Please Help!

Pepsi is sponsoring a Project Grant Program that will award $250,000 to the public organization that demonstrates the most commitment. Here in my college town is a place called the Food and Care Coalition. Recently, they received money from a church to start a homeless shelter, but have been unable to finish it. Currently, this county does not have a homeless shelter so those people must travel an hour or more to find sufficient shelter.

“This morning I helped a youngle single divorced mother of two children who had failed to graduate from high school. When you realize the need these people have, it really makes you want to do more for them…if everyone knew how critical the need for this shelter was, they would enthusiastically support this effort.” 

-J. Merrell Hansen

Please help in this cause. You can vote three times everyday—by texting, facebook, and on the website. Below I have listed how to do this. It will only take a few minutes out of your day, but it will be an answer to someone else’s prayer.

Text:

1.       Add Pepsi as a contact with 73774 as the phone number.

2.       Text 105571 to Pepsi

Facebook:

1.       Go to facebook.com and search “Pepsi Refresh Voting App”

2.       Click “Go to App”, click “Allow,” then “Like”

3.       Click tab “Pepsi Refre…”, click “Support ideas on Facebook”

4.       Search “Friends of the Coalition”, “Vote for the idea”, “Confirm”

Website:

1.       Visit refresheverything.com

2.       In upper right, search “Friends of the Coaltion”

3.       “Vote for this idea”

4.       You may need to sign-in

image via weheartit

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Giving Helps the Giver, Part 2

I hope you read Part 1, it has a little to do with this post. 

Mosiah 4:21: And now, if God, who has created you, on whom you are dependent for your lives and for all that ye have and are, doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive, O then, how ye ought to impart of the sub­stance that ye have one to another.

The Lord has blessed us, has blessed me, with so very much. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to think about how much I have, and how much I have failed to give to others.

After reading Brook’s speech, I can understand so much better why, for his birthday, our wonderful prophet President Monson did not ask for presents, but instead asked each of us to serve others. President Monson was giving us the gift of giving. I hope with these last couple posts, I have touched at least one person’s heart so that I can be giving the gift of giving this Christmas season. Along with that, I am going to try my hardest to not be a hypocrite. I realize that writing all about this is one thing, taking action is another.

 “Let it be a time of forgetting self, and finding time for others.”

-President Thomas S. Monson

Giving Helps the Giver

I’ve had giving on my mind a lot lately. For my job, I ask people to give. [Yes, I’m a “telemarketer” if that’s what you want to call it, but it’s not to sell, it’s for a cause, and I generally enjoy it]. At this job we talk about giving a lot. We watched a speech about giving. In church we talk about giving. Sunday night, speakers at the Christmas devotional spoke on giving.

So since it’s on my mind and I think its an extremely important thing, I’m going to tell you about it in two blog posts. This one is all about the speech we listened to at my work, called Why Giving Matters by Aruthur C. Brooks [no, he is not a professor at BYU; he is President of the American Enterprise Institute and a devout Roman Catholic].

Brooks decided to set out on a mission to prove that a statement her heard, giving makes you richer, was completely and totally false. As an economist he knew there was no way in the world giving money away would help you get even more money.

Well I am here to tell you that Mr. Brooks did not prove that statement wrong, he proved himself wrong.

“Specifically, here’s what I found. If you have two families that are exactly identical—in other words, same religion, same race, same number of kids, same town, same level of education, and everything’s the same—except that one family gives a hundred dollars more to charity than the second family, then the giving family will earn on average $375 more in income than the nongiving family—and that’s statistically attributable to the gift.”

Seems impossible right? Well let’s think about this. And actually, let me just sum up Brook’s hour long speech. Giving makes people happier. Giving and serving and volunteering give people what psychologists call the “helper’s high.” Research shows that giving literally makes people happier and reduces stress. And think about that. Think about it opposite. What happens when we are stressed? We can’t perform as well. We become overwhelmed. So when we are aren’t stressed, we perform better and we succeed.

Successful people can hold jobs better, they can progress in jobs better. Not only that but when people see that you are a giver, they see you as a leader.

So it’s true. Giving helps the giver. In many ways.

Now, with this holiday season approaching, we don’t want to be selfish right? We know that giving helps more than those that we give too, but how can we help people even more than that? This is what Brooks said:

“Now I’m going to ask you to take a pretty sophisticated understanding here of charitable giving. As Christian people we are taught that giving is important to help others. I’m telling you that the data say giving helps you, so if you want to help others, don’t just give to them—think about what you can do today to help somebody else to give. The main beneficiary of a charitable gift is the giver him- or herself.”

So how can we help others give? The most obvious way, ask them. That’s what I do at work, and that’s why I love my job. But depending on your circumstances, that just might not work. Brooks suggested simply being an example. As we give, others will see our happiness and want to become givers as well. In this way we are not only helping the people we give to, but we are helping others become givers, become happy, less stressful, and more successful along the way. 

image: https://anitagrant.com/images/stories/Blog/GivingBackjpgTxt.jpg