Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [24]
Throughout college, Brianne volunteered with the Heart of America Foundation, speaking to more than five thousand high school and middle school students about the importance of volunteering. When she went home to Wisconsin, Brianne kept giving. At age twenty-three, she organized young women in the Wisconsin Cherry Blossom Princess program (she was the 2003 princess) to donate books and read to local schoolchildren. At twenty-four, she organized a drive in South Milwaukee that collected more than seven thousand books for children in poor rural schools. At twenty-five, in connection with Washington, D.C.’s annual Cherry Blossom Festival, she helped organize a week of activities that included a community-service project at an elementary school. Very few of us have to take the risks to serve that Brianne Schwantes takes every day. It makes her happy.
At the ripe old age of six, McKenzie Steiner organized her friends in California to participate in her second beach cleanup. She did the first beach cleanup with her school but was concerned because there was still trash on the beach when they stopped. So she decided to enlist her friends to do another one. She brought gloves and plastic bags for about twenty other kids to pick up bottle lids, containers, bags, and other trash. McKenzie told me she plans on doing a cleanup on her next birthday and several after that, and she is talking to her mother about organizing one a month. When I asked her why she did it, she said, “Sometimes animals die from people littering in the ocean…. I felt better for helping animals and people coming to the beach to swim.”
If someone as young as McKenzie Steiner can organize her own time-giving project and someone like Brianne Schwantes can give so much, surely we all can give something.
If you’re willing to volunteer, there is no shortage of organizations and projects that will be glad to welcome you. Many local newspapers run advertisements asking for volunteers who are willing to help but don’t have a particular area of commitment. Or you can check out volunteermatch.org. You just put in your own zip code and it gives you a list of opportunities in your area. If you’re not American or if you want to volunteer in another country, check out VSO at vso.org.uk for innovative opportunities to pass on skills to people in local communities. Whatever you do, it will almost certainly be educational, enjoyable, and rewarding. And remember, if everyone did it, we would change the world.
FOUR
Giving Things
MOST INDIVIDUALS, FAMILIES, and enterprises in wealthy countries have things they can easily give away to people who need them, in their own communities or around the world. The challenge is to identify a really useful gift and get it to where it’s required or to someone who can be trusted to deliver it. Fortunately, there are some fine organizations who do that job, most of them founded by people who saw how things that were part of their everyday lives could make a big difference in the lives of others.
Doc to Dock was founded by Dr. Bruce Charash to collect and deliver American medical supplies, equipment, and pharmaceutical products to health providers in Africa and the Middle East. More than seven thousand tons of usable medical supplies are discarded in U.S. hospitals and clinics every day. The organization aims to recapture as many of these supplies as possible, solicit direct donations from manufacturers, collect supplies and equipment from doctors and nurses at major medical conventions, and monitor the impact of its donations in the hospitals and clinics that receive them. For example, Doc to Dock will ask doctors to bring an extra stethoscope to a cardiology convention, or material for plastic casts to an orthopedic meeting. Hospitals use many items that come in multi-product packages, and though each item is separately packaged, rules often prohibit