NothingToGive.com

It’s not all that often that a book comes along which agrees with everything you believe to the point that you wonder if you secretly wrote it yourself. For me, Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is definitely one of them.

Those of you who have read this blog before will probably know that it is about my family’s efforts to raise money for needy people/causes.
We realized earlier this year that there is a lot of need in this world, real need, urgent, life threatening need and yet we live in a society where we are blessed beyond measure and yet many of us spend so much, either by choice or simply because of the high cost of living, we have very little we can give.
We have spent this year trying …

We’ve set ourselves a Challenge this Christmas, one which will alter our lives and hopefully improve the lives of others. Read the article to learn what the Challenge is.

Back in March, our family were racking our brains trying to come up with ways to save/raise money to hopefully enable us to buy a well for a village in Africa.
We came up with the idea of Websites For Wells:
For every new website hosting plan bought from our business (NewBlogHosting.com) before June 30th 2010, we would donate $15 toward the well project.
June 30th came and went and we noticed three startling facts:

The world had not collapsed around us
We had not dissolved into bankruptcy
We had more money in our ‘well’ fund than …

If you had the money, what would you do for your community?
That’s what we’re asking in our latest project here at nothingtogive.com.
Stemming from a desire to do something (or some things) for our community with the resources our church currently has, we’re wondering what does our community need?
I can try to guess at what my community might need or to judge from my own point of view what is needed but life is not all about me. Other people have different perspectives, different experiences of life and what they see …

Our next idea for giving when we have nothing to give is simple: bring in more income so we can give some away. Read the post to find out how

I’m so proud of my kids right now!
After the success of Change for Chile, Rebekah and Caleb were not ready to give up their fundraising efforts and felt inspired to carry on.
Rebekah came up with the idea of doing a hot dog fundraiser and so, Hot Dogs for Haiti was born.
Our church (Hands and Feet, Hanford) is donating all the supplies and we’re hoping to get into the local paper.
We’ve picked a date of March 20th 2010 on our front lawn. Probably from around 11am-1pm.
We’ll probably drop fliers into some …

Less than a week after we collected up our change to send to the Haiti relief effort, a massive earthquake struck Chile, once again causing destruction, death and despair.
Although many buildings in Chile have been built to withstand the effects of earthquakes, most older buildings did not fare so well and even some of the newer ones found it difficult to withstand the effects of such a huge quake.
Again, my family sat down together to scratch our heads and ponder what we could possibly do.
That’s when the idea of ‘Change …

Do we have any spare change?
The first way we came up with to be able to help others when it seemed we had nothing to give was to give our ‘spare’ change.
Debbie suggested this idea to the family on the morning of February 21st 2010 and the idea was simple.
There were coins laying in drawers, piggy banks, play wallets and forgotten pots and holders all over our house – as there probably are in most houses around the world.
These coins, this ‘spare change’ was not being used, it wasn’t counted …