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A man I've never met, but who's special in the lives of friends and friends of friends, is in danger of losing his property, which is a sacred space to his network of friends. There's an amazing fundraising effort and auction going on at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
save_dave, so please, go take a look and see if you can help out.
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vixyish made an eloquent plea here that really brings home the beauty of this kind of community effort, and I'll repeat here the response that I made over there...
We see a lot of these kinds of requests, and they do several things for me. They make me think about how easily it could be me in that position. They make me think about how glad I am that right now, in this moment, I have $10 to toss towards a cause that matters to a friend (in this case, several friends). And they awe me with the power of teh intarweb. Faced with "I must have $7k or risk losing my house" how many of us could hit up "real life" friends and family and come up with that kind of money? 1 person with $7000? 10 people w/ $700 each? 70 people (that's a lot of people) with $100 each (that's a lot of money to most of us)?
But through this kind of signal boosting... through this network of friends of friends of friends... finding 700 or 1000 people willing to put two or three days worth of coffee money towards helping out? That's a hella lot easier.
And that money keeps going around, 'cause the people who benefit from things like this get back on their feet and then they pay it forward. One of the beneficiaries of a similar fund-raising event is donating cool handmade stuff to the auction for Dave as a way of paying forward some of what came her way to fix her car. So that's money that's now helped two different people in crisis. This is a good thing, any way you look at it.
Oh, and another thing... people may think they can't afford to get stuff in the auction, but it's almost Annual Gift-Giving Season. Instead of shopping at big impersonal merchants, people can buy amazing handcrafted jewelry or fiberwear or OMGBrownies. Do a good thing and get the holiday shopping out of the way! (Well, except for the brownies, which would never survive to become a holiday gift at my house! :-) )
save_dave, so please, go take a look and see if you can help out.vixyish made an eloquent plea here that really brings home the beauty of this kind of community effort, and I'll repeat here the response that I made over there...We see a lot of these kinds of requests, and they do several things for me. They make me think about how easily it could be me in that position. They make me think about how glad I am that right now, in this moment, I have $10 to toss towards a cause that matters to a friend (in this case, several friends). And they awe me with the power of teh intarweb. Faced with "I must have $7k or risk losing my house" how many of us could hit up "real life" friends and family and come up with that kind of money? 1 person with $7000? 10 people w/ $700 each? 70 people (that's a lot of people) with $100 each (that's a lot of money to most of us)?
But through this kind of signal boosting... through this network of friends of friends of friends... finding 700 or 1000 people willing to put two or three days worth of coffee money towards helping out? That's a hella lot easier.
And that money keeps going around, 'cause the people who benefit from things like this get back on their feet and then they pay it forward. One of the beneficiaries of a similar fund-raising event is donating cool handmade stuff to the auction for Dave as a way of paying forward some of what came her way to fix her car. So that's money that's now helped two different people in crisis. This is a good thing, any way you look at it.
Oh, and another thing... people may think they can't afford to get stuff in the auction, but it's almost Annual Gift-Giving Season. Instead of shopping at big impersonal merchants, people can buy amazing handcrafted jewelry or fiberwear or OMGBrownies. Do a good thing and get the holiday shopping out of the way! (Well, except for the brownies, which would never survive to become a holiday gift at my house! :-) )
