will be giving away as part of the project. I don't yet know how much the bonus will be, but I'm sure it'll be enough for us to find some useful way of spending it.

I knew that this was a possibility, but wasn't counting on it. Even if my company did give bonuses this year, I wasn't sure when they would manifest. I have to admit, I was kind of hoping that the bonus would come out right after the project was over, in the beginning of April ... which would provide a great conclusion to the book (and provide me with the ability to pay off the new windows I bought on credit last year). Alas, this was not to be.

Fortunately, this provides me with a good opening to hit up my coworkers to donate to our Heifer International team fund. Remember, if I collect $10,000 by midnight March 28, I will donate my hair to Locks of Love! This is your opportunity to help families become nourished and self-sufficient, and also to provide a child with medical hair loss the opportunity for a nice hairpiece. Find out more here!

Amber and I also went to the grocery store, with the plan of buying a random stranger's groceries. (We also shopped for our own, of course.) However, this proved to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated. For one thing, I was suddenly overcome with intense nervousness about approaching someone and offering to buy their groceries. Being a big, hairy guy walking up to some single mom with kids and offering to pay their grocery bill just seemed kind of creepy, even with my wife there.

So Amber took my card and walked up to the woman behind her in line, as she was rung up, and offered to buy her groceries. The woman was understandably confused, glancing around as if expecting there to be video cameras. Amber said, "No, there's no gimmick. We just want to bless someone." The woman replied, "You really don't have to do that." Amber replied that we knew that, but would still like to. The woman said, again, "No," and we backed off this time.

I had been waiting for the time when someone would turn down a giving opportunity, but I honestly didn't expect it to happen so early - on the first day when we're actually giving money away to a random stranger on the street.

Rather than trying to find someone else, we left the grocery store - although I did end up buying $30 of bags worth of food which went into the grocery store's campaign to feed the poor. We've got a month full of grocery runs to try this particular sort of give, and the failure has left me with an idea for how to approach it (and future gives) in the future:

Our plan has typically been to keep it fairly anonymous, like just a random act of kindness without any real explanation. I think, in retrospect, that this is a bad plan. Instead, we'll lead into it with something like, "We're trying a project where we give to others for forty days, in new ways. Could we buy your groceries today?" This way, the person doesn't think that we're buying the groceries just because we feel like they can't buy it on their own, but instead they're helping us to complete a task that we want to complete.

If they express interest, I'll tell them about the blog and potential book, and even invite them to follow along or donate to Heifer if they're so inclined, but I won't push for that. I don't want anyone involved to feel like they're being pressured.

I guess we'll see if future recipients are more willing to accept their good fortune in the future.

Day 11: Birthday Dinner & Time

2010-02-27T19:36:00.000-08:00

Today was a pretty straightforward day of giving. First, Amber and I went through her mother's neighborhood looking for more people who would be willing to help out with the formation of a community garden. (Really, one of these days Amber will post explaining this in greater detail. I promise.) We had some nice responses, including one fine gentleman who's friends with the mayor and said he might be able to help us at least get a funding request through to him, though he obviously can't guarantee us actually getting any funding.

Then this evening, a friend had a birthday dinner at a fairly pricey sushi bar/buffet. She did not, however, want any gifts, although she did say that she'd accept cash gifts which she'd donate to charity. Everyone thought she was kidding, implying that she herself was the charity, but in fact she is collecting for our very oven Heifer International team goal.

Anyway, Amber and I attended the dinner. We picked up the tab for our friend and her daughter and mother, along with a generous tip.

Tomorrow I will not be blogging on here, because Elijah informed me today that I work every day. While this is true, it's also true that I play every day, so I don't see this as a problem. Still, I have decided that I'll not worry about blogging tomorrow, so that I can give my full attention to my family. That's a worthwhile bit of giving on Day 12, I think.

Day 10 (Belated): On Tithing

2010-02-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my "day job" paycheck came in, and we now have some money in our giving fund for this project ... but first, some housekeeping issues. We have an auto-deduction of 10% of my paycheck to various charities, which is matched by my company (a very nice perk), before I ever see it. Also, since January, we have been tithing another 10% of all our income to our local church. We did this religious tithing on a trial basis, from January through March, to see how we felt about it and include our experience as part of the 40 Days of Giving project.

Tithing
Our giving started back when Amber first mentioned the idea of tithing. If you're like me, you either don't know what it is, or only have a vague sense. I remember learning about it in high school history class, where it was presented as a sort of tax imposed by the Catholic Church during the middle ages. To be honest, while I knew it was based in the Bible, it didn't occur to me for many years that this was a doctrine still being practiced by Protestant churches today. Though I'd put some money into offering plates when they were passed over my life, it never occurred to me that this was equated to the tithing I'd learned about in school.

In 2008, Amber and I started giving 10% of our gross income to charities (predominantly non-religious ones) that we found worthwhile, and noticed that not only did it not hurt our finances, but it actually seemed as if our finances were running more smoothly than ever. (More on the details of this in my hypothesis post.)

While our local church has discussed giving quite a bit, they don't address the specific issue of tithing all that much. In fact, one thing that I really like about the church, is that they specifically say when speaking about giving that the people listening don't have to give to them, but they want them to give somewhere. Last December, the church implemented a series of sermons based on the book The Blessed Life by Robert Morris, which brought tithing, as opposed to just giving, front and center.

Essentially, Morris puts forth a fairly strict view of tithing. In his interpretation, the Bible calls for 10% of your income to be given to the local church. And, most importantly, this has to be the first amount given on any income, or else it doesn't count as a valid tithe.

His basis for this stance is actually fairly logical, if you assume the Bible as the literally true word of God, and I'll try to do it justice in the brief discussion below, then offer my criticisms (of his interpretation, not of the Bible itself). He also recounts many personal anecdotes on giving which support his interpretations, which I will not address here.

Why the First of the First?
One of Morris' big points is that the money you give needs to be the first check you write, before you put other things first. If you write your mortgage check before your tithe check, you're actually putting the mortgage company (or the house) before God. Here's the Biblical argument:

In Exodus 13 (seemingly moments after Israel is freed from Egypt), God goes at length to talk about how the firstfruits of all crops and firstborn of all animals, including people, belong to him. If you do not offer these firstfruits back to God, in the way he outlines, then you are stealing from God.

This passage details two ways you can deal with the first products of abundance: sacrifice it or redeem it.

Redeem it, in this sense, means that the firstborn is an unclean animal, and you should sacrificing a clean animal in its place. So, regardless of what happens, a sacrifice is needed for every firstborn, which belongs to God, or else you're stealing from God ... which means that you are living under a curse.

And while this is laid out in Exodus, Morris supports it with evidence from even earlier. For example, God was able to kill all the firstborn in Egypt because he had a "legal" claim on them, but the Israelites got out of it by sacrificing a lamb in their place (redeeming the firstborn). Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, but is allowed to avoid this at the last minute, though a redemptive sacrifice in Isaac's place was still called for.

(The astute reader and biblical scholar may realize an issue with the Abraham situation described above, in that Isaac is not actually Abraham's firstborn son. That was Ishmael. However, Isaac was the firstborn of Sarah. Exodus 13 describes firstborn as the first to "open the womb," so I guess Isaac still qualifies under that interpretation. In fact, I suppose that God could legally lay claim to both Isaac and Ishmael under this rule.)

The story of Cain and Abel, from Genesis 4, appears to be about this principle as well. Abel is specifically cited as giving the "firstborn of his flock" in an offering, and God accepts them. Cain, on the other hand, provides his offering "in the process of time," and God didn't accept it. In other words, since Cain's offering wasn't the first of his firstfruits, God was unable to accept it. Cain murders Abel in revenge, so the first murder comes about because of a tithing issue.

And this lack of acceptance doesn't appear to be just egotism on God's part. Since God is perfect, anything which does not recognize him first cannot help but fall under a curse.

Still, the idea that God cannot help but be perfect runs into some logical problems, the most famous of which is whether an omnipotent God can create a rock that he himself cannot move. If he can create the rock, then he cannot move it, and is therefore not omnipotent. If he can move any rock, he cannot create such a rock, and therefore is not omnipotent. Either way, there are fundamental limitations on God's power.

Though Morris doesn't go this way in his discussion, it appears that he accepts the idea of limitations on God's behavior. Morris seems to be saying that God literally had no choice about accepting Abel's offering and rejecting Cain's. Even if God had wanted to accept Cain's offering, He cannot accept an offering that is not the first of the first. It's literally impossible for Him to accept second best as an offering.

In other words, to use an example that Morris makes in his video sermon series, if God were playing golf He would get a hole-in-one every single time. And, it seems (though, again, Morris didn't point this out), He would be unable to miss a shot even if He tried.

This appears to be a theologically complex point, and one that I've heard referenced before. It reminds me a bit of the Kevin Smith film Dogma, the plot of which centers on the idea that proving God wrong - even about a minor, insignificant thing - would result in the collapse of all existence, because existence itself is held together by the divine thread of God's infallible will.

And, in fact, the tithing story that Morris lays out goes back to the very creation of the universe, too. The Genesis Creation story itself (or rather "the Fall of Man" portion of it), in Morris' view, is about tithing and respecting the things that belong to God. God declares the Tree of Knowledge off limits. It belongs to him. Stay away from it. If you take anything from it, you are stealing from God and therefore will be cursed.

In this view, the entire the history of humanity is therefore about the cursed consequences of stealing from God ... but you can alleviate the curse by offering a tithe, and turning the curse into a blessing.

Why 10 Percent?
The 10% figure comes in part from the word itself - tithe means "one-tenth." There are various references throughout the Bible, but probably one of the most relevant is Genesis 28:22, where Jacob (also known as Israel) says, "of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you."

Why Brought to Local Church?

In Exodus, God gives the rule to the people of Israel that "The first of the firstfruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God" (Exodus 23:19). This and many other places in the Old Testament that discuss tithing make it clear that the tither should bring it to the "house of the Lord." Not television ministries, or distant Christian (or, heaven forbid, secular charities!), or anywhere else - the actual house of worship that you frequent, and you shouldn't really designate it for anything. It is, after all, God's money, not your money.

The church itself, of course, is free to designate it however they want, presumably guided by whatever religious principles upon which the church is founded. If you're going to a church, you have likely assumed that the church's leadership has some idea of what they're doing, so they can be trusted with the allocation of these funds. If not, then you should really choose a different church. Our local church funds a lot of community programs and international aid work, including ministries which help out in developing countries, so it's not just all going to pay the pastor's salary.

More Good Stuff

Morris goes on to discuss the idea of "mammon," which is a spirit of greed, and how it is diametrically opposed to love of God. You can't be greedy and spiritually righteous, and I certainly agree with this.

He also outlines a "principle of multiplication" which expands on his idea of being blessed. The blessing is obtained by the tithe, but when you give over and above the tithe amount, God will multiply what you give many-fold. The key example of this is the 12 loaves of bread that Jesus uses to feed 5,000 people in Luke 9. Jesus blesses the bread, but it multiplies only when the disciples give it away. (It's a cool analogy, but I have to admit I found the expansion of this into a general religious principle to be a bit of a stretch.)

My Criticisms

Even if you assume that the Bible is literally true, I have some problem with Morris' interpretation in one respect - the bit about the tithe only being valid if it goes to the local church. I disagree with this not only on grounds of personal belief, but also on theological grounds.

Morris is right that there are numerous references to bringing the tithe to the temple, but most of these are found throughout the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament, the temple wasn't just a church where people held meetings, it was literally the location where the ancient Hebrew people believed that God was physically manifested on Earth. He was in the back, behind the curtain, in the Holy of Holies. So you weren't just taking the money to a building and handing it over to some intermediaries, you were literally taking the money (or firstfruits or firstborn) to God Himself.

Under the New Testament, however, the rules are changed around. When Jesus died, the curtain was ripped asunder in the temple, symbolizing that God was no longer contained within the back of the temple, but was out in the world. In fact, Jesus says (Matthew 25:31-46), "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.... Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me" and "the kingdom of god is within you" (Luke 17:21).

In other words, theologically, the New Testament untethers "God" from the temple itself and places him squarely inside of each and every person, especially those in need. So if you give your 10% to those in need, you are tithing under New Testament theology. You are giving God's portion of your money back to God's people, the needy. It does not matter in the least if the money goes through a church.

Throughout The Blessed Life, I was continually thrown off by the author's repeated insistence that the money should only go to Christian organizations. It just seems like that was his own prejudice, in the midst of a discussion which, otherwise, I found quite compelling and internally consistent.

Of course, if you go to a church and find that it's servicing the spiritual needs of you, your family, and your community, you should certainly help to support it. But for those who don't, there are still many ways to give, and you shouldn't feel compelled to give to a church just because you think you'll be cursed by God if you don't.

All that having been said, though, I still enjoyed the book, and I think that everyone who claims to be a Christian should read it. If you believe the Bible is literally true, as many Americans do, then it presents powerful teachings that will make you question whether you're doing enough.

The book is extremely well thought out and written, and I do believe that he makes a very strong case that the Bible tells us that, at minimum, 10% of our income should be given away. Whether or not you're "cursed" if you don't do this, I'm not sure, but part of the point of this experiment is to find out if you're "blessed" when you do it. We've been donating it Morris' way - 10% to our local charity, right off the top - since January, and have not noticed any substantial change over the abundance flowing into our life over when we were giving 10% just to secular charities for the past year and a half. (There is, of course, the very odd incident of selling the pick-up truck just as I wrote the first tithe check, so I'm not ruling it out completely yet.)

Auto-Deduction
My company has a really good charitable matching program. Back in October, we decided that instead of giving a single payment to be matched, we'd sign up for their auto-deduction program. Ten percent of my gross salary from work is auto-deducted before I ever get the paycheck, and is split up among various charities. It gets paid out at the end of the year, along with the matching funds from the company. Here's how we decided to break down the donations this year:

35% - Heifer International
25% - CARE
20% - Women for Women
10% - Smile Train
10% - Kiva Microfunds (donation to the program, not loans through the program)

This was before we decided to also tithe to the church, or decided to do the 40 Days of Giving project. If I'd known back in October that we'd have made either of those decisions, I can honestly say that I probably wouldn't have wanted to give a full 10% into the matching program, which commits us for the entire year.

Giving 20% (church tithe plus matching program) through January and February was manageable, but just barely so. It pretty much ate up any financial margin we had, though we didn't have to actually do without anything ... we just couldn't really splurge too much.

As you may be able to tell from this post, I'm personally feeling like our secular donations are doing more good than our religious donations, and that may be a bit unfair. Our church was able to send someone to help in Haiti, for example, and that was certainly worthwhile. They help fund worthwhile works in the community. But compared to healing a kid with a cleft palate or offering a starving family a means to provide meals for their family, it just seems kind of paltry by comparison.

Annabella's Story

2010-02-26T13:16:00.000-08:00

A friend (let's call her Annabella) related the following true story to me, which happened to her in the weeks leading up to the project:

Annabella's boss was taking part in a fundraising activity where he was "arrested" and had to be bailed out, with the money going to a muscular dystrophy children's charity. On that cold Tuesday morning off he went to the restaurant that served as a "jail." The company would match the funds raised by employees.

When Annabella was asked to donate, she pulled out her checkbook. She wrote a check for $50. She was generous in donating things (to Salvation Army and similar organizations), but rarely did she designate actual money toward charity. As she wrote the check, she thought about other expenses she had. Her garage door had broken just the day before, and that morning she'd gotten a quote of over $700 to fix it. Living through a harsh Detroit winter, this was not an optional expense; she needed to be able to park in the garage. She also needed dental work, a new crown, that was going to cost her about $550. Still, she knew that she had a tax rebate coming which could help her with those expenses, so she could afford to give the $50 ... but she was in a position where giving away $50 stung a little bit. She donated the money and went on with her business.

Later in the day, she called her condo association to get some information about the specifications for her garage door repair. She didn't want to get the wrong color or style, accidentally violating the condo regulations. Also, she thought, maybe the condo association had a deal with a specific repairman who could replace the garage door at a lower rate than the one that she had been quoted.

The woman she spoke to at the condo association told her that they'd look into it and get back to her later. Two hours later, Annabella got a call back.

The condo association had decided to take care of the full cost of repairing or replacing the door.

Although it could be argued that the the problem arose from the original installation, Annabella has lived in the condo for about 6 years and the original builder has long since gone bankrupt. The woman from the condo association offered no reason why the condo association had made such a strange decision, nor was Annabella going to tempt fate by asking questions. She hung up the phone, somewhat in shock, because only hours after donating $50, which she almost didn't give because of the garage door, she had received the alleviation of a $700 expense.

This happened on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, the association's contractor came out to evaluate the repair needed, and agreed that a whole new door was required. However, her garage door was very drafty, which made it uncomfortable in those Detroit winter mornings when she went out to start the car. Since she had gotten the new door for free, she asked how much extra it would cost to get an insulated garage door. The cost was $180, so she agreed to it. She was still over $500 ahead, and she would end up with a better situation than she had before. Instead of a flimsy metal door, she had a solid steel garage door with insulation, which no longer showed the light from outside and let the air flow in.

Then she went to her dental appointment. As the dentist did the preliminary work and installed the temporary crown, Annabella listened to him talk, and it was clear from what he was saying that it took more work than he had anticipated. When it was all over, he took off his mask and said, "I'm not charging you for the post & core (the preliminary work). The fee for those is $250. I'm not charging you for that."

This time, however, there was a reason. The crown appointment had originally been set up for September, and had been pushed back five times until the end of January. One of these cancellations had been because the dentist's wife went into labor with what turned out to be a lovely daughter. Through all of this, Annabella had been very understanding about the delays. (She was actually somewhat thankful when these delays happened, since she literally looked forward to it about as much as a root canal!) The dentist just decided that since it had taken so long, and she'd been so nice, he'd cover the expense.

On Friday morning the garage contractor arrived. As he began, his supervisor called Annabella to offer her an extra add-on to the installation. It was a small detector, which had a red and green light. When the garage door was closed, the light was green; when open, the light was red. This meant that when she was upstairs in her second-story condo, she would know for sure if the door was open or closed without having to descend her narrow stairway into the garage itself to perform a visual inspection. The cost for this add-on was $45.

Annabella declined, because she really didn't need the extra expense. Still, though, she has a roommate, which means she sometimes might genuinely not know for sure if the garage door was left open. And she is the sort of person who occasionally gets anxiety about such things. Annabella, a smoker, regularly goes through her apartment checking ashtrays to make sure there are no smoldering flames before leaving the apartment. So a mounted indicator that can verify that the garage door is indeed closed would have been a big help. But it wasn't essential, so she decided to avoid the expense.

When the installation was done, however, she noticed a small red/green indicator light mounted in her condo. She told the repairman that she hadn't wanted the indicator included. He said that he knew, but when he called it in to his boss, the boss had said to go ahead and install it anyway, at no cost. Again, there was no real explanation for this.

So Annabella had gotten her garage door substantially upgraded, and instead of nearly $1,000 it would have cost to install all of this, it cost her only $180. A savings of $800!

In Annabella's words, "It just went from serendipity to spooky." Within 48 hours of donating $50 to charity, she went from having to shell out over $1,250 ($700 + $550) in garage and dental expenses to paying only about $500, but with an extra $225 value over the garage door she would have ended up with!

Now, if there were actually a causative link between the donation and the savings - if this is somehow the "karmic bank" kicking in - then Annabella saw an astounding return on her "investment." A $50 donation resulted in $700 worth of savings. So $700 divided by $50 results in a 14-fold increase (an 18-fold increase if you count the extra value from the insulated door and the indicator).

This is a better return than anyone on Wall Street can bank on, including Warren Buffett, one of the greatest minds in modern finance. Of course, now that I think about it, Buffett has donated 85% of his wealth to those in need. Maybe he knows something that we don't.

Maybe he is banking on precisely the same sort of return that Annabella saw.

The Generosity Factor

2010-02-26T06:33:00.000-08:00

I love audiobooks, because I commute for about 2.5 hours a day and sit in front of a computer the remainder of the day, so they're a good background noise, and I can learn stuff. Big fan of the audiobooks.

Yesterday I listened to The Generosity Factor by Ken Blanchard & S. Truett Cathy (founder of Chik-fil-a), which detailed the role that generosity could play in leading a life of significance. While the narrative is a bit campy, as these sort of self-help books usually are when they try to go fictional (the primary goal isn't a good story, after all, but is instead to beat you over the head with their message), the book has some great insights. It is religious themed, but the main character balks at that somewhat and is still able to understand the importance of generosity, so the book's really aimed at everyone to some degree. It's a quick book - the audiobook took up just two disks - so anyone can fit this into their schedule.

So, the actual details of the book.

Ways to Give:
According to the book, there are four things that a person can give: Time, Treasure, Talent, and Touch.

While Time, Treasure, and Talent are fairly self-explanatory, let me take a moment to discuss Touch, which is the idea of literally a hands-on connection with those who are close to you. They don't get into this idea in much detail in the book, but one of the major characters wrestles with his "adopted grandkids" and this is the idea of touch. Hugs and that sort of thing, to the people you care about, as a means of showing that you care. It is true that people need touch with others to feel connected, and I know a lot of people who just don't touch people.

So touch people, already!

(With their permission, of course.)

(And not in pervy ways.)

(Or, at least, not in pervy ways without their permission ... but then you're going from generosity to a whole other emotional state. I need to get back on topic.)

Of the other possible ways to give, Time and Talent often seem linked to me (such as tutoring poor kids or adults), although I suppose there are many ways of giving Time which require no particular Talent (answering phones at a telethon). Answering questions on FreeRice.org is a nice way to give time, because it helps enhance your talent!

Comparisons and Contrasts
Ken Blanchard is a writer who specializes in books on business management, so the majority of his market are people who want to become successful in business. In fact, in a note at the end of the book, Blanchard points out that part of the reason it took him so long to write a book on generosity is that he had trouble figuring out how to translate the concept in a way that would seem relevant the modern day businessman.

He achieves this mainly through two distinct contrasts that he sets up in the book:

The first is: successful life vs. significant life

The second is: driven people vs. called people

So, for example, if you are driven and successful, the question that you should ask (according to Blanchard) is whether you are also called and significant. Are you truly doing the most significant work that you can, and the work that's in line with your fundamental nature? Are you just consumed with acquiring "things" or with building meaningful relationships?

While Blanchard means "called" in a religious sense, I would argue that a religious viewpoint isn't necessary to believe this way ... anyone can be called to serve their fellow men (and women), even if you believe that the calling comes from within instead of without. Also, being "called" instead of "driven" means that the work involved is more enjoyable. If you are driven to do something, it implies that you don't really have control. If you truly love doing it, then you don't have to be driven ... you just do it whenever you can. That is a calling.

No matter how we were designed (either intelligently or natural selection, or some combination of the two), we appear to be constructed in such a way that we want to reach out to others and have significant lives, so even without an active belief in God, it's natural that many people want the richer significant lives over just material success.

The Guidelines
Finally, Blanchard and Cathy offer up the following guidelines for how to live by "the generosity factor."

He owns it all.
Every day is an opportunity.
Action is required.
Remember your blessings.
Thank Him.

If you're paying attention, you may have noticed the secret message inside the above guidelines. (If not, then look at the first letter of each line.) Again, even without a religious viewpoint, these seem like useful guidelines to follow. Let's consider them one by one.

He owns it all
Even if you don't believe "He" exists, the fact is that everything you have is on loan from the abundance that exists within universe itself. It's in your hands for a while, but eventually you'll have to pass it along to someone else. Keeping this in mind helps keep a lot of things in perspective, I've found.

Every day is an opportunity
This is part of what this whole experiment is about - specifically trying to look for the opportunities to give in our daily lives. And, really, it is true that every day is an opportunity to make a new connection with someone else, to form a new relationship, and to move a little closer to the sort of person you want to be. Don't beat yourself up if yesterday didn't go so well, just take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves today. If you want to be a more generous person, then every day is indeed an opportunity to do that.

Action is required
This is where a lot of people trip up, because they have great ideals but then don't act on them. (I have this problem with exercise and eating right.) You have to really make the choice to act when the opportunity presents itself. Again, this is at the heart of this experiment.

Remember your blessings
Remember how I mentioned that everything you have will have to be passed on to someone else, and so in a sense is just on loan to you? Well, before it came to you, it had to come through someone else. So now it's in your hands, and it's important to remember that didn't have to be the case. And blessings are not, of course, just material things, but even more important are the blessings of relationships with others and caring for them.

The fact that my wife exists, and is such a wonderful woman and partner, are things that I had absolutely no control over. They are truly blessings, because I had no part in forging these factors. The fact that I had good parents, who helped form me into the person that I am (who didn't screw up the relationship before it started, for example), is also something that was beyond my control.

My first book, String Theory for Dummies, though I worked hard to write it, is also the result of many factors over which I had no control. Consider the many factors that went into just getting the offer in the first place (not to mention the writing of the book itself):

An agent contacted me, which only happened because a publisher was looking for a good science writer and I had shown that I was a good one on About.com. The publisher was looking for a good science writer because it was in business, successfully publishing books, and there was a market for science books. I only had the job at About.com Physics because someone (I don't even remember who) had happened to mention in an e-mail that they were looking for writers, I had a physics degree, and I had a good non-fiction writing sample available to send them with my application. I only had the good writing sample because I'd volunteered to write for EpicSFF.com in an effort to get some exposure and practice writing. I had the physics degree largely because of a lot of support from parents and teachers over the years.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not belittling an ounce of the work I put into the book, my work at About.com, my writing in general, or the work I put into getting my degree. But as the paragraph above demonstrates, there were many aspects of getting the offer on my first book which were entirely outside of my control.

Thank Him
Again, while the "Him" might not sit well with some people, the idea of being thankful hopefully sits well with everyone. There is actually ample evidence that being thankful is a good thing, independent of any religious perspective, and in fact I'll be covering this idea in the weeks to come in greater detail. Every culture and faith seems to manifest some sort of thanksgiving, so just from an evolutionary psychological standpoint it would appear to have some sort of tangible benefits. So, even if you're just talking to yourself, it's definitely good to be thankful for the things that you have in your life, because you certainly didn't do all of the work involved in bringing it into your life.

Day 9: Many Efforts, Few Results

2010-02-25T17:52:00.000-08:00

Well, I don't know if any of my efforts today amounted to much, but I had some interesting experiences. This was one of the days when I had to actually drive into work, rather than work from home, and I kept a vigilant watch for people in need. In fact, I found a couple, but they ended up already having things well in hand.

Roadside Assistance
I stopped twice by the side of the road to help people who were off on the shoulder. Once on the way into work in the morning, once on the way out in the afternoon. (Different cars, of course.) I saw a couple of other people who appeared to be having car trouble, but I was in the wrong lane, and couldn't get over in time to stop before being well past them. It's 40 Days of Giving, after all, not 40 Days of Reckless Driving.

Unfortunately, neither effort turned into an actual opportunity to help. The first woman said that her sister was on the way, but she thanked me very much for stopping. The woman in the afternoon car had also already called for help and was waiting on a gas tank.

Cellphones really cut out the opportunity for good Samaritan activities.

Other Activities
I signed up for the One Campaign, so I'll begin getting news from Bono's charity to help alleviate international famine, disease, and poverty.

In addition, I earned 5,000 grains of rice. I also dug around a bit more on the FreeRice.org website, and discovered some disturbing statistics - the United States only gives 18 cents of every 100 dollars in international aid, tying for last place with Japan. This is only 0.18%! Appalling!

(In fairness, I'm not sure what is counted in this statistic. Does this include money given by religious organizations toward international missionary work and funding churches in these regions, which support their local communities? However, even the best estimate I've heard of religious giving places it at about 1.8%, and certainly the majority of that stays in the United States.)

According to the One Campaign website, Obama's recent budget is making some good steps in the right direction, but still has a way to go. So I went and printed out this letter, which I'll send to the White House. If you believe we should be doing more, you should look into this as well.

Finally, I offered up some help to local city officials who are trying to get a major infrastructure investment in my hometown to improve the internet connectivity through the new Google Fiber plan. I may have to try to look into some innovative ways to get the word out on this, as it would be a major boon to our community ... which needs it, after all of the industry we've had abandon the town in recent years.

Tomorrow, the giving fund coffers fill up, and then things should get really interesting.

Great Minds Think Alike

2010-02-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

Early on in my preparation for this project, I became aware of Cami Walker's book 29 Gifts, which chronicles her own giving experience. I got the book from the library, adding it to my own pile of books. Though our giving experiences were fundamentally different, I was intrigued that someone else had chosen to write a book on the subject. (Her giving experience is motivated out of a deeply personal place, whereas mine is more intellectual curiosity.)

Then yesterday, I get an e-mail from Brigid Slipka, who is running a blog on her website, http://www.actuallygiving.com/, which details her own 40 Days of Giving project. And, graciously, rather than issuing a cease and desist letter for our communal act of genius, she has donated to the 40 Days of Giving team over at Heifer International ... one step closer to that haircut! (And rest assured, Brigid, that if I ever get on Oprah, I will put forward the suggestion that you also be invited.)

Brigid's blog is quite entertaining, and has a lot of great links, so I highly recommend that all of you actually interested in this check out what's going on at her site as well. She actually works in the fundraising industry, so she's got her finger a bit more on the pulse with these sorts of things than I have.

Speaking of Giving: Ride the Electric Wind

2010-02-24T20:31:00.000-08:00

Last night, I received first place in the first round of the Toastmasters International Speech contest, held in our Chief Anderson Toastmasters chapter. (Only three of us presented speeches for the contest, so this isn't as big an honor as it sounds ... but it still gives me a shot to go on to higher levels, so we'll see!) This being my first Toastmasters contest, I'm still waiting for details about how things proceed from here.

Since I am in the midst of an experiment where I am embracing giving throughout my life, my speech was also on the subject of giving. Here is the speech I gave (with heavy editing, since I write far better than I talk):

Ride the Electric Wind

A few years back, in the African nation of Malawi, there was a famine. The Kamkwamba family, in the village of Wimbe, were down to eating one meal a day, of an un-riped corn turned into a sort of porridge. The father was drying their last tobacco harvest, so he was able to get some loans against it ... but the loans soon outstripped the amount that would actually be made from the sale of the tobacco.

In the midst of all of this, the family didn't have the money to pay the fees for their son, William Kamkwamba, to attend the local primary school. He still tried to go to school, avoiding the authorities that would notice him. Finally, though, he was caught and told to leave. But he didn't give up on learning, and spent time at the local library. He especially enjoyed reading about science topics.

Keep in mind, English was not William's primary language, but the books were in English. So to research the science topics, he had to teach himself English. And what he couldn't learn, he had to get other people to translate.

One of the things that he learned about were windmills. He was fascinated by the idea of building one, to bring this "electric wind" (as he called it) to his poor community. The focus of his research became building one of these machines. Using materials salvaged from his local trash dump, he pieced together the turbines that would turn the motion into electricity and the windmill itself and the circuit breaker [to keep his house from burning down - see the Daily Show video below]. He was mocked by his community and family, most all of which (except for his father) thought him insane.

But William Kamkwamba, at age 14, was successful. He built a working windmill for his house.

This is the point where things get ... well, not interesting, because it's already interesting ... but they get worldly, I guess you could say. Because William's windmill came to the attention of newspapers and blogs, and finally to the attention of the people who organized the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conferences, who asked William to attend.

At the TED conference, 19 year old William was brought on stage where he, in halted English, explained what had happened: "After I drop out from school, I went to library and I read a book titled Using Energy and I get information about windmill and I try and I made it." [See the video below!]

William met wealthy patrons from around the world. Now he had funding! He built a new, improved windmill, and now women from his village can access the electric irrigation system, which brings water directly into the village ... rather than hiking for miles to bring water every day for their family. He received the funds to attend a prominent school, where he will learn the skills he needs to be successful in life and to transform his community in ways that even he can't yet imagine. Just last December, he announced that he was leading a project to rebuild his primary school. (The old building was built in 1950 to educate 450 students, but now has 1,480 students!)

This would be impressive enough, of course, but I want to focus on another aspect of this story, which wasn't included in his book - The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind - or in any of the other major commentary on the matter that I've read. I only found out about this other aspect because I work for a company which makes textbooks ... in fact, for the very company that published the textbook, Using Energy, from which William learned to build his windmill. The company offered this textbook, as they offer many textbooks every year, through a program where they donate textbooks to libraries in developing countries throughout the world.

So this whole inspiring story, really, begins with someone, over a decade ago, in a boardroom, or an office, or a cubicle, deciding that it would be worthwhile to give away textbooks to libraries in the developing world. And then that person had to, no doubt, push for their idea and get it implemented as a practice by a major corporation ... to give away the very product they sold to make their profits.

The gift of a textbook changed the lives of thousands of people in a village in Malawi. A good call, in my opinion.

When we give, we don't always know what the full impact will be. But we give precisely in the hope that if we give, there will be a worthwhile impact. And the more we give, the more we reach out to expand knowledge, and learning, and opportunity, and hope, the greater the impact that we can expect to have in the world.

Other information:

William Kamkwamba's website

William Kamkwamba's Profile on TED

Interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

William Kamkwamba

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

The Olympics

Day 8: Playing for Food

2010-02-24T18:56:00.000-08:00

Today, after work, I set to work at FreeRice.org, a website where you can play knowledge-based games and earn money for the United Nations World Food Programme.

I've been to Free Rice many times in the past. The way the site works (or so I thought) was that you played a vocabulary game where you chose the meaning of words and, the longer you play, the more rice gets donated to prevent hunger around the world. Each question answered correctly gains 10 grains of rice. The words get progressively harder, and I usually end up fluctuating between levels 40 and 45 out of 60, and find it a fairly entertaining way to pass the time. (The rice is paid for by the banner advertisements on the page as you're playing the game.)

Since I knew I would blog about it, I was paying a bit more attention to the links on the site and I noticed one I hadn't seen before: Change Subjects. By clicking on it, I discovered that "English Vocabulary" was only one of the many subjects that they offered you to play for rice. The full list of subjects is:

Art - Famous Paintings
Chemistry - Chemical Symbols (Basic)
Chemistry - Chemical Symbols (Full List)
English - English Grammar
English - English Vocabulary
Geography - Identify Countries on the Map
Geography - World Capitals
Language Learning - French
Language Learning - German
Language Learning - Italian
Language Learning - Spanish
Math - Basic Math (Pre-Algebra)
Math - Multiplication Table

I played the English Vocabulary, English Grammar (reached level 5 of 5), Identify Countries on the Map (level 4 of 5), Basic Math (level 10 of 10), World Capital (level 4 of 5), and French (level 9 of 10 - who'd have guessed the foreign language classes stuck that well?).

According to the Free Rice website FAQ, in countries where rice is a staple, they provide about 400 grams of rice per person per day. About 48 grains of rice is a gram. So this means that 19,200 grains of rice will feed a starving person for a day.

Today, with only about an hour's worth of play, I earned about 5,000 grains of rice.

So, if I can keep this sort of activity up for each of the remaining 32 days, the World Food Programme would be able to provide about 8 days worth of food for starving people in developing countries ... and my own knowledge of vocabulary, geography, and French (who knows, I might try some Italian, Spanish or German) might even increase a bit.

Day 3 Follow-Up

Today, Amber and I received our test kits for the Be the Match National Marrow Donor Program. We rubbed cotton swabs on the inside of our moths and placed them into the envelopes to be sent back. They'll go back out in the mail tomorrow and, in relatively short order, we'll be placed on the registry to donate bone marrow.

Day 7: Free Pancakes Around the USA!

2010-02-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

I started out this morning by taking my 4-year-old son, Elijah, to the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) for the IHOP National Pancake Day, when IHOP gives away "short stacks" (servings of three pancakes) for free. In exchange, they have a collection on the way out the door for some local charity. IHOP has been doing this for five years, and it generates a lot of money for both IHOP and for the related charity. This is all IHOP restaurants across the country, so if there's one near you, go check it out ... and think about giving some to the local charity they're supporting.

At my IHOP, the local charity was First Choice for Women, which offers various types of support to women who find themselves in the midst of an unplanned pregnancy. Given the nature of the experiment, I felt like I should attend this event, but frankly my bank account is running a bit low, and I haven't gotten the first of the paychecks that I'm giving away yet (that comes Friday), so I didn't really have money to give away. Still, I figured I'd talk to the manager and get some information.

Elijah and I had the free pancakes, and some hash browns and sausage(which we were charged for), and as I was getting ready to pay the bill I realized I had a $100 bill in my wallet. Remember the pickup truck that I'd sold to a relative? Well, we'd gotten the first payment a couple of days before the project began and I hadn't really looked in my wallet since then.

To Give or Not to Give, That is the Question?
So here I was, in the middle of a giving experiment, having just been given free pancakes, with my son across from me, knowing that I'd have to go home and blog about this ... with a $100 bill sitting in my hand.

Dammit.

I paid the bill ($4.30) and then left a generous tip ($10.70), and was left staring at $85 in cash. A $50, a $20, two $5 and five $1 bills. And I did not want to give that money up. Some little voice inside me was declaring, "Listen, you're being more than generous, and you've laid out guidelines for how to do project. You do not have to give this money to prove anything to anybody. You got this money well before the project began. Just keep it."

But I didn't particularly trust these thoughts. The $100 bill had literally shown up right as a giving opportunity presented itself. Was I being greedy by not giving the money in this situation? What was the right thing to give in this situation?

Not trusting my own instincts, I had only one option. I asked Elijah.

I laid the money out on the table, and told him that the restaurant was collecting money to help women who were pregnant - just like Mommy had been just a few months ago - but who needed help paying for their doctor visits (he remembered Mommy going to the doctor a lot) and getting food and things like that. How much should we give?

Elijah reached straight for the $50, and then sat the $20 on top of it, then the $5 bills and then three of the $1 bills. Out of $85, I was left with $2.

Yowza!

I'm still, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, feeling uncomfortable about this. There's the obvious, of course ... for me, $83 is a not-insignificant sum of money. That's about a month's worth of gas in my car, for example. But, of course, this money came to me as extra money from the sale of my pick-up truck. I wasn't planning for it and, frankly, I had enough money in savings to cover my expenses for the 40 days even without this $83. It really just made sense to donate it, yet I was mentally resisting.

Then Elijah began taking more ones, saying "I need change for my magic trick." And, sure enough, we had just learned a magic trick that involved turning a $5 bill into five $1 bills. So I took the $5 bill (which he also needed) and the five $1's and said, "How about we keep these to go in your magic kit?" (He got the magic kit from his Nana for Christmas. It's very cool, although he has some challenges really hiding the secret of the trick.)

So now I have $75 that I'm giving, and I'm still feeling a little hesitant about it. I stand at the donation box, feeling awkward, and Elijah looks at the money in my hand. He reaches out and fiddles a bit with the remaining $5 bill in it. On an impulse, I take the $5 out. Oddly, I now feel completely fine about putting the $70 into the donation box.

On the drive home, I think realized why I felt so awkward. Over the past two years, I have become nearly obsessive about tracking receipts for business expenses. I was giving a cash donation which I was giving as part of the 40 Days of Giving project ... which meant I would deduct it as a business expense, but had no receipt.

And, in fact, the cut-off expense where you need a receipt is $75.

In other words, if I had deposited $75 in cash, claimed it on my taxes as a business expense, and not had a receipt ... it's possible that, were I to be audited, the IRS could nail me for tax fraud! At $70, my understanding is that they have to take my word on it, but at $75 or higher I actually need the receipt. My subconscious may have been trying to let me know that I was about to get myself into a bit of trouble.

So it wasn't greed (Unless you count not wanting to be on the losing side of an audit as "greedy." This falls under my classification of "common sense."), and just to prove it (to myself, not to all of you people ... I'm not even sure if anyone is reading this far into the post, after all), when I got home, I gave the remaining $5 to Amber, so that she could get cookies for the other students in her afternoon Human Services class at Ivy Tech Community College. (She can't have any cookies, because she's going gluten-free in an effort to alleviate the baby's digestive problems. Talk about sacrifice!)

An illuminating exchange:
I spent part of the day watching the kids and working from home, rather than taking a day off work (because our daycare fell through). At one point, frustrated that Elijah (let alone the baby, who can't help it) won't leave me alone to get work done, I said, a bit more loudly than was warranted, "Elijah, why can't you just leave me alone to work!"

He frowned and said, "I wish people couldn't make you work. You shouldn't give so much money away, because then you wouldn't have to work so much. Next time, you should keep it."

I do work a lot, on a wide range of projects ... and I am the sort of person who can lose himself in these projects, and focus on them to the exclusion of all else. I have to sometimes consciously remind myself that the projects are not the most important thing in life. Not even this one.

Being a parent is a tough balancing act. In part, you want to teach your kids to have a good work ethic, and to perform their time doing worthwhile things. But, at the same time, you want to be sure that your kids enjoy life and remember how important it is to play. I certainly don't want him to grow up with an emotional aversion to work.

But the truth is that I, too, wish that people couldn't make you work ... but even if I didn't have to work, I'd probably still choose to occupy myself with writing projects such as this one.

I hope that someday he finds a way to do work that feels like play.

Day 6: You Get $25 ... and I Give $20 to a Charity of Your Choice!

2010-02-22T18:33:00.000-08:00

Today's another opportunity to give to people reading this blog ... and also give to someone else.

So, here's the deal. For the last three or so years, I have used an online bank called ING Direct. It's an excellent bank, and provides full service. They have checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, and some of the best interest rates out there. (These are still poor interest rates in this economy, but they're better than any brick-and-mortar bank. Right now, the checking account is giving 1.35%.)

ING Direct currently has a referral program where I can refer someone, and that person (upon funding a bank account with ING) gets $25 deposited into the account. They always have this plan in place, but the plan normally results in the referrer getting a $10 referral fee. From February 18 to March 31, however, the referral fee is being increased to $20!

So here's today's giving opportunity:

Sign up for ING, get $25 added to your account, and I will donate the $20 that I receive to a charity of your choice.

Here's what you need to do:

E-mail me at azjauthor@gmail.com with your e-mail address and what charity you want the money to go to.
Upon receiving an e-mail from ING Direct, follow the steps to sign up for a bank account with them. This will include actually putting at least $250 into the account.
You will get another $25 deposited into the account - an instant 10% return, which is better than your $250 will get sitting in any other bank account these days!
Leave it there, and save up for a vacation, education, or whatever else you want through their Automatic Savings Plan ... or close the account after April 7. (This is when I actually get the second half of the referral fee, so if you close the account before then, I probably won't get the full fee.)

If you sign up for a checking account, you get a debit card to access the account. You do not actually get paper checks for ING checking accounts, although you can send checks from the website and they arrive in a couple of days. I've used online banking pretty much exclusively for at least 7 years and think that it's great. You can find out more about how they work at the ING Direct website.

Note: If you are one of the people who is part of the Move Your Money movement, seeking to keep money in local banks, then you might resist starting an account with ING Direct, a large international bank. But keep in mind that you're getting $45 from them, $20 of which goes to charity, and you can close the account in mid-April with no penalties. (They are assuming, of course, that people who open the account will stick with them, but they aren't requiring it.)

Day 5: Want a Free Book?

2010-02-21T20:12:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I truly love to read. The unfortunate side effect of this is that since I read a lot, I buy a lot of books. In fact, I buy so many books that it far outstrips my time available for reading. This isn't inherently a problem, because I believe that everyone's library should contain books that they haven't gotten to yet, because it means they always have something to look forward to. (I read that somewhere, though I can't remember where at the moment.) If you only buy books as you have a chance to read them, then you're not really committed to the learning process.

And, for me, keeping books around that I've already read isn't just hording. As a writer, I frequently need to reference some idea from a book I read long ago, so keeping them handy is something of a necessity.

For example, just a couple of months ago, I was reading something which referenced an idea from Plato's Phaedo. Wanting to learn more, I went down into the basement and dug out my copy of Phaedo, which I haven't read since I was taking a classical philosophy course in college over a dozen years ago. I was quickly able to find Phaedo and get the information I needed, since I rarely get rid of books.

(My books are organized thematically and by subject, so I could easily find the classical greek philosophy, a kind of informal version of the Dewey decimal system. This method drives my wife nuts, especially in our DVDs, since she has to figure out if I consider Keeping the Faith to be a religious film, placing it near The Last Temptation of Christ, or a romantic comedy, placing it near Sweet Home Alabama. Such are the trials she must persevere to love a man like me. These days, we watch non-kid films so rarely that I've really given up on organizing the DVD cabinet anyway, as every other trip into it is with the express goal of getting Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins. But I digress.)

In fact, the whole book String Theory for Dummies would have been much more difficult to write if I weren't such a pack rat, because there were books on the subject that I'd read over a decade earlier, which I had to go back through for research. In addition, years worth of science magazines piled around my basement were also scoured for resources. So these things do occasionally prove useful.

Despite this, there are a lot of these books which, while perfectly fine books, I just know I won't need. And what's odd is that, despite my near-certain knowledge that I won't need to ever look in them again, and that even if I had free time I wouldn't ever get back to them, it's actually hard for me to give some away. I think, "No, I can't give away my The Elements of Fiction Writing series," even though I long ago internalized (though have not yet mastered) the key elements of these introductory writing books - which, incidentally, I bought in high school! The only way to get better at them is to write more, not to have books sitting on a shelf which I have not and will never reference after reading them the first time.

So, the question then becomes how best to give the books away. My original thinking was that I'd just load them up in a box to Goodwill, but then I decided that it would make more sense to offer them to the people actually going to the trouble to read the blog. So here is a list of the books I am giving away. If you would like them, then e-mail me (azjauthor@gmail.com) or message me in Facebook with your street address, and I'll send them to you next Friday (when my "giving" fund has money in it). I've broken the book down by category for easy review:

Writing Books:

Scene and Structure by Jack M. Bickham
Beginnings, Middles, and Ends by Nancy Kress
Characters and Viewpoints by Orson Scott Card
Plot by Ansen Dibell
Conflict, Action, and Suspense by William Noble
Setting by Jack M. Bickham

Science Fiction/Fantasy Books:

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain by Isaac Asimov
The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
Nemesis by Isaac Asimov
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time: Marauder by William F. Wu
Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time: Predator by William F. Wu
Gamer Fantastic edited by Kerrie Hughes (collection of short stories about gaming)
Intelligent Design edited by Denise Little (collection of stories on evolution versus creationism)
Cold at Heart by Brian A. Hopkins
Deadfellas by David Whitman
The Scar by China Mieville
The Lady of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Forest House by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Sailing to Sarantium (Sarantine Mosaic Book 1) by Guy Gavriel Kay (hardcover, first U.S. edition, autographed)
Lord of Emperors (Sarantine Mosaic Book 2) by Guy Gavriel Kay (hardcover, first U.S. edition, autographed)
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey (hardcover, first edition, autographed)

Science:

The Void by Frank Close
13 Things That Don't Make Sense by Michael Brooks

Other:

John Adams by David McCullough
The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool edited by Wendy Northcutt
The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans
The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me About Life and Wealth by Richard Paul Evans

Since I will have to ship these books, please don't get carried away. Only request the books if you really have a desire to read them, or to pass them on to someone else (as gifts - no reselling!) who would enjoy them. Any unclaimed books will be given to either Goodwill, the local library, or possibly our local prison, depending on which one seems to have the greatest need.

Day 4: Sharing the Food

2010-02-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

One of the most basic elements needed for life is food, and the meal has long been a cornerstone of family and community. Celebrations have long featured feasts as a central component and one of the ways that many cultures demonstrate sacrifice is by fasting, both of which are different ways of making you very aware of food. When you're conscious of the food you're eating, you really can't help but appreciate the abundance that we have around us in this world.

Today, this central role of food has been usurped by the mindless eating at the heart of American behavior, epitomized by the ease of the fast food industry and pre-made entrees which can be heated up in minutes in the microwave, many of which are marketed with a glossy veneer of misleading nutritional benefit claims.

Giving has traditionally started with food, because it was one of the few things of valuable that people had to give and which someone else would definitely need. In fact, there's no shortage of charities that focus on food, both locally and around the world. Consider a few examples:

Heifer International - This worldwide organization provides needy families with the livestock and training needed to grow their own herds and benefit from them. Remember to donate to Heifer International for the 40 Days of Giving team. Collecting $10,000 in donations by midnight on March 28 will result in Andrew donating his hair to needy children.

Aspire Indiana Farm - a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program run by Aspire Indiana Behavioral Health System (a merger of BehaviorCorp and The Center for Mental Health). The Farm provides work and training for citizens with disabilities, growing produce for the local community. You buy into the program up front, helping offset their costs, and then go in weekly to claim the produce that's part of your share of the weekly harvest.

Second Helpings - An Indianapolis-based organization, which reclaims food excess food from restaurants, grocery stores, and other sources, which would need to be thrown out otherwise. They provide training to under-employed citizens, so that they can get jobs in the food services industry. Together with volunteers, the food is prepared into nutritious meals which are provided to other service organizations throughout Indianapolis.

World Food Programme - the United Nations organization for fighting hunger worldwide.

Hungry for Change - The organization related to the recent film Food, Inc. (Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary) that seeks to inform people about the various issues that are resulting from the industrial food process, including foodborne illnesses.

Last night, we were reminded of the significant role food plays in community when a couple of our friends, motivated by the project, decided to shop at a local discount grocery and buy food in bulk, getting a lot of extra food for about the same price they would normally pay for their weekly food. They ended up with a lot of extra food, and decided to share some with us, and with some other friends who they know had some need. There was enough food there to probably supply meals for several days, with nothing else added (although we'd probably get full of rice and potatoes).

So our giving today has involved sharing this food that was shared with us, by inviting some other friends over for dinner. We both have a fair amount of work (writing for me, school work for Amber) that we need to get done, so this is a bit of a sacrifice in a sense ... but it's also important, we both feel, to make time for our friends. There's a lot to do in life, but slowing down every once in a while to make time for others is always useful.

As Gandhi said: There's more to life than increasing its speed.

This, sadly, is something I tend to forget. It is one of the lessons that I have to continually remind myself ... and taking the night off to have dinner with friends is a good way to do that.

Books That Inspired the Project

2010-02-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

Of course, in addition to the books that I'll be reading over the coming 40 days (discussed yesterday), there are a number of books that helped inspire and cultivate this project idea in its infancy. They basically fall in two categories.

Project Books

The first category includes what I have taken to calling "project books," which are autobiographical accounts of people who set themselves some specific goal and then go about trying to make it happen. Accounts like the ones below helped me get in a mindset for a project like this in the first place, even before I had an actual idea for what my particular project would be.

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs: Jacobs reads every word of the Encyclopedia Britannica, from A to Z, and writes about the amazing experience.
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs: In this book, Jacobs attempts to follow the Old Testament laws as closely as possible, even going so far as to drop stones on peoples' shoes in order to "stone" them. Jacobs is a fantastic author, and his account is highly engaging. This is the inspiration (along with the Bible itself, of course) for Ed Dobson's The Year of Living Like Jesus. Jacobs, in fact, wrote the forward to Dobson's book.
The Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible by David Plotz: Plotz reads the Old Testament from beginning to end, commenting as he goes on what occurs to him. I have attempted to do a similar project, though more piecemeal, over at my Philosopher's Stone blog. I'm still in Leviticus, but I think that's mostly because I haven't set definite goals on this one.
No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process by Colin Beavan: Beavan attempts to generate no net environmental impact, and the story is truly astounding. It really made me think about the overall impact of even seemingly small decisions, such as choosing to use disposable diapers or getting take-out food.

Philanthropy Books

In addition, I've also read a number of books that have stressed the importance of philanthropy, which have of course also set the seeds of this project in my mind:

Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World by Craig Kielburger & Marc Kielburger: This was a great book, really exploring the stories of two brothers who devote themselves to charitable work, and in fact a whole movement of the upcoming generation who is choosing to turn its back on the materialism that is at the heart of so much of modern American life.
The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me About Life and Wealth by Richard Paul Evans: I read this book right as I was getting ready to marry Amber and begin my life as a family man, and it had a profound effect on my views about money and success. The fifth lesson is "Give Back." In fact, many books on finance and success emphasize the importance of this. In addition to Amber's influence, it was this book that made me decide to begin giving a portion of my salary to charity, even when I felt I didn't have the excess to spare.
The Blessed Life: The Simple Secret of Achieving Guaranteed Financial Results by Robert Morris: This is a Christian-based book, which I bought from our church after watching a compelling video series based on it during the Christmas season of 2009. While I certainly think the "Guaranteed" in the title is a bit disingenuous (especially since the author says repeatedly that financial rewards are not guaranteed, even while implying strongly that they are guaranteed - you can't have it both ways, Reverend Morris!), I was intrigued at the strong argument he makes for how important giving, and specifically tithing, is. It's laced throughout the Bible, in places that I would never have expected. I'll discuss some of the thoughts on "tithing" that came out of this book later on.

Day 3: Bone Marrow Donor Registry

2010-02-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

For our third day of giving, Amber and I both registered with the "Be The Match" National Marrow Donor Program as potential bone marrow donors. We will receive cotton swabs in the mail, which we'll use to take cell samples from the inside of our cheeks, and then return for testing. We'll remain in the registry, and when we come up as a match for a needy recipient, our bone marrow will be extracted and donated, possibly saving a life.

We were inspired to this particular giving opportunity by a woman in class with Amber, whose young (three or four year old) son suffered from a form of leukemia. He immediately went on chemotherapy, and they set out to find a match. They ended up finding a matching donor from somewhere along the Pacific coast. The boy is now seven years old and is doing fine, all thanks to a stranger from across the country.

Now all of this testing and tracking takes money, so when you sign up for the registry they request a $100 donation to cover the costs associated with the donation. (We went ahead and put our $200 on the credit card. It's normally not a good idea to give with credit, but since we wanted to get on the registry as soon as possible, decided it would be okay this time since we'll pay it back with the paycheck next week. It just didn't seem in the spirit of the project to sign up for the registry and not cover the associated costs at the same time.) If you aren't able to donate money, though, you should still sign up for the registry, as long as you meet the guidelines. Donations from other sources, such as Jeff Gordon, can cover these costs even if you can't.

What amazed me was that the site also contains information about donating umbilical cord blood, and I really didn't realize that this was an option. I was vaguely aware of medical uses for the umbilical cord, and I knew that there were (expensive) services you could sign up for to save the umbilical cord blood in case your baby had a problem down the road, but in the wealth of information covered with the birth of our recent child, Gideon (three months and one week old!), I don't recall the issue of donating umbilical cord blood even coming up. If it did come up, it wasn't a big deal.

The website has a neat video about it, but it's not particularly informative on the details. It does make it clear that certain ethnicities, such as African-American, have high incidences of blood disorders, so they require a diverse pool of donor blood cells to get the proper matches. The reason why the umbilical cord blood is useful is, according to the site, "Cord blood is rich in blood-forming cells that can be used in transplants for patients with leukemia, lymphoma and many other life-threatening diseases."

At some point, you'd think that a person would have said, "Hey, pay attention - this stuff either goes in the incinerator or saves a life. Which do you want?" I mean, donating bone marrow is a big inconvenience (from what I've heard); donating umbilical cord blood, not so much. They just take that stuff away anyway, and you never see it again.

Part of me wonders if the reason it wasn't more prominently discussed was because we were at a Catholic hospital, but I wouldn't imagine that the use of umbilical cord blood would conflict with the philosophical doctrines at the heart of the Catholic church's opposition to stem cell research. (I'm not a biologist, but I do know that blood cells and stem cells are different.) Maybe people just don't want to be pushy at a time like that, but this is something that I really regret we didn't do.

So, if you're pregnant and reading this, or if you know someone who's pregnant, check out the information (or pass it along). Every parent should make an informed decision about this, and not just trust that your doctors will pass along every relevant option.

After all, your baby's first act in this world could be to save a life.

My Charitable Reading List

2010-02-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

While giving is great, my life-long love has always been reading, and I certainly won't give up reading during my 40 Days of Giving experiment ... but I will focus my reading on books that emphasize the importance of giving, or which seem thematically associated to the project. Here's the pile of books, mostly from my local library, that I have sitting before me:

How to Be An Everyday Philanthropist by Nicole Bouchard Boles
Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D.
The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin (Here's a link to an interesting radio interview with Jeremy Rifkin ... which is good, because this book is a monstrous tome at 616 pages plus many pages of endnotes, so I may not actually fit it into the 40 days.)
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal
The Power of Serving Others by Gary Morsch & Dean Nelson
The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith.
Give It Up!: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less by Mary Carlomagno (It's not about giving, but a useful book in exploring how to organize your life so that you are able to give)
29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker (This one, since it's sort of similar to what I'm doing, will be put off until the end of the project, since I don't want to be influenced by it too much.)
The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do by Rev. Ed Dobson (This is a sort of "sequel" to The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, which focused primarily on the Old Testament. Though written by a different author, it was inspired by the earlier book, and the Jacobs writes the forward. I don't know if I'll get to this one, or if I'll put it off until after the experiment is over.)

I've also snagged the following audiobooks from my local library, for when I'm in the car:

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton
The Generosity Factor: Discover the Joy of Giving Your Time, Talent, and Treasures by Kenneth Blanchard & S. Truett Cathy

This list of books should definitely get me in the giving mindset. I might need to occasionally run to the local coin shop and stare at some shiny gold coins just to avoid a full vow of poverty after taking all of this stuff into my brain.

Blessings Already?, or I Haven't Paid for Food in Two Days

2010-02-19T02:37:00.000-08:00

Last night, Amber, the kids, and I were invited over to a friend's house for a nice lasagna dinner. Lasagna is, actually, my favorite meal, so I was all over this. The only thing was that I'd had lasagna the night before ... and, like last night, I did not have to pay for it.

Actually, all of my meals for Day 1 and Day 2 of the experiment have been provided for free. I was in work meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so they provided us with Panera Bread for breakfast and lunch. On Wednesday, I claimed some leftover bagels to bring him for Amber and Elijah to have for Thursday's breakfast. Wednesday night, my manager took coworkers and me out for dinner, where I had lasagna ... about half of which was brought home for Amber's Thursday lunch. (Amber ended up eating lunch at her mother's, so the lasagna is still waiting in the fridge.) Then on Thursday night we were invited out for dinner, spontaneously, by friends - again, with lasagna, which is fine by me, since it's my favorite food.

I cannot help wondering if this is coincidence or should be interpreted as some form of synchronicity. That is a large part of why I'm doing the experiment, of course - to get some tangible evidence of whether there is a correlation between the good things that happen to you and the amount of giving in your life. So far, the jury's still out, but free food hasn't been the only reward.

For example, as we were beginning to plan this experiment, Amber recommended that we begin tithing to our local church. I will get into more detail on tithing specifically in a future post, but since we were planning the project, I figured that it couldn't hurt to give some to the church, which does a lot of good work in the community. Some of our money, no doubt, was used to help send one of our pastors to Haiti to help out, and so that alone makes it worthwhile in my book. (And this is, after all, my book.)

However, as I wrote the very first tithe check in January and placed it in the envelope, I thought about the sermons in the preceding weeks. The emphasis throughout the Christmas season had been on how giving really, tangibly, brings divine blessings (sometimes in the form of physical wealth) into your life. Now, to the degree that I have any religion, I tend to be more of a Deist ... God may exist, and may have set things in motion, but I really don't believe in a personal God who intervenes in affairs here on Earth all that much. (This may surprise many people reading this, given the project I'm working on, but keep in mind that if I did believe in such a thing, the whole experiment would be unnecessary.) I glanced up into the sky as I placed the tithe check into the envelope and said something along the lines of, "Okay, it's in your court now."

Then the phone rang. I stared at it. It rang again. I blinked. It rang again. I glanced at the envelope. It rang again. I stared at it. It rang again. I answered it.

It was Amber, and she was calling to tell me that a family member who was borrowing our old pick-up truck (which we really never used anyway) wanted to buy it from us. We ended up settling on a price of $750. Given the payment terms (requested by the buyer, who knew nothing about the experiment), only $100 will come in during the 40 Days, so this is money that we'll actually see and be able to use, instead of having to give it away as part of the experiment. In addition, this saves us roughly $20 a month in car insurance expenses which, since we rarely used the vehicle, were really kind of a waste of money.

Now that is a profoundly weird experience, I think. Certainly it's possibly just coincidence, but the dramatic juxtaposition of me thinking "It's in your court now" and the phone ringing, bringing money into my life (and removed an expense, which is in some ways even better), is a powerful one that's hard to ignore. The human brain makes it hard to see connections like this and not draw some sort of link between them, even in cases where none appears to exist. Not impossible, but hard. (On a related note, my essay in Pink Floyd and Philosophy addresses the philosophical questions related to human interpretation of these sort of connections, in the context of the perceived synchronization between the Dark Side of the Moon album and The Wizard of Oz film, including the aforementioned Jung's theory of synchronicity.)

On top of that, I've also been asked to teach a local writing workshop for kids, which would potentially bring in about $250. (The workshop would take place during the giving experiment, but I don't know if I'll actually receive the payment during that period or not.)

Furthermore, on Monday, a full two days before the experiment officially commenced, I had a series of experiences where - in somewhat rapid succession - I got several interesting business opportunities placed in my path without really trying too hard for them:

A new acquaintance who teaches physics and astronomy at a nearby university proposed the possibility of collaborating on a series of physics textbooks. He'd already begun making overtures to textbook companies on his own to gauge interest.
Tony Lakas, a friend who runs The Danger Room comic/gaming shop (and has generously joined as a 40 Days of Giving team member for Heifer donations!) proposed the idea of a monthly comic book series focusing on philanthropic issues. I'm not sure how feasible this one is, but it was interesting nonetheless, and Tony has the connections in the comic book industry that if I wanted to pursue it, I would actually have a chance of getting in touch with the people needed to make it manifest.
Another new acquaintance discussed setting up speaking engagements, and provided me with some insider tips on how to situate the engagements so that I'll actually get paid for them.

All in all, what do I think of this? It's interesting, and it certainly is in line with my hypothesis ... especially if any of them end up panning out. These, of course, are long term projects, and have the potential to offer benefits that far exceed the duration of the 40 Days of Giving project. We'll just have to see what comes of them.

Day 2: Giving Presents Itself

2010-02-18T15:02:00.000-08:00

On the first day of the experiment, an e-mail popped into my inbox with the message: "Giving opportunity for Handscoring employee" (Handscoring is one of the departments in our company, where they score assessment tests). Naturally, given the experiment, this caught my eye.

The message goes on to describe a situation where a truck hit a utility pole, which yanked the power line and the power meter off the house, resulting in a shortage which in turn sparked a fire. The fire ravaged the house, which has to be gutted and largely rebuilt, and destroyed the possessions of the inhabitants - the employee in question, as well as her mother.

Insurance is taking care of the reconstruction and most of the possessions, but now these two people were stuck in a rental unit near the home, while the insurance company and the truck's liability company hammered out the details of who was responsible for what, including extra rounds of damage assessments. So the call was for some household supplies - towels, blankets, various sorts of kitchenware, cleaning supplies, grooming supplies, and so on.

Amber went through the house and found several items of use, mostly blankets (and we got some towels from Amber's mother, as well!). She also offered up an inspirational book which she felt hopefully at least one of the women would enjoy.

This wasn't exactly what I had planned for Day 2, of course, but I did anticipate that these sort of opportunities would spring up as I got into the project. I recall a sermon from our local pastor, while the idea for this project was percolating, about how to know when to offer help to someone in need, and the sign was a simple one:

Notice the need

In essence, the argument was that if you notice that someone has a need, then you should step in to see how you can help that person fill that need. End of story. There is no debating over whether or not the person is worthy of this help, or anything else. Just offer help.

While the pastor framed this in a Christian perspective, such doctrines are nearly universally present across many different spiritual teachings the world over. Nor is this confined to spiritual individuals. Vocal atheists such as Richard Dawkins strenuously support the importance of personal morality, even while completely rejecting a spiritual basis for this morality. The central tenet of this morality, in both the spiritual and atheistic contexts, is based around the recognition and alleviation of suffering and hardship. Something within us - built into us by whatever mechanism does such things - recognizes that this activity is moral. Though we can (and should) discuss and debate the source of that morality, there is no denying that it's moral. (Unless, of course, you're Ayn Rand ... but more on that another day.)

Part of the purpose of the project is to cultivate my own ability to notice need and alleviate it. And I like that the opportunity arose so early, and hope it will continue to do so. There's a lot of need out there, so I don't expect it to be a rare event.

Day 1: Give Andrew's Hair Away!

2010-02-17T03:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, so the giving begins, and it starts at home ... and maybe that's where it will end, too. This piece of giving isn't just up to me, but is up to my friends, family, fans ... and even people I don't even know yet!

My plan is to complete the 40 Days of Giving by cutting my hair for Locks of Love, which uses the hair to create wigs for disadvantaged children suffering from medical hair loss. For those who don't know me personally, it may not be clear what a significant thing this is. I've been growing my hair, with only minor trims to remove split ends, for over a decade. Consider the following pictures, which clearly show the hair in question:

My wedding day - May 16, 2008

Honeymoon in Daytona Beach, May 2008

And no, I am not wearing a flaming fez. That's a torch on the pier behind us.

Summer 2009 - Florida again, this time at Sanibel Island

But not so fast ... this bit of giving has a catch, and you can help! I will sacrifice my treasured hair to Locks of Love ... if I successfully raise $10,000 for Heifer International by midnight on March 28!

So give generously, and pass the word along to your friends ... or even your enemies, for that matter! Heifer International is a worthwhile charity which not only provides the means for impoverished families around the world to sustain themselves (you even get to choose which animals you're donating), but also has a great program where your acts of philanthropy pay it forward into the future by passing on the gift.

In fact, I don't just want you to give (although I want you to do that, too!). You can also join my 40 Days of Giving team, which means that you can begin soliciting your own donations that will count toward the $10,000 team goal. I will give a gift of some kind (to be determined) to everyone who is able to raise at least $500!

So let me know, either by commenting here or on Facebook, what you think of this plan! Can you help join the crusade? Will you offer up your hair, as well?

I'm also taking suggestions on giving without any money. I've got a great plan for Day 2, but after that I've still got to fill the time until February 26 (when I get my next paycheck, which I will then proceed to give away) ... that's 7 days of giving in which I'll have no income to give!

IHOP Gives Free Pancakes

2010-02-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how you tune into all kind of giving opportunities when you're actually looking for them. This one is from the fine people at IHOP - National Pancake Day. Next Tuesday, February 23, IHOPs across the country are offering a free short stack (3 pancakes) ... So what's the ulterior motive, you may be asking?

Well, you're right, there is an ulterior motive. They'd like you to consider donating to a local charity. What a deal!

In addition, of course, IHOP no doubt hopes that you'll order some coffee or other drinks, and maybe a side of bacon or sausage, but there's nothing wrong with that. Giving things away for free is actually, if done right, a phenomenal business model. The various ways that this model can be adapted are discussed at length in Chris Anderson's great book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anyone who makes decisions about how a business runs, or is involved in any sort of marketing, should read this book.