OT: Doing Gooder

Don't read me wrong here: I'm all for helping good causes in any way you can. When a CEO serves up food at a soup kitchen and there's no media around to catch it, that's a noble thing. It's dharma and humanitarianism at it's finest. But it's also an underuse of skillset.

CEO in the soup kitchen.
Everybody can serve soup. But the CEO has a skillset that can be better used by the charity. Donating his business and management skills could help the soup kitchen be more efficient and serve more people. Instead of this honcho doling out a few dinners, they could be the catalyst for serving thousands more. That's doing gooder.

And doing gooder is not about donating money. Not at all. Skills and ideas are so much more valuable than a few dollars. Here's an example of this and how my family wound up taking in a Bosnian war refugee for a year.

100 kids the snipers missed.
Robert Azzi is an award-winning photojournalist who often finds himself working in the middle of gunfire. While covering the war in Bosnia, he saw kids killed daily by snipers in ski masks. At a time when war seemed its most senseless, the idea struck him that if he could get the brightest young minds in Bosnia out to finish high school in peace, he could save the lives of 100 future leaders.

He called Continental Airlines and told them he didn't want a donation. He wanted a jet to make one flight from Zagreb Croatia to the US. He got a chuckle. Three days later he got an apology from the head of Continental. A tank of jet fuel would be a small donation to make for a gooder cause.

Azzi got a call from Rick Deerwester in Florence, Kentucky. Rick's church was going to take a up a collection for the kids. No, Azzi said. Don't give me money. Give me homes for 35 kids. The painless act of shoving a few bucks in a the plate turned into beds for three dozen strangers who where from a different religion, a different world and didn't speak our language.

We wound up with Senad. His house was hit by a grenade the day before he left. I also met Nadja, whose legs were almost blown off by a bomb months before and whose war diary I helped translate into English. (That's a example of gooder use of skills.)

Today Senad is personal translator for the Bosnian Minister of Defense. And Nadja Halilgegovich is known in Europe as the Bosnian Anne Frank and is an international speaker. She's stood on the same stage with Desmond Tutu and is featured in the book Architects of Peace alongside the Dalai Llama and Mother Teresa.

Azzi's act of doing gooder started with an idea. In our world where we think money is a prerequisite for making anything happen, not a cent changed hands. People played their part instead of payed their part.

May I take your photo while you're down and out?
And going gooder doesn't need to be on such a grand scale. Steve Ziegelmeyer is a freelance Art Director and Photographer. He walks Downtown every day at lunchtime and instead of avoiding eye contact with the indigent who ask for money, Zieg stops and talks. Those just looking for beer money scamper away. (Sometimes he chases them away.) But he's become close enough to the truly needy that he can pull his camera out of his bag and ask to snap a photo. For anyone else, catching a person at such a low point in their life would be taboo.

Eventually this turned into the Street Portraits project that Zieg created with Gina Weathersby. It's become very popular at local galleries and proceeds go to the City Gospel Mission, the city's oldest supporter for the indigent. Again, a simple idea and the right skills doing gooder.

What's your skill?
After almost a year in the making, I recently launched a doing gooder project called Audible Ambles. But this tale is not really about that. It's also not about starting an international Doing Gooder™ movement with a big infrastructure and soirées for wealthy benefactors. It's just a simple seed that it'd be nice for people to keep in the back of their minds. Maybe it will bloom into some good someday.