8 Days. 8 Votes. 1 Million Dollars.
Tonight at Midnight (EST), December officially begins and so does the final round of voting for the American Giving Awards presented by Chase. TWLOHA is one of five charities with a chance to win $1,000,000. Your support helped us win Round 1 back in October and now we’re looking at the chance not only to win this money but to do it on national television, as the Awards will be broadcast nationwide on NBC.
Your support got us here and we need you now more than ever. Winning this money would allow us to take our message of hope and help on the road to more places and in more creative ways than ever before. Beyond that, we think the chance to speak to a national television audience is something pretty special.
You can vote once a day December 1 thru 8, so we’re asking for 8 votes over the next 8 days. If you want to do more, you can tweet, retweet, post on Facebook and Tumblr, even host a voting party at your school or in your community. There’s room to get creative. There’s room for your passion and your voice.
This thing started small and we’ve seen amazing doors open as we’ve continued to journey together. That’s what it’s all about…
To see how we would spend the money and to cast your first vote, go here.
We live in a world where brokenness is a reality, not a possibility. TWLOHA began as a response to that reality, as a way to confront a certain brokenness head on regarding mental health—specifically depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. We have learned that most people don’t talk about these things. There are thousands of people, people with faces and families and stories, who never get the help they need because they feel there isn’t a space to talk about their pain. TWLOHA is an attempt to create that space.
Starting today, we join twenty-four other charities in Round 1 of the American Giving Awards presented by Chase, a voting contest on Facebook to honor the past winners of Chase Community Giving. Voting ends next Wednesday, October 5 at 12 p.m. EST. We hope you will join us by liking the American Giving Awards presented by Chase Facebook page, voting for TWLOHA, and then asking everyone on the planet to do the same : )
We often talk about TWLOHA as a bridge to help. Taking the first step to talk to a friend about something painful is scary, as is packing a suitcase to go to a treatment center for the first or fifth time. We exist as a safe passage offering hope and encouragement along the way. Winning the American Giving Award will allow us to strengthen that bridge, to take our message of hope and help on the road to more places and in more creative ways than we’ve ever been able to do before, such as:
— Investing in building an interactive platform that will allow people to contribute directly to treatment and recovery in their local community.
— Providing more widespread counseling scholarships for people with little or no insurance, alleviating the stress of a financial burden that often accompanies treatment and recovery options.
— Expanding our vision by taking HEAVY AND LIGHT - an evening of songs, conversation, and hope - on the road. There is a unique kind of community that happens when people gather in a room with songs and honest stories that resonate. Nights like this can change a perspective for people, and that shift could be the beginning of change or even a life saved.
— Strengthening the launch of our brand new high school campaign called The Storytellers, a way for high school students to bring the story of TWLOHA and message of hope to their own campus through organizing and engineering community events.
We’re honored to participate in this contest and excited to have the chance to work with Chase to carry out this vision. Thank you for being a part of it.
Please vote.
Creative Ministry
Nouwen’s Creative Ministry was a book I stumbled upon at Swap.com. I didn’t expect to read it so soon after getting it and I especially didn’t expect the breadth of wisdom in this short volume.
More thoughts to come later this week, but I give you this selection to ponder over in the meantime.
[Prayer] becomes, rather, an attempt to be visible and available to each other just as we are at this very moment. What we then ask from each other is not, first of all, to solve a problem or to give a hand, but to affirm each other in the many different ways we experience life. When this takes palce, community starts to form and becomes a reality that can be celebrated as an affirmation of the multiformity of being in which we all take part.
Henri Nouwen, Creative Ministry, p 94 (1971 edition).
Running around leaving scars,
Collecting your jar of hearts,
And tearing love apart.
You’re gonna catch a cold,
From the ice inside your soul.
So don’t come back for me,
Don’t come back at all.
His words, too, run counter to the fundamental precept of the prophets, whose message, according to my father, theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, is clear: “in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Yes, the gunman who pulled the trigger is the one put on trial, but almost instantly we all began a profound and very moving period of collective soul-searching. How might we have contributed to an atmosphere in which such a heinous act could take place? What can we do to change the ugliness of our language? Do our words and tone indicate a bitterness of heart and an anger in our spirits that is damaging to ourselves and our entire society?
“Our society.” The phrase reveals the gulf between a civilized society and the world advocated by Palin. Civilized people strive for ways to co-exist and seek moral principles that achieve peace and prosperity for all, not just for ourselves. Palin’s insistence on freedom seems to suggest freedom for oneself, without assuming any responsibility for others, a perspective that would create a wild realm in which each person looks out for herself, not for the collective. Yet again, that is not the message of the bible. When God points out immoral behavior, it is of the collective people, not individuals. The prophet Amos condemns the crimes and injustices committed by an entire society, be it Israel or Edom, and the prophet Jonah calls on all citizens of Nineveh to repent, not just those who have acted in sin.
The dream of the prophets is not for conquest, power, or wealth. The dream of the prophets is of peace. A civilized society does not live by the sword, but by principles of justice, and those principles require a clear and careful articulation. Words do create worlds.
(Source: religiondispatches.org)
Rich Rodriguez was a good man and a good football coach who failed to live up to the standards set out before him. His failed tenure was the sum of everything that has happened over the last three years, good and bad. There just seemed to always be a little bit more bad than good.
There is no grand takeaway from Rich Rodriguez’s time in Ann Arbor. No villains or heroes—save perhaps one young quarterback, but more on him later this week—and no morals or life lessons. Rich is simply a man who isn’t perfect who was put into a situation that wasn’t perfect either. Mistakes are just as fundamentally human as the stories we tell ourselves.
Regardless of whether you liked the man or wanted him run out of town, one thing any Michigan man should be able to agree on is that Rich deserves a hearty thank you from the entire fan base. Not for what happened on the field, but for giving himself fully over to this team and university. Rich Rodriguez devoted himself 100% to the program, cared about his players like family, and did the best he could every day. In the end that is all we can ask of anyone, standards or performance be damned.
That is, until we decide to see if someone else’s best might be good enough. But that’s the next story to be written. Let’s hope it has a happier ending.
(Source: maizenbrew.com)
I am a Detroiter and lifelong Michigander. You can find me at:http://dsimmer.com
http://facebook.com/deanpsimmer
http://about.me/mojodean
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