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Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

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Archives for November 2011

Four Real Ways To Make A Difference

by Margie Clayman

Are you still far from convinced that social media for social good is a worthwhile thing to pursue? I get it. We’re all getting more cynical these days. Less trusting. And it seems like there is a lot of fluff out there. Sure, social media for social good. Uhhuh. Give me some proof that it works.

Well, I have some proof for you. Just a little. A short while ago I wrote a post about a project my friend Nic Wirtz was working on with photographer Jean-Marie Simon. They wanted to use Simon’s photographs of Guatemala from the 1980s to create historically accurate, high-quality textbooks for Guatemala’s use. At the time I wrote the post, Nic and Jean-Marie needed to raise about $19,500 in two weeks. Sounds pretty impossible, right? Except that Nic and I promoted the heck out of the effort via Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, and, well, with a few hours left, the project is rather substantially over the goal.

Anything is possible in the online world.

With that in mind, I know four people who could really use your help. Help doesn’t have to be a donation, by the way. Help could be just spreading the word or engaging with them online so you can get to know them and maybe connect them with people who CAN help. These four people are people I either know personally or know are fantastic. I’d vouch for any of them is what I’m trying to say. And I want to see them succeed. I want them to have a little taste of what the online world can do for social good. Are you ready to meet these folks?

Nancy Davis

You’ve seen this name a lot here on my site if you visit regularly. Nancy has posted here, she often comments, and I’ve highlighted her here and there because she is awesome. Unfortunately, as is the case for so many people these days, Nancy has come under hard times. She is at risk of losing her apartment. She is facing having to find a job that would be an extremely long commute that would reduce her ability to care for her beloved son. She is facing the possibility that she may have to move to a less safe neighborhood to make ends meet. Nancy deserves better than this, as do so many people in such dire circumstances.

What can we do to help Nancy? First and foremost, I think we can help spread the word. Nancy has an amazing personality, she’s a fantastic writer, and she has all of the skills a marketing/communications firm could be looking for. Maybe you know someone who knows someone who has the ideal job waiting for this woman. Maybe you know someone who knows great apartments where Nancy lives. You never know who will read your shared content, right? Or maybe my sharing this with you has given you an idea of something that could be done to help this wonderful lady out. Read Nancy’s post about her current situation, friend her on Twitter, and let’s see what we can do.

Phil Sandifer

I have known Phil since college, and for all of that time, his intelligence has been pretty darned awe-inspiring. That magical brain of his has cooked up a really fascinating idea that I think has a lot to offer. Phil wants to write a book about the history of Wonder Woman. Now I know a lot of you wonderful people are comic book nerds. I meant…fans. But have you ever wondered how Wonder Woman sort of ended up the way she did? Part dominatrix, part feminist, part superhero – she is a really weird, really interesting fictional character, and Phil wants to explore it all.

This is a passion project for Phil – in order to treat the project professionally, he needs funding. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a whole lot – he is looking for $4,000, which would help him get professional editing and which would buy him some extra time to pour into this labor of love. What better present could we give this guy at this time of year? Check out his Kickstarter page and even if you don’t want to donate, help spread the word to people who might want to support this project!

The Fugee Village

I’ve written about Luma Mufleh and her Fugees before. For all of the info you can just revisit that post, but suffice to say that her cause is absolutely amazing and to make it reach its full capacity, she needs our help. There are many, many ways that we can help the Fugees out. They need school supplies. They need money. They need us to spread the word. Check out the Fugees Get Involved page to see all of the ways you can help, and friend Coach Luma on Twitter to let her know we’re out here helping.

Patrick Prothe

Last year, when I was working on some anti-bullying ideas, one of my biggest supporters and best assistants was Patrick Prothe. Patrick is a brilliant fellow, endlessly kind, and as fate would have it, he is also a phenomenal photographer. Patrick has discovered that Oregon is rich with beautiful bridges, and he would like to create a coffee table book highlighting these architectural wonders (often overlooked) via his photographic talent. Like Phil’s project, this is a labor of love, and Patrick needs our support. By the end of the year, he needs about $5,000 to make this dream a reality. Having given so much to his online community, I would love to see Patrick’s wish come true. Visit his kickstarter page, and again, remember that you do not have to donate, but if you spread the word, the idea may reach just that person who would love to support such a project. And you should friend Patrick on Twitter too, because he’s awesome.

So there you have it. These are just four of my friends who could really benefit from the power of social media. Maybe you could do a post like this highlighting four of your friends who need help. Maybe we could make a whole lot of difference in the world. Now wouldn’t that be amazing?

Let’s try it out!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrentunnicliff/4232232092 via Creative Commons

Filed Under: Crafts and Charity, Musings

The Worry Basket

by Margie Clayman

In some Native American cultures, you are not allowed to bring your worries into another person’s household. You are not allowed to bring negativity to the hearthstone of someone else. It is deemed improper.

Because of this belief, many of the homes have a little “worry basket” outside. Before you set foot in the home, you lay your worries to rest in that worry basket.

My guess is that you don’t remember to pick them up on your way home.

We live in very worrisome times. Money is short. The world seems to be falling apart in one way or another every day. The future is uncertain. But I realized, in thinking about the concept of the worry basket, that we really don’t take time to express our fears and our worries. We let them simmer inside our heads and our hearts. We let them flavor our perspective on the world and our relationships with other people. We let them hold us back.

Given that, it’s not so surprising that we don’t go out of our way to ask other people what is on their minds. When was the last time you asked someone, “What are you worried about? What’s on your mind?”

I can’t recall  starting that conversation with anyone but my own brain.

Kind of silly, isn’t it? Because as we all know, dropping our worries – verbalizing them, sharing them, dealing with them – that’s the best way to get rid of that load.

So, I’m taking the time to ask. What are you worried about? What is on your mind? You don’t have to comment here. You don’t have to answer out loud. But however you respond, don’t keep it locked up in your brain. Write a post and then delete it. Write a post of your own if you like. Write an email to a friend or a pastor or a family member.

Whatever you do, let those worries go.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fkehren/6098824622/ via Creative Commons

 

Filed Under: Musings

Be Your Own Clarence

by Margie Clayman

It is that time of year again – the time when watching It’s a Wonderful Life and bawling your eyes out is not only appropriate, it is darned well expected.

My personal favorite part of the movie has always been when Clarence, the guardian angel, takes George Bailey on a tour of what could have happened if George had never existed. Person by person, neighborhood by neighborhood, Clarence helps George Bailey trace the outline of his life’s footprint until George realizes that he is not only loved by many but that he has played an integral part in the lives of people he has never even met.

In the era of social media, this resonates particularly strongly.

If you are feeling like your social media presence isn’t doing much, or if you are feeling, as some do during the holidays, like you are just not really getting ahead in your life, take a moment to be your own Clarence. What would Clarence tell you about what your online work has meant to others?

If you’re saying, “Yeck yeck, Clarence wouldn’t have anything to say to me, ” I say au contraire. The thing of it is that as soon as you set foot in the online world, you are a perpetual stream of ripple-creating pebbles into a big pond. Every blog post you write, every tweet you send out, every Facebook status update you post, they all are ripples across that glass surface of the enormous pond of the online world. Maybe your ripple reaches a person who needed to hear just that particular message at that particular moment. Maybe your ripple will reach a person who was trying to figure out the problem you so neatly summarized and solved in your post. Maybe your tweet was the last one that was needed to reach a goal. Maybe your Facebook status update changed a person’s frown into a smile.

Pulling a person back from the edge without knowing it

When I was a kid, a story fell into my hands somehow. It makes this point pretty clearly, so I will share it with you here.

Once upon a time, there was a young man who just could not get on track in his life. He was bullied every day at school. Things were going wrong in his family. His grades were falling. He didn’t like the way he looked. Every day, he just kept getting more and more convinced that there was not a person in the world who cared for him or even noticed he existed.

One day, when it was grey and rainy and cold, the young man was walking his big armful of books back home when someone tripped him and he fell down, all of his books spilling on to the ground.

It was the last straw. The young man was convinced that this world had nothing to offer him, and he was equally convinced he had nothing to offer the world.

Suddenly, a stranger leaned down and helped him up. Asked the young man if he was okay. Helped the young man pick up his books. Asked the young man if he needed any other help.

And for some reason, this was enough to give the young man that boost he had so long been looking for. It was that little break in the clouds that showed him hope was still there. There were people who cared, and he could encounter them in the world. That person, who did something any normal human being would do on any given day, made all of the  difference to this struggling young man.

If helping someone who has fallen pick up what they dropped can make that kind of difference, there’s really no telling how many lives you’ve touched in big and small ways.

Think about all of the people you’ve talked to. All of the people who have responded to what you’ve written.

You’re quite the difference-maker, aren’t you?

And you’re rather special.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsueg/4191156523/ via Creative Commons

Filed Under: Musings

Your Neighborhood Just Became The World

by Margie Clayman

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Not in my backyard!” It’s an interesting statement. To me, it is meant to indicate that various problems the world experiences won’t be present in your general sphere of living. There shouldn’t be anyone starving in your proverbial backyard. There are no homeless in your backyard. Nobody is sick without ways to get better. Not in your backyard.

A lot of people feel quite fervently about taking care of their own first, then expanding out as people around them become more secure. Take care of the homeless in your neighborhood first, then maybe worry about the whole city, and then maybe, just maybe, take it to a national level. International problems may draw compassion, but priorities remain domestic in nature.

Here’s the thing, though. The online world – this whole “social media” thing I’ve been talking about here on ye olde blog – it has changed the way I look at my world. I talk to people almost every day who are from Canada (various parts), Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Malaysia, Australia, England, Scotland, and many other places too. These people have faces, voices, families, and friends that I know and recognize. If something happened in their city or in their country, I would feel as obligated to help them as I would to help my next-door neighbor. My backyard, my neighborhood, has become expansive.

This represents the framework for the #tweetdiner chat that will happen this week. We are trying a new day – Thursday, but the same time (9 PM EST). We’ll talk about what “backyard” means in this day and age and what the advantages and disadvantages of that kind of “local first” thinking are when it comes to social good in the online world.

Just search for the #tweetdiner hashtag on Twitter and jump in. I’m looking forward to the conversation and I hope you are too 🙂

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15216811@N06/5619617675/ via Creative Commons

Filed Under: Musings

My Garbage Has To Smell Good

by Margie Clayman

Remember the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina? It was a lot of forecasting, a lot of doomsday “this is the storm of the century” kind of reports, but we hear those a lot. Then the storm came and we all saw the aftermath, and we realized the forecast had actually undersold the severity of the storm somehow. In the days that followed, news coverage showed people dying in the streets of New Orleans, people standing on roofs begging to be saved, and many other horrible images that will not leave the memories of those who saw them, not to mention those who witnessed and survived that horrible tragedy.

I don’t know about you, but as I watched all of those images I felt the most utter sense of helplessness. I mean, heck, the people who are responsible for saving people in those kinds of situations couldn’t get to the people who needed them most. What could  I do? Send band-aids? That hardly seemed worth it. How would the situation ever resolve itself? How would New Orleans and the whole Gulf region ever recover? Would they ever recover?

With these thoughts running through my head, I realized I needed to make a run to the grocery store to get a few items. So off I went, thinking about everything I was seeing on the news.

One of the items I needed at this particular time was garbage bags. It’s one of those irritating things that you only realize you’ve run out of when you have a huge mess of food you need to throw away, right? So I was standing in the garbage bag aisle surveying the offerings. I was looking for a particular kind of garbage bag, one I had discovered somewhat recently. It was the “odor shield” garbage bag. Tall, for kitchen trash cans. There it was (top shelf, as all things are that I need). As I held the box of smell-good trash bags in my hands, I was struck by an obscene moment of absurdity. Here I was in a suburban grocery store with a box of garbage bags in my hands – bags that would ensure that my trash, as in, the stuff one throws away, would not smell bad.

Meanwhile, people were trudging through armpit-high water in New Orleans, filled with filth, looking for ways to feed their families.

I wanted to make sure my garbage smelled good.

Kind of out of whack, don’t you think?

Do you really need that?

This is not a post that has the intent of chastising people for buying nice things for themselves when they can. I, by the way, ended up getting those smell-good garbage bags even after being struck by how ridiculous it was. But do you ever think that maybe there are some things that we could sacrifice and not notice it at all? Like, maybe I could take my garbage out 20 minutes earlier and not have to worry about stinky garbage anyway. I could probably live without my streaming Netflix (although I’m so addicted to Breaking Bad right now it would be a bit painful). I probably don’t need a lot of the stuff I have. I love it all, and I don’t really splurge, but there is so much stuff I don’t need that I always look for.

And there are so many people who are just looking for a roof and something to eat.

It is not to self-flagellate. It is merely to say, on the fumes of Thanksgiving here in the US, that there is probably a lot of stuff we take for granted that is totally gratuitous to our every day existence, and we should be cognizant that there are people who wouldn’t even consider that stuff on a must-have list of 1,000 items.

It’s interesting to think about, isn’t it? All of this stuff we accumulate?

Maybe there is another way to channel those funds, at least some of the time.

What do you think?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliemaynor/4497967157 via creative commons

Filed Under: Musings

50 Twitter Accounts dedicated to social good

by Margie Clayman

This post is pretty self-explanatory given the title, but I figured, hey, those of us in the US have a long weekend coming up, and I’m sure the rest of you will miss us horribly, so this will give you a fun thing to do online to pass the time. Also, these accounts are tied to organizations that do really great things, so supporting them in the online world seems like it would be a neat thing to do.

I’ve linked all of the accounts below, so all you have to do (assuming you’re signed in to twitter right now) is click and follow!

I hope you enjoy 🙂

1. @Kindcampaign – a movement and documentary intended to stop girls from bullying each other

2. @CharityWater – bringing clean water to people who need it all over the world

3. @ProjectLinus – making and donating blankets & afghans to children who are in need

4. @world-wildlife – the World Wildlife Fund – dedicated to creating harmony between people and animals

5. @StJude – pediatric center for research

6. @americancancer – Twitter account for the American Cancer Society

7. @foprr – Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation – they let us know what the residents of Pine Ridge Reservation need most

8. @UNICEF –  Helping children all around the world

9. @unrefugeeagency – The organization behind the powerful Blue Key campaign for refugees worldwide

10. @habitat_org – Habitat for Humanity – building houses for the homeless

11. @skip1 – Twitter account for skip1.org. The idea – skip something yourself, give to someone else

12. @epicthanks – The charity fueled by gratitude

13. @fugeesfamily – Helping children refugees rebuild their lives in the US

14. @civilination – Combating cyber-bullying

15. @safetyweb – Helping protect children online

16. @TrevorProject – Preventing crisis and suicide amongst LGBQT youth

17. @800273talk – a suicide prevention hotline

18. @the_uso – support for all American troops

19. @makeawishintl – Twitter account for the international Make A Wish Foundation

20. @humanesociety – Account for the Humane Society of the US

21. @american_heart – Official account for the American Heart Association

22. @mssociety – Official account for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society

23. @gdsfoundation – The Global Down Syndrome Foundation – giving a voice to those with Down Syndrome

24. @specialolympics – The Special Olympics give those with physical problems a chance to compete and be free via sports

25. @foundanimalsorg – Twitter account that informs followers about pets who need forever homes, among other things

26. @adoptuskids – this organization strives to find homes for children, including teens, who need a home

27. @St0pChildAbuse – 5 cents is donated to Love our children USA for every follower. Spread the word!

28. @escapeabuse  – offering hope and support to those in abusive relationships

29. @datesafeproject – enabling conversations about how to date safely

30. @womenslaw – This Twitter account offers channels to get legal information if you are in an abusive relationship

31. @evawintl – This organization is working to combat gender-based violence worldwide

32. @roomtoread – This organization is spreading education and literacy around the world with the hope it creates equality for all

33. @kickstarter – if you want to start your own funded social good project, talk to these folks!

34. @samasource – this organization is trying to match up women and refugees with digital jobs

35. @recoveryblog – Offering support to those in search of sobriety

36. @Toms – Official Twitter account for Toms Shoes and Eyewear

37. @komenforthecure – Official account for the Susan G. Komen Foundation

38. @SUTC – Stand Up To Cancer. Raising money for groundbreaking research

39. @amber_alert – get live Twitter updates of amber alerts. Maybe you can help find a missing child

40. @meals_on_wheels – See how you can help get food delivered to the sick and elderly

41. @foodforthepoor – this organization, per the name, is working to combat hunger worldwide

42. @mercycorps – striving to help those in the most dire of situations

43. @aidsvaccine – Tweets regarding the International Aids Vaccine Initiative

44. @CTRHIVLawPolicy – legal support for those suffering from HIV as well as their advocates

There are also some great individual accounts to follow that can direct you to social good efforts. Among those are:

45. Estrella Rosenberg – Founder of Big Love Little Hearts, Estrella also is in tune with every other effort to do social good

46. Molly Cantrell-Kraig – An amazing woman, founder of the Women With Drive Foundation

47. Geoff Livingston – Completely in touch with the Not-for-Profit world. I found out about Charity Water thanks to Geoff!

48. Danny Brown – Danny always seems to have a social good project he is working on or supporting.

49. Mark Horvath – Founder of InvisiblePeople.TV. Mark brings the homeless into your Twitter feed.

50. Chris Brogan – I learned about social media for social good because of this guy. He highlights a lot of great causes on a daily basis.

 

Who would you add to this list? I’d love to follow more accounts dedicated to social good!

 

 

Filed Under: Crafts and Charity, Marketing Talk

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