As you may know, tomorrow is #GivingTuesday. This online giving holiday was founded as a way to spur end-of-year charitable giving.
Last year alone, $300 million dollars were raised on #GivingTuesday, with the median gift of $120.
What you may not know is that the organization behind these posts, Moving Up Media Lab, is itself a 501c3 charitable organization and we also will soon be celebrating our seventh anniversary.
During this time individual philanthropists and small grants and contracts from Foundations have funded our work. This has allowed us to:
- Conduct one of the largest national studies on our attitudes on the American Dream.
- Design an online platform for our work (www.movingupusa.com)
- Share a month long #thx2 campaign encouraging people to share stories of gratitude
- Develop a curriculum that has been taught in hundreds of of high school students
- Launch Your American Dream Score that has helped over 550,000 people reflect on their life journey.
- Deliver almost three years worth of weekly blogs to thousands of readers like you.
More important than the impact demonstrated by the numbers are the stories that people have shared with me over the years.
They prove that when we give people the tools to see their life’s journey in a more complete way, they never see the journeys’ of others in the same way either.
The simple act of reflection can make us more grateful and giving at the same time.
For the first time tomorrow, we will be launching a #givingTuesday campaign of our own. It will undoubtedly be one of tens if not hundreds of requests for your time and money.
I encourage you first to please give to worthy organizations that are directly serving those in need. Some of my favorites are Save the Children, Doctors without Borders, Family Independence Initiative, ROCA and Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
If your resources allow, we hope you can then support the work we are doing at Moving Up Media Lab. All donations will go towards a Dream Team Fund, which will allow us to pay interns and junior designers to create more programming and content like that mentioned above. More details will follow in tomorrow’s special email.
In the meantime, thank you for all you’ve done to support this work.