In this blog, we build upon the concept of Say It’s Your Birthday and what it entails. This has the synthesis of our Somerville for Obama group meeting at Hayyim’s place on Feb 8th (thank you Hilary for your notes) and our discussion at our first Birthday Celebration – New Style on Mar 7th, 2009.
Mission Statement
“Say It’s Your Birthday” is about changing birthdays from receiving to giving and organizing giving - shifting from culture of consumerism to the culture of generosity. What does one do on one’s birthday - one gives and organizes friends to give also. One of the seniors described this as loving our society. Most of all it is about having fun while loving your society!
Whose birthday?
First of all, whose birthday would we do service on? They would be (a) people from the group and (b) people in need – people “out there” who do not have means or friends to organize their birthdays.
Who do we give to?
We give to the people in need and to our society. This can be done directly to someone we know in our society or via a charity organization.
What do we give?
This is the crux of the puzzle. This is where we need to spend most of our time on to drive this movement! We could give both our time for social service or money. The group felt strongly about organizing and donating time for social service – this is something that everyone can give. Money may or may not be possible for everyone in our society.
As we set out to organize our first birthday celebration event, we found it quite difficult to find a volunteer event for our group. We think there are three parts to this:
1. Volunteers: people who want to provide help.
2. Charity organizations: organizations that provide help and need help to provide help.
3. Causes (people or social cause) that needs help.
Here are the key problems that need to be worked on:
1. Matching volunteer groups to charity organizations that need help. Our group discussed many ideas to help with that. May be a site that provides this kind of matching – input number of people, location, date and voila this would match you with the organization that needs help. May be both of these groups submit things to this site and matches are reported. Another idea was to get in touch with Craigslist and seek their help in providing this matching service. Graciela suggested that local churches can also facilitate this kind of matching service.
2. Charity organizations themselves are not organized to seek help. Most of the times these organizations are run on shoe-string budget. Think this is the pre-cursor to mobilize the society for volunteer activities. We need to volunteer to prepare these organizations to seek volunteers.
One thing that we learned with helping organize Senior Tea Party event at Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House. Number of seniors who need help are home-bound. They have limited help with their mobility. As we organize events for seniors, think it will help if we provide volunteer car service for the seniors. These volunteers can help get seniors from their home to the social event and back.
How do we promote this concept?
Everyone we have spoken with so far has loved this idea. Our chosen mechanism to promote this movement is with word of mouth and using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Shilpa (thank you Shilpa) has created our group page on Facebook. Here is the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57613298909.
So let’s spread the word, join our group, and let this movement begin!!
Mar 7th, 2009 - The day arrives. Today is our first birthday celebration new style. Everyone is very pumped up to start this movement and celebrate the birthday of its group member Brajesh Goyal. The group arrives at the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood house at 10am. Our hosts at the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House(MFNH) are Annie Small and Bryan Hewitt and of course, volunteer coordinator, Tony Bee (who helped organize this for us) and her charming daughter, Serena who brought the bundle of energy to our birthday celebration.
As a part of the celebration, Brajesh had already collected some food with Food Drive at NetApp (his office) with some of the donors included ebullient Mindy Thorpe. Mindy is the coordinator of all the fun activities at the office – including collection for Toys for Tots, etc. After reaching at the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, we realized that food is much required there. Especially in this economy, they can also use more food and provide for so many needy people in the neighborhood.
Our activity started with some of us (David and Cindy) helping at the food pantry. We took boxes of canned food (potatoes, beans, etc.) from storage to the food pantry. David spent most of his day at the pantry helping there. At noon when David came upstairs, you could really see his sweat and happiness in helping out at the food pantry. Pantry closed at 12 noon and David made sure that the pantry was fully stocked up for the next day.
Bryan took us to the library where there would Senior Tea Party in the afternoon from 2 – 4pm. The group chatted more about our Birthday movement concept while waiting for Annie Small. A few things became very obvious with our first event (more details in my next blog on the “Say It’s your Birthday – Concept”). First, these social services places themselves need organizing themselves to take help from volunteers. Second, given how hard it was to find a volunteer service activity, the group felt some kind of matching service (online or places such as churches, etc.) who would connect volunteers to the organizations that need help would quite essential.
Annie arrived and told us about the table arrangements and provided us with the decoration supplies (ribbons, balloons, thread, etc.). Here the group was at its best in terms of their decorative arrangements of the room. Wow – blowing of those balloons was so hard! We created a beautiful string of multi-colored balloons. Shilpa, Graciela, and Cindy made this tricky but really amazing filigree that looked really beautiful.
Well, the tables at the MFNH weren’t in the best of their shapes. Arranged the tables as per Annie’s direction. We got the chairs from downstairs and arranged the chairs around the table. Tony Bee and her daughter arrived and they added their twist to the decoration arrangements. We had the tables set up with tablecloth and everything. The plates arranged. We were quite proud of our creation! Tony Bee and Annie were very pleasantly surprised. Hope our local seniors would enjoy this too in the afternoon! Next came putting up of the fliers in the neighborhood. We had 11 sets of balloon and flier at 11 different spots around the MFNH.
There was one big surprise waiting for all of us. Meghna (Brajesh’s wife) conspired with Nitin and Shilpa to arrange for a birthday cake for Brajesh. What a finale to the amazing birthday celebration – with the cake from Finale! We sang “Say It’s Your Birthday” as we cut the cake.
Our next birthday celebration will be David’s birthday to be celebrated on April 25th or May 2nd. Stay tuned!
Hello Friends:
A group of friends met at an event organized by Hayyim in Somerville to organize "Be the Change - Somerville group". Hayyim was an excellent host offered some good food. We started with socializing and discussing our group goals and then explored an idea for our first social service project - "Say It's Your Birthday movement".
Overall Group Goals
General theme for the group offered by Hayyim: Support each other in being bearers of the hopeful, confident and unifying moral vision that drew us to Barack Obama.
To start we thought collectively about the question of ‘ What would keep you coming back to this group?’
Common threads in peoples responses – building relationships within the group and locally, building community with a diverse group of people; doing something useful in the world beyond our-selves; working on multiple projects, issues at the same time; engaging in political discussion for our own education, to generate ideas, etc.
- 1st point of discussion offered by Hayyim: can we come up with a project to engage in in the near term to hold us together as a group; need a concrete goal. One priority might be to develop relationships with local elected representatives.
Ex 1: congressman Michael Capuano: arrange a meeting; offer support for recent efforts to encourage humanitarian efforts and diplomatic intervention in Gaza?
Ex.2: Green energy project? What would it be?
Ex.3. Brajesh ‘ It’s my Birthday idea’ – a MOVEMENT to foster community, charitable donations and community service locally
Say It's Your Birthday
General agreement that the ‘It’s My Birthday Idea’ is unique, creative, fun and has a lot of possibility for fostering community and generating human capital for community service. We all decided we would like to explore it further. We agreed that our first efforts as a group will involve crystallizing and implementing this idea. A lot of excitement was generated!
More about the ‘Say it’s Your Birthday Idea’: Brajesh explained the idea of it being a tradition in his family of doing service or offering donations to help out others on a persons’ birthday instead of buying gifts etc. Use the money/assembled people to achieve some kind of charitable action, service work etc.
Can we build on this idea? Generate a community of celebrants (maybe people in the local Obama organization to start) who sign up to be part of the ‘Say it’s your Birthday Club’. The idea is that on someone’s birthday, people in the network are alerted. The Birthday person can specify donation to a charity or implement some kind of community service project using the voluntary effort of the celebrants who sign up. It can be an opportunity to celebrate, get to know new folks in the Local Obama community and do service work or generate donations to charity.
- use the Beatles song as a theme song (Birthday)?
- what should we call this movement?
- discussion of websites to find charitable organizations of a certain bent
Agenda for next meeting:
- Build on the ‘Say it’s your birthday’ idea.
- develop a bigger picture of what this idea will be
- Hayyim will send out a pre-meeting agenda
- Meeting will be at Hayyim’s house; Sun Feb 8 3- 5 pm
- other people are encouraged to offer their houses or establish agendas for future meetings if they are so inclined
- GO VIRAL!
- GO GLOBAL!!
