How To Become An Armchair Activist

When I was a high school sophomore, with a road test and the SATs looming over me, making a positive difference in the life of someone else seemed like a totally impossible task. A friend challenged my inaction, claiming my attitude was all that stood in my way.

The friend, Craig Keilburger, suggested I start small. So I registered a chapter of Free the Children, the non-profit that Craig founded when he was 12, at my high school. I was an aspiring guitarist so I threw, and performed in, a talent show as a fundraiser to help build a small school in Calcutta, India.

That felt good, but nothing would compare with seeing that school in rural Calcutta take shape a few months later, during a service trip to India with Free the Children. What started as a well-intentioned plan to have a captive audience for my 'Roadhouse Blues' cover had become a school that gave impoverished children the chance to learn. Hundreds of people from the community came out to help us lay the foundation of the school, very appreciative and genuinely shocked that anyone cared enough to help their children.

I felt as proud and accomplished on that day as I ever have before or since, and I decided on the flight home that I would never again take the easy way out with "I couldn't possibly make a difference, I might as well not try."

Things change. I work long days now, and I don't have an ounce of spare time to throw talent shows or build a school in India- I'm sure you don't either. But we can absolutely still make a difference; if you are reading this now, you've already got all the tools you need. To that end, I'm a huge fan of leveraging the web to use the precious few free seconds we do have to make the world a little bit better. The last thing I do before I leave work every day is visit TheHungerSite.com (and its 5 sister sites) and PovertyFighters.com. Those two sites allow you to make a small difference every day just by viewing a few ads from their corporate sponsors. When I get home, I go back to both sites and click again. Since its founding in 1999, TheHungerSite.com and its sister sites have contributed over 500,000,000 cups of food for the hungry, 1,600,000 books for children from low income families and basic health care for 2,161,000 poor children- not bad for a few clicks a day!

But I wanted to do more. So recently, the company I founded with some buddies from college had the chance to partner with Peter Buffett and Akon with one goal in mind: make it easy for us to do more. If you've got a spare minute after clicking around TheHungerSite.com and PovertyFighters.com, join AmieStreet.com and download Peter and Akon's new mp3 , "Anything," for free. For each download, AmieStreet.com donates $2 to a deserving charity.

So that's how I became an armchair activist and those sites are my tools of choice. To get one more perspective for this post, I asked Peter Buffett to share his experiences with giving back- what inspired him to make a difference and what he's doing about it.

"For me, inspiration hit when I returned home from my first trip to Africa, by way of two countries - Liberia and Sierra Leone. These are people that suffer from - or took part in - years of war and displacement. And when I saw them, they just wanted to improve their lives, give their children something better than they had - they got up each day and started living. When I got home, I realized that to many, the images I captured would look like nothing more than another collection of pictures from some anonymous African country. A story that's repeated too often in too many places in the world. I had to write a song to express my frustration. And then I realized that I had all the footage to help express the song even further. Akon knew when he heard the song that it was an authentic call. He had many of the same realizations having grown up for much of his life in Senegal and then relocating to the U.S. And he understood that music can be a very effective way to communicate and inspire. The song represented a way to inspire action in whatever form the listener wanted to take. IsThereSomethingICanDo.com was born from the collaboration musically and by our own very personal experiences."

Comments

[Jules1]

Elias
Thanks, I am 66 and disabled, I have been doing this for three years now, I love it, I don't make money, but I feel great because I help people, children, animals, out green parties,many many more, not just in our country , and of course Obama. Thanks for all you do also.
Jules1

[Elias Roman - Huffpost Blogger]

Thank you, Jules! Are there any sites you find useful that I left out of the post?