This is exactly as it sounds: a pot for change. If you don’t mind stopping in the middle of a sidewalk or side of the road, pick up loose change that has fallen to the ground. Add your findings to the same pot and after a few months, see how much you have collected. If you’re strapped for cash, spend your findings on a nice meal for your family. If you are fairly stable financially, donate the money (anonymously) to a good cause.
Finding out that handmade rugs are often made by mere children was so shocking to me- I couldn’t imagine what those youngsters have to go through every day. The organization GoodWeave (goodweave.org) was started in 1994 to stop child labor in the rug industry. To help their efforts, check for a GoodWeave label on the rugs you purchase and donate to their One in a Million campaign. GoodWeave’s work has reduced the numbers of children toiling in rug factories, and with your help, they can help end child labor in the world today.
When Jaime Finkel, assistant to music manager Scott Rodger, began working at Maverick in Beverly Hills, she noticed there was a lot of unclaimed “merch” in the office. The newly-founded company, which is composed of nine of music’s top managers-who collectively manage more than two dozen of the planet’s biggest artists, including Madonna, Paul McCartney, Miley Cyrus, Pharrell Williams, Alicia Keys, Arcade Fire, and U2-is at the forefront of major changes taking place in the music industry today.
Instead of throwing away the excess and unwanted tour products and unsolicited gifts, Jaime initiated a Merch Box. Every month, she selects an organization to donate these items to. It seems like a natural match since for every celebrity and wanna-be star in Hollywood there is a person in need, but no one had thought to do this before. It’s as simple as setting up a bin in your office lunchroom and creating a sign that reads “For Charity.”
Volunteer was never a word in her vocabulary. Not that Lee Grant didn’t know what it meant, but it wasn’t something she would ever think about doing. Feeling unloved as a child left her self-centred, angry, and needy. As far as Lee was concerned, the world owed her. But it was hard to get to know the world, as small as hers was. Sheltered and sequestered in a small coastal community in rural New England, she knew little about the daily lives of regular people with regular families, but enough to know that hers wasn’t like theirs. “Bad things happened in my house,” she said, “and I never understood why, because I was afraid to ask.”
Throughout her teen and young adult years, Lee used drugs and alcohol to transport herself, begging attention from anyone and everyone. Chemicals seemed to work in the short haul, but eventually they led to more destructive behaviors: setting fires, shoplifting, drunk driving, punching through plate glass windows. Cutting helped drain her pent up self-loathing and relieved her. Sutures and butterfly bandages briefly put her back together, but after so many years and so many scars, self-mutilation wasn’t working. After three weeks in an institution for attempted suicide, she was ready to try something differnt.
One day, out of the blue, Lee was invited into a knit shop filled with happy, loving people and found a passion and joy she never knew before. “I made things with my hands and felt good about myself. I entered an afghan in the county fair and won a blue ribbon. I joined AA and stopped drinking. I found a community of creative people who accepted me and my knitting and that, along with sober living, brought the attention I craved. But still...something was missing,”she said. She noticed she felt best when she shared her knowledge of knitting and making other people happy brought a new kind of satisfaction.
On a whim, Lee volunteered to teach knitting classes to kids for the local Santa Rosa chapter of Catholic Charities (CatholicCharities.org). She wanted to find out if knitting would make a difference to them like it did for her. She wanted to give them something they could turn to when life got too scary, or complicated, or boring...something they could turn to for comfort or fun. She gave them sticks and string and direction. She gave them an opportunity to feel accomplished and proud. She gave them a piece of herself and found out what she’d been missing.
Lee began to care about other people. “I taught families at a homeless shelter to knit. I taught a group of foster teens. I crocheted for battered women and premature babies. I knitted warm hats for cold-headed cancer patients I would never get to know.
“All of this giving changes me. I feel good inside. No longer hollow and self-centered, I feel something akin to love. For others. For myself. For who I am. For what I do.” Lee is not just any knitter; she is tremendously gifted and tremendously generous. She is the author of several books, including Love in Every Stitch, and is a sought-after pattern designer. Go to her Facebook page, “Knitting and Healing With Lee Grant,” or you can find her at a shelter with a lot of bright, beautiful skeins of yarn and a bunch of happy kids, doing what she does best.
I asked Lee to sum up how it was that she came to “be a good in the world.”
“I blame it on volunteering,” she said.
In early 2010, in the small village of Nshupu, Tanzania, nine malnourished orphans were sleeping on a cement floor without even a blanket or sufficient food. Four years later, these children have a lovely new permanent home, are attending school, and have welcomed six more orphans to their family. Their home also serves as a village community center that hosts, among other things, a weekly women’s empowerment group that has created a savings and loan program for impoverished single mothers and widows. There is also a kindergarten program that serves 70 village children annually, including feeding them regular meals. All these endeavors are shepherded by PreciousProject.org, which explains on their website, “Though lack of education is a leading cause of poverty, Tanzanian schools are not free. Attendance even at the primary school level requires the ability to pay for school uniforms, meals, materials, equipment, fees, and other expenses. As a result, there are children who are unable to even receive a primary education. Our goal is to help break the cycle of poverty by providing educational opportunities for orphans and other high-risk children.”
Simply reframe your perception: each of us has had dreams that for one reason or another, we do not achieve. And we may have made choices that perhaps were not the best. Yet, rather than allowing regret to overtake us, we must celebrate all the other goals we’ve accomplished and positive choices we’ve made.
Human nature so often leads us to perceive the one negative in a sea of positives. But we can retrain ourselves to learn the lessons embedded in our mistakes, and allow ourselves to feel pride in the beauty we are capable of. All it takes is a little shift. You’ll see.
