Wise Ideas

The Giving Tree

I witnessed something extraordinary this weekend...a sliver of shining light in these dim times.  And it is something that charities, schools, small businesses, big corporations, and government would do well to take note of. 

There is still money out there to be spent.  But the difference between now and back then is that before people part with their money, they want proof it will do some greater good....whether that "good" is putting people back to work, repairing a roadway, or insuring teachers and students have the tools they need to teach and learn. 

Our public school auction was held Saturday night.  And despite these tough times - and A LOT of worrying by yours truly - parents spent money.  Lots of it.  In fact, we exceeded our budgeted projections and might even have some money left-over to start a "rainy day" fund to get our PTA through these lean years.

And although these parents bid, bought and got great deals on things they would probably be buying anyway (summer camps, haircuts, gift cards at grocery stores), they REALLY opened up their wallets for heartfelt, personal and meaningful items like Principal for the Day opportunities for their kids, bowling with the popular PE teacher, a museum outing with a First Grade teacher and most especially the quilts made by the kids in each classroom and sewn together during weekend quilting bees by many a mom (and a few dads).

There is money to be spent out there, if people really believe it will do some good, and not just line someone else's expensive pocket.  

Plus, another tip I learned over the weekend.  A lot of wine and a DJ help!

The Downsized Christmas

If there was any doubt remaining that Americans were downsizing Chrismukkah this year - it was completely erased with the news that Wal-Mart had as many shoppers this past weekend than Sears, JC Penny, Target AND Toys "R" Us combined.  Backing up that observation are recent statistics from the Pew Center showing that 73% of people survey confirm they're cutting back. 

The NY Times recently featured a special  "Holidays Downsized" section reporting about how people of different ages, faiths and economic status are adjusting and reframing their holiday traditions.  In fact, no matter what newspapers or magazines you read, radio stations you listen to or TV newscasts you watch --- you'll hear stories on exactly how we are putting the brakes on our consumer culture and realigning our values to better fit the times.

Whether it's office parties, the height of the Christmas tree or the amount spent on gifts, people are cutting back.  And it's not unusual to hear the sentiment "it's about time" pop up in these stories.  I couldn't agree more.

But instead of looking at this holiday season as a bleak imitation of years past -- there is a movement afoot to "redefine" Christmas.  "It's not about reinventing the holiday. It's about changing the way we look at gift giving and receiving," says the website Redefine-Christmas.org.  "It's taking money we usually spend on obligatory gifts with little meaning, and creating gifts of charity that give in multiple ways, to the receiver, the giver, and people who truly need. 

According to the blog, Cause Marketing, Redefine Christmas is multi-faceted media campaign involving radio, Church-based outreach, celebrities, social media, and e-greeting cards. It actually launched last holiday season -- when the recession "officially" started but the "experts" wouldn't call it one.

Although the Redefine-Christmas website leads visitors to two other websites (JustGive.org and ChangingThePresent.org) that can help you search and donate to countless charities...there are other participating organizations including Well Good LLC and the Dalio Family Foundation.

But it's one thing, as an adult, to redefine gift giving and downsize personal spending.  It's a whole other can of worms downsizing the expectations of certain members of the household who can't understand why Santa would be at the mercy of something as un-jolly as the economy.

Try explaining to a true believer why just one gift from Santa is all that's going to turn up under the tree this year, when last year he or she got five or six.

I know, I know.  It's all the fault of us parents, who have been spoiling our kids for far too long with far too much stuff.  You could, in turn, blame all our parents, who did the same thing.  It's the American way - working to give your children more than what you had. 

But it's also the American way to find an entrepreneurial end to your goals.  And according to the Wall Street Journal, countless kids are doing just that -- by selling their old toys on eBay and CraigsList to raise the money to buy the stuff their parents can't afford to buy them.  

Call it Holiday 2.0.  Now that's a redefinition of Christmas Santa and Mrs. Claus would be proud of.

Bottom Feeders Begging for Dollars

PTAs are the plankton of the philanthropic ocean...bottom feeders who, according to WikiAnswers, actually end up consuming one another in an attempt to survive. 

I came up with this analogy as I was reading the NYTimes' special section this week on "Giving." The section features dozens of articles with one main theme:  how will non-profits and charities survive when times are tough and donations are down?  From food banks to huge foundations -- non-profits nationwide are tightening their belts and developing creative fund raising methods.

But the groups featured in the Times Giving section were all large, mostly recognizable organizations.  What of all of us PTA plankton who, even in good times, struggle to get $25 here and $50 there in order to keep a P.E. teacher employed or markers in the kindergarten classrooms? 

Bake sales just aren't enough to pay for what's lacking these days in public schools - that is - if it's even legal to have a bake sale in your kid's school anymore.

As the chairperson of the annual auction at my children's public school this year, I am particularly freaked out by the prospect of running the school's largest single fundraiser in such lean times.   Ever since last fall when the recession started hitting the middle class - I've been waiving the warning flag at PTA meetings - urging parents and faculty NOT to expect such fabulous profits from the auction has we have enjoyed in the past.

Not to gloat - in fact I wish I'd been wrong - but I was right.  At last spring's auction which I also chaired, our school saw a 20-percent decline from the year before, with higher food costs eating into our total.

This year, I am again the maniac at the meeting begging parents not to put all their fund raising eggs in the auction basket - as I am fearful of even smaller auction revenue come March 2009. And unfortunately, hope and hard work are not things we can actually bank on. 

We are going to have to count on our community of local merchants and businesses -- which are all struggling as well -- to come through for us.  And as usual, we are also going to have to count on the generosity of our own parent community to dig even deeper into their empty wallets to pay for things once considered "basics" at public schools.  As The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch reports this week, "local PTAs in California are being asked to raise millions of dollars to backfill programs and services in the face of massive budget cuts to schools."  Welcome to my world.

In the election just ended, average Americans came out of the woodwork to donate money, knock on doors and make phone calls for their candidates and issues.  The outpouring of volunteerism was unlike anything I'd ever seen in my lifetime.  As I mentioned in a blog just last week called Change We Can Participate In, in this post-election world it would be a shame to let all this civic energy go to waste.

The question remains though, how to plug into that spirit within our own communities - and get it to work for the plankton of the philanthropic ocean?  Because while everyone seems to agree that our public education system is broken and needs to be fixed -- few with the where-with-all to do anything about it actually reach down to the people holding the system together - the PTAs - to give them a helping hand.   

And conversely, the PTAs - peopled by stressed-out working parents who volunteer "on the side" - do not have the bandwidth to seek and solicit the "big fish" they really need to keep their schools together until real help can arrive, if it ever really does.  NYTimes Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof writes today that President-elect Obama has ranked education fifth among his priorities.  "If it is being downplayed, that’s a mistake," Kristof says.  Here we go again......

However, as I learned from WikiAnswers and from Al Gore, when the plankton die off - the bigger fish which survive on the plankton start dying as well.  And then - well - you get the picture. 

Even though times are tough, we can't afford to let our public schools wither away and die while politicians debate over how to restructure the system.  Public schools need help now.  Contact your local PTA or just walk into your neighborhood school.  They'd be happy to take a $25 donation. And if you get a solicitation for a local school auction in your mail, please contribute something.

We plankton may not be able to catch any big fish --- but some smaller fish will do just fine. 

Know When to Hold 'em, Know When to Fold 'em

Before summer started, I made by two kids compile a list of 10 chores they would do weekly over the break to earn their allowance.  There were three chores which appeared on both lists:  make bed, clean room and fold laundry.

Fold laundry?  The reason behind that is that both my son and my daughter love the smell and warmth of clothes just out of the dryer.  However, "fold" is waaaaaay too generous a word for what it takes them 30 seconds to do....after they've soaked all the warmth out of the clothes by hugging them.

Call me Type-A (you won't be the first), but after the kids help me "fold" the laundry....I always end up re-folding it. sorting it and putting it away -- having long since been abandoned by my two helpers who quickly find somewhere else to be.

But it turns out I'm not so anal about folding the laundry as I thought. 

A Page One story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal tells how countless Gap and other former clothing store employees - trained in the "art of folding" during the past 25+ years - are now among the "ranks of obsessive folders."  "Legions of retail grads have spent countless hours neatly folding T-shirts and jeans and stacking them on tables and shelves," says the WSJ.  "Now, their peculiar idea of perfection is straining marriages and leading to bizarre behavior ranging from buying clothes based on an item's foldability to straightening up sloppy displays while shopping."

Call it Compulsive Folding Behavior.  Apparently there could be hundreds of thousands of "retail refugees" suffering from CFB - because as The Journal reports, The Gap claims to have trained that many people over the years in the "art of folding clothes." 

Pre-Gap --- clothing stores always used to hang their merchandise on racks because it was easier to maintain.  But The Gap was the first to fill its stores with tables and begin displaying folded clothing in piles to emphasize certain styles and colors.  Thus - clerks trained in folding were needed to keep Gap stores looking neat and orderly.  Gap thrived (back then), and other stores followed suit --- training their clerks to fold just as neatly, just as quickly.

Years later - after most of those early folding clerks have left retail to pursue other careers - numerous folding products have been introduced into the marketplace by former folders who obviously believe there are millions of Americans who suffer from CFB.  Products like FlipFold (as seen on TV!) and MobileFold. 

Me?  I'd rather just off-load the chore onto my two children --- who wouldn't recognize the difference between a shirt folded at The Gap and one just shoved into a drawer.

Well - at least that's one fewer psychological disorder my kids won't have to seek treatment for.  Unless they end up getting summer jobs at The Gap.

The Church of Oprah

I'm all for grassroots philanthropy and encouraging altruism in America.

When I actually have time, I've been known to indulge in and actually enjoy prime time TV - especially good prime time TV like Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock and House.

And I have nothing but the utmost respect for Oprah Winfrey, whose contribution to our culture and impact on society has really been nothing but positive.

But when you put the three together (philanthropy + prime time TV + Oprah) and throw in the worst excuse for entertainment - reality TV - what you get is Oprah's Big Give, a bizarre cross between Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The Amazing Race, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

The show, which premiered last night on ABC, sends ten competing contestants across country in search of people who are really, seriously deserving of a hand-up in the form of tons of cash.   There are no losers among the needy....but a "giver" is given the boot each week by judges who determine who deserves to stay and who deserves to go.  I'm still not quite sure what guidelines they're following to decide this. 

The show isn't actually hosted by Oprah, but of course features brief snippets of the busy media maven checking in with everyone's progress.  Does she realllllly get that made up to make phone calls?

I'm sure it left millions of viewers "in tears of joy," as Oprah put it in an interview conducted by media critics including The Washington Post's Tom Shales.  But it left me with a smarmy feeling.  Yes - there were truly heart-wrenching moments.  But despite Oprah's announcement to TV critics that "I wouldn't be involved with anything that was going to humiliate or dehumanize or make anybody feel bad," to me the show smacked of exploitation.  Kind of a perverted American Gladiator spin on charity.

The show is already getting mixed reviews.  NYTimes critic Alessandra Stanley called it "ingenious: a fierce, cutthroat competition between people who are dedicated to doing good." But The Times TV Decoder blog, and it's readers, were not so generous.  As one reader put it, the "whole notion of philanthropy could be given a bad name by this caper–which looks like a “concept” some misguided soul 'pitched' to Oprah." And the Chicago Tribune wonders "how many of those corporate donations were lined up in advance and came from companies that were eager to be part of a prime-time Oprah endeavor?"

An LATimes article points out that Oprah's Big Give "is a logical extension of Winfrey's brand," and that the show's "elegant stroke" is that it makes charity "viral," with the bigger goal of mainstreaming charitable values.  Kind of "An Inconvenient Truth" for philanthropy, I guess.

But despite how selfish we may seem on the surface, America is still a country filled with altruistic, giving people.  According to some surprising statistics from The National Philanthropic Trust, 89 percent of American households currently make some sort of charitable contribution - with the average household giving level hovering around $1,600.

And , in the first ever national study ever conducted on altruism and empathy, Tom W. Smith at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that Americans are practicing what they hear preached.  That is, church goers are doing unto others in increasing numbers.  "People in a religious congregation are nested in a community that provides them with opportunities to do good deeds and reach out to others," Smith notes.

To me, altruism seems more of a personal expression and therefore, a more personal experience...not something to be shared with millions of people armed with remotes, who might just as soon be watching Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.

However, who's going to argue with the Church of Oprah, i.e. Oprah's Big Give, with services held Sunday nights at 9 on ABC.  Oprah viewers are nothing if not faithful.  Do I hear an Amen?

Mental Post-Its

I've got a TON of little, niggling things to do today.  You know, the kind of errands, chores, emails, etc...that pile up on post-it notes and scraps of paper on your desk and in your kitchen.

But before I get to all of those reminders, I thought I'd clean out all those random mental post-its stacking up in my brain, and get them out on this blog today - things I've been wanting to write about but aren't worth a full blog, or are off topic.  Let the cleaning commence.

• While we of the vast middle class tighten our belts and hunker down for recession...the wealthy elite are cavorting in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum discussing how to "improve the state of the world," in between ski trips and photo ops with Bono.  Bill Gates, no slouch in the wealth department, addressed the forum yesterday and advocated a kinder, gentler capitalism. "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well."  You go, Bill.  If you thought running Microsoft was hard...try getting corporations to part with their profits.  I wish him all the luck in the world.

• Fight with your spouse and live longer.  So say the preliminary results of a study conducted by the  University of Michigan School of Public Health and Psychology Department, which you can read about at LiveScience.com.  Apparently, keeping all those frustrations to yourself is more harmful than letting them fly at your husband. Tell that to Hillary this week.

• What exactly, are people thinking about during Yoga class when the blissed-out, paper-thin instructor urges the class to "find your core."  Food writer Kim O'Donnell at The Washington Post admits that what she thinks about is the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.  There's a gym rat after my own heart.

• American Idol.  Over it.

• Johnson & Johnson's Scrubbing Bubbles brand has a new automatic shower cleaner on the market.  "Cleans your shower with a touch of a button."  It can't really be that simple, can it?

• Gee, what are we going to spend our "economic stimulus package" money on?  You know, the money the nation is counting on to bounce us out of recession.  Oh, that's right....we're still paying bills from Christmas.  Guess we already spent it. 

• I hear enough bickering in my house.  I don't need to hear it from the people who want to be President.  We've all seen enough enough dirty laundry in our lives to recognize the "spin" cycle when we see it. 

• Why on earth isn't John Edwards, seen here earlier this week on Letterman, higher up in the polls?

• Mike Huckabee's got Chuck Norris watching his back....now John McCain's got Sylvester Stallone in his corner.  Only in America.  Maybe the media will stop obsessing over "issues" and start a contest to match each candidate up with their perfect movie action hero.

Whew -- my brain feels soooo clean.  Now it's time to get busy on the real post-it notes and scraps of paper.  That should take me my whole three day weekend (Monday off - Semester Break for the kids).  Have a great weekend.

BTW - has Bruce Willis endorsed anybody yet?........

The Way to a Mom's Wallet

Memo to local business owners, multi-national corporate executives and everyone in between:

You want - strike that - you need the mom market.  Your business's bottom line relies on the consumer choices being made every day by "the decider" in every home in America.  And that "decider," as statistics show, is the mom.

You've tried changing your ad campaign.  You've tried changing your marketing tactics.  You've shifted the entire focus of your business in an effort to lure moms to try, or stick with, your brand.

However, I suggest you start looking outside your own offices and products for ways to increase your mom market share, by instead focusing on ways you can actually make real change, a concrete difference, in the lives of moms.

Set yourself apart from your competitors by NOT spending millions on a package redesign, and instead invest that money in grant programs, corporate sponsorships, or meaningful cash donations to the 26,000 PTAs across the country struggling to provide pencils, papers and books for their kids.

In these economically challenging times, as states like California ponder cutting school budgets by billions ($5.6 billion in CA to be exact), the consumers you rely on are too worried about how to keep their kids schools afloat to even give a hoot about your new ad campaign.  They need help - now - at the local level. 

Your decision to reroute millions of advertising and marketing dollars into public school fund raising campaigns will not only inspire moms by the millions to buy your products --- but it also might inspire other businesses to do the same. 

Imagine the difference you could actually make in the lives of American families - who would reward your generosity with some real brand loyalty...something that doesn't really exist anymore in this Land of Too Many Choices.

If you are a local merchant scrapping for business as recession looms -- rethink all those requests you get to donate to numerous school auctions.  Donate a dinner for two, some tickets, some merchandise or a gift card, and I guarantee you that grateful parents will thank you with their business.

If you are a major player in the food industry like - say - General Mills, pick a division like Cheerios, pick a needy cause like childhood literacy, and as part of your efforts provide $50,000 to a new national program at the Library of Congress aimed at inspiring young people to read.  (For real!  You can read about the Cheerios program in this NYTimes Book Review article).

Then there's Yahoo's Internet search engine called GoodSearch.com, which donates about a penny for every web search to the school (or other charity) of the users choice. Or Target's  "Take Charge of Education" program (although Target and Yahoo could undoubtedly afford giving back more than they're giving now).

I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this kind of "charitable marketing," but I really don't have time to look for them.  I'm too busy trying to twist the arms of local merchants and national corporations to donate something - anything - to the upcoming auction that provides the bulk of funding for the PTA at my kid's school. 

Moms - still the chief fund raisers at schools nationwide - are tired and frustrated.  Volunteerism and PTA membership is down nationally due to parental burn-out, lack of time, and the feeling that the job is just too overwhelming.  You can read proof of this in recent entries of the Washington Post's OnBalance ("PTA Do-Gooders") and OnParenting ("It Was Nice Knowing You, PTA") blogs. 

Take it from me.  I'm one of the six million members of a local PTA.  And believe me, what used to be considered a coffee clatch is now a determined, sometimes divisive, group of parents bewildered by the lack of interest and funding of public education. 

We could really use your help.  And in exchange, you'd get our business, and the satisfaction that the money you're spending on "advertising" is working in ways you never dreamed of. 

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

MJ Call
Exhausted parent, household "decider" and Auction Co-Chair

Tweens and the Power of Giving

I know people in-the-know who already know what "the next big thing" is.

These are the same people who told me about YouTube months before the mainstream media was even aware that it had been rendered passe....and a good year-and-a-half before its $1.65 billion acquisition by Google.

These are also the same people who were so far ahead of the curve that they had already grown tired of their Club Penguin accounts by the time Disney recognized its value and snatched it up for a mere $700 million.

The people in-the-know that I know are the kids who go to the same K through 8 school that my kids attend.  And they're probably in your kids schools, too.

I'm not talking about web savvy teenagers, although there are plenty of those.  I'm talking about 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th graders who have become the ultimate viral messengers...passing along word of largely unknown sites that within months, burst out of Internet obscurity to become the next big multi-gazillion dollar thing.

Where these pint-sized trend setters are getting their original information is anyone's guess. I've not been able to track this due to the fleeting attention spans and memories of the messengers.  But I can tell you that once a site passes the "cool" test by these 7 to 11 year olds...it spreads like wildfire.

The hot site now sweeping our school is FreeRice.com, the only place (for now) where you can build your vocabulary and feed the world's hungry. Here's how it works.  Visitors to the site play a simple word definition game, and every time they click on a right answer, FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program (WFP).  The words increasingly grow in difficulty with every right answer.

As users play the game, an onscreen bowl fills up with rice and keeps count of grains "earned" for the WFP.  "It's really caught fire," Brenda Barton, a WFP spokeswoman tells The Christian Science Monitor.  "More people visit our site from the link on Freerice.com than any other referral." 

FreeRice.com was started less than two months ago by a man named John Breen, who runs another website called Poverty.com.  Breen says he created FreeRice as both an adjunct to his Poverty site, as well as a way to help his son study for his SATs, a story you can hear more about by listening to this NPR Morning Edition report which ran yesterday.

But very few (if any) kids I know listen to NPR or read the CSMonitor.  Instead, they rely primarily on each other to find and spread the word about the hippest, hottest things to fill their free time.

One third grader I know has played FreeRice so often that she's reached a vocabulary level way beyond her years....AND earned Lord knows how many bags of rice by now. It seems FreeRice has hit on the secret to success:  take something every parent hates - kids spending too much time on the computer - and add not only an educational element, but a philanthropic one as well.

Marketing to tweens is nothing new, as you can read here in this 2005 BusinessWeek article. The piece rightly points out that the economic power of a tween is dependent entirely on their parents.  But the $221 billion dollar youth market, as estimated by 360Youth.com, is proof that a persistant tween can be very persuasive.   

But it's a welcome change of pace that what tweens are talking about now is feeding the world's hungry, rather than acquiring something for themselves.  And that's one tween trend I can really get behind.

A Drop in the Bucket

When the kids and I finished our errands at the mall yesterday, I gathered up all the change in my purse and we went in search of a red kettle.  It was easy to find, since all we had to do was follow the sound of the ringing bell...which has become just as much a sound of the season as carolers, Christmas muzak and babies crying on Santa's lap.

The kids stuffed the kettle full of coins, but it was literally just a drop in the bucket for The Salvation Army, which could use a little salvation itself right about now.  Donation growth rates among America's largest charities have slowed significantly, after making record climbs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami.  In fact, more than a quarter of those charities have experienced a turnaround and are now seeing significant declines in donations.

Among them, The Salvation Army, which according to a survey by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, experienced a 55-percent drop in donations last year. Charity watchers blame philanthropic fatigue following a particularly brisk pace of giving in the disastrous year that was 2005, the uncertain economy, and increased competition among the growing number of non-profit organizations.

As a result, long-time and start-up charities are reaching out to potential donors in new ways.  One of the most popular new outreach methods is catalogs.  As you can read here in this MSNBC report, organizations including the United Nations Children’s Fund, OxFam America and the World Wildlife Fund "sell" items like mosquito nets and endangered animals in holiday gift catalogs. 

"Charities that offer the catalogs are tapping into issues of great concern to Americans — the environment, global aid — so both donors and recipients can feel they are making a difference," Palmer tells MSNBC.

But back to the 129 year-old Salvation Army...which doesn't have a - for lack of a better word - trendy cause like global warming or  African orphans which it serves.  Instead, it tries to provide the basic necessities of food and shelter to millions of people who have slipped through the cracks....the ones we city people walk by everyday...the ones whose plights are so vividly dramatized in The Salvation Army's new holiday public service announcement which you can see on the agency's home page.

It's estimated that some 30 million Americans a year rely on The Salvation Army.  And it relies on us to  keep it going.

There's no catalog, though.  Just bell ringers...real and virtual.  Two years ago The Salvation Army launched an online Red Kettle campaign in an effort to stir the social consciouses of social networkers.  This viral campaign raised $482,000 last year.  This year the agency expects those figures to grow, due to its partnership with Facebook, and the generosity of its many users and their many "friends."

Back at the mall, after the kids had stuffed the kettle full of coins and wished the bell ringer in the Santa hat a Merry Christmas, my son said to me "that felt good."  I don't doubt his earnestness.  It does feel good to give - even if it's only a drop in the bucket.

Food for Thought

I'm posting from Bellevue, Washington today - where I am thankful not to be cooking tomorrow.  However, having spent other years chained to the kitchen planning and prepping for the Thanksgiving feast, I know what all you cooks are going through.

Here's something to keep in mind today as you make your final grocery store runs:  pick up some extra cans and boxes of good nutritious food items, and take them to your nearest food bank before you head home.

As you can read here in The Christian Science Monitor, the nation's food banks don't have nearly enough food to help feed the 35.5 million Americans, a third of them children, who are going hungry today.

Vicki Escarra, President of America's Second Harvest, tells the CSN that her group's 200-plus food banks are reporting "critical shortages."  "There simply may be no food for many families," Escarra says. 

Partially to blame are the same things that are impacting your family:  higher oil prices which have resulted in higher food prices.  Many families who are struggling to make ends meet are having to make a decision this year between paying the heating bill, and buying food.

Make that decision easier for them --- by giving food or money to your local food bank, which will make sure your donation makes it to a family in need in your community.