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A Good Cause

(via texburgher) Many of you know my girlfriend, Julie.

If you do, you already know something of why I love her. Her affability and vivaciousness are infectious, and that’s hard not to love. That those traits point to her deep compassion for people is probably no surprise, but you might not know about the happily selfless dedication she brings to spreading that compassion around.

This summer, after spontaneously giving her umbrella to a stranger caught in a sudden downpour, she had an idea. Simply put, she wondered if she could start a viral campaign to encourage random acts of kindness. She imagined the stranger with her new umbrella, bewildered about her good fortune and perhaps inspired to pay the favor forward - potentially touching off a chain reaction of random, generous acts. So the idea for “Here You Go” was born.

As a surprise in August, I bought Julie 50 umbrellas and conspired with a mutual friend to print and stamp custom postcards to affix to the umbrellas. Reflecting the vision Julie had described, each postcard carried a message gently nudging the recipient to do something in kind for another stranger - to pay forward the favor they’d been done. We conducted what became a little pilot program with those 50 umbrellas. Julie handed some out, as did I. To my delight, my kids wanted to get in on the action too, and felt great each time they convinced a stranger to accept an umbrella. It was fantastic fun, and beautiful to see the recipients’ reactions go from wariness and confusion to surprise and open gratitude. Our thirst was whetted, and we decided to try to scale our little homegrown charity.

In October, we received a grant from The Sprout Fund, a very highly regarded Pittsburgh nonprofit dedicated to funding projects that enrich and deepen the cultural life of our community. Being naive fundraisers, however, we applied for exactly what we needed to execute the scaled version of the project - and we received just over half. Very exciting stuff! 6 months ago, we never would have imagined receiving a $3000 grant from The Sprout Fund! But it left us with a curious problem: In order to execute the project, we now need to raise an additional $2500 on our own.

That’s why I’m writing this today. I’m asking for a donation to help us reach our goal of raising an additional $2500 to conduct a full-scale version of our umbrella program. We’re conducting our entire campaign online, through the incredible Kickstarter website.

In the last two weeks, we’ve received pledges from 50 backers, totally over $1600 in pledged funding! Many of your reading this are among those 50, and I cannot thank you enough for your pledge. We’re almost to our goal!

But there’s one crucial caveat: IN ORDER TO RECEIVE ANY OF THE PLEDGED DONATIONS, WE HAVE TO REACH OUR GOAL OF RAISING $2500 BY DECEMBER 7TH. You read that right, it’s all or nothing with this campaign. And it’s brilliant - because if we succeed, we will succeed completely. But we’re still $900 away from reaching our goal, and we need all the help we can get.

This is where you come in, and timing is absolutely critical. Please check out our project’s Kickstarter page. Watch the video of Julie explaining the project. (She does a better job in 60 seconds than I could in 100 emails or blog posts.) Then, please make a donation if you can. Any amount gets us closer to our goal, so don’t feel like a $10 or $20 donation isn’t enough to matter. Because IT ALL MATTERS.

Okay, thanks for reading this. I’m sorry if it was kind of long. I know I have a problem. Here’s where I stop typing though, and hopefully where you start clicking. Thank you so much for any help you’re able to give. And please forward this plea to anyone you think may be interested and willing to help.

Sincerely,
Geoff

Here You Go on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1901754761/here-you-go