Tag: change-can

Giving Made Easy

Brian FullfordLeave a comment

Imaging you are driving the road ways of Jacksonville, FL and you come upon a homeless man or some other experience which triggers thankfulness of your condition along with a desire to help. Emotions can be tricky wolves as once they pass the power to react diminishes or the sentiment itself may be forgotten.

A benefit of our technological achievements is the ability to manage our finances remotely. With the aid of our mobile devices we can check account balances, transfer funds and donate to causes. I received a tweet this morning from The Sulzbacher Center (@thewayhome). If you are not familiar with this organization, here is who they are as stated on their website.

We are Northeast Florida’s only provider of comprehensive services for homeless men, women and children.We are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.We serve nutritious meals and offer safe shelter. But that is just the beginning. We provide outstanding health care and high-quality children’s programs. Our job placement assistance and life skills programs equip men and women for employment and for success. We offer something simple, but important—hope.

The contents of the tweet were simple and straight forward.

Text “wayhome” to 20222 to make a quick and easy $5 donation to the Sulzbacher Center via your wireless provider. It’s fun.

This is something you are surely familiar with as it is what groups such as the Red Cross have utilized to obtain donations for catastrophic events such as the earthquake in Japan. Yet it is something that had slipped my mind and a thing which seems so basic. Such a great use of Twitter, to send out daily, weekly or monthly requests. The financial benefit to Sulzbacher is further spelled out on their site: $1 is the cost of one meal. Through a text while in your car, out to dinner or walking the local mall you can feed five people.

I would encourage you to follow Sulzbacher or another local/global group which you would like to help. Contact them to ask if they have such a feature. Please share any giving opportunities you have come across.

Recommended Twits

Brian FullfordLeave a comment

As I slowly and painfully (to a degree) make my switch from Facebook to Twitter I thought sharing some of the “Twits” I follow might be a nice feature. It can be very much like going down a rabbit hole as you will find one, see who they follow, add them…you see where this is going. But in life that is how things work. The problem is that when you have so much information coming at you it can be hard to process.

Twitter makes it nice (for those who don’t use it) in that those you follow will re-tweet those they follow so your timeline can remain relatively clean.

I have actually been using Twitter for years as a resource for mostly my Jacksonville Jaguars writing through JaguarsBlog and BigCatCountry. However after a recent Twitter conversation which became nothing short of straw man arguments and blatant misinterpretation of intent I knew the time to pull away from this “football world” at a higher level was required. I didn’t like how I was reacting and the basic lack of civility and integrity created an atmosphere I was not strong enough to not be “corrupted” by.

It never fails to amaze how hard it is to admit weakness.

So enough with the history of this personal “Twit”. Here are a few folks that keep the timeline filled with great ideas.

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Two Tuesday Quotes: Thoreau and Mead

Brian FullfordLeave a comment

Things do not change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.
Margaret Mead
On Thoreau:
Over the years, Thoreau’s reputation has been strong, although he is often cast into roles — the hermit in the wilderness, the prophet of passive resistance (so dear to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) — that he would have surely seen as somewhat alien. His work is so rich, and so full of the complex contradictions that he explored, that his readers keep reshaping his image to fit their own needs. Perhaps he would have appreciated that, for he seems to have wanted most to use words to force his readers to rethink their own lives creatively, different though they may be, even as he spent his life rethinking his, always asking questions, always looking to nature for greater intensity and meaning for his life.
– A comment by Ann Woodlief Emerita Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University
On Mead:
Of her life’s work, cultural anthropologist, museum curator and feminist scholar Margaret Mead once said, “I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples — faraway peoples — so that Americans might better understand themselves.”
– Meredith Melnick’s Time magazine piece about Mead as one of the 25 most powerful women of the past century