November 15, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Rather than heading to the mall the day after Thanksgiving, a group of volunteers plans to spend the day helping the causes they care about — and they’re using e-mail and the Internet to ask America to join them.
The volunteers call their effort Giving Day, and they hope the idea will catch on and become a new tradition for the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Like a lot of people, I was devastated by what happened on September 11,” says the founder of Giving Day, Tod Hill, “and I found what was pulling me out of that feeling of devastation and anxiety was the feeling of inspiration about how people were pulling together and responding in a really compassionate way to the tragedy.”
The San Francisco communications consultant thought of the idea for Giving Day after he read an article about the worries that many nonprofit organizations not involved in relief work have about their end-of-the-year fund-raising drives.
Mr. Hill is encouraging people to talk with family members and friends on Thanksgiving about the issues and charities that are most meaningful to them, and then take the day after Thanksgiving to write their checks or find out how they can become volunteers.
Many of the people Mr. Hill has enlisted to help him spread the message are Bay Area consultants and former dot-com employees. They have built a Giving Day Web site, and are using e-mail to spread the word about the idea. The site includes posters and a sample e-mail message that people can download to publicize Giving Day, as well as instructions on how to add the Giving Day logo to their e-mail signature files.
Many people who have already sent in their Giving Day ideas say they will be adding a charitable twist to their Thanksgiving traditions.
A Massachusetts family plans to ask everyone who participates in its annual game of charades to contribute to a common pot, and then the winning team will decide where to donate the money. A woman in Virginia wrote that in years past the losers of her family’s after-dinner card game had to do the dishes. This year, in addition to escaping clean-up chores, the winners will get to select a volunteer activity for the family to do during the Christmas season.
Mr. Hill hopes that people will continue to send in their ideas so that he and his fellow organizers can use the information to build on the idea.”It’s not just about this year,” he says. “Altruism is not a finite resource. It’s a renewable resource. It just needs to be pumped.”
To get there: Go to http://www.givingday.org.
