Guest Post: How to Help Thy Neighbor in a Recession
The earthquake in Haiti was a sobering reminder of how important it is to help our neighbors in their time of need. But unfortunately, the country’s anguish hasn’t relinquished the suffering many face right here in the United States.
The recession in particular has had a lasting effect on many Americans, leaving some in the unexpected position of needing help versus giving help. So if you’re in a position to give, this is a great time to show that you truly know how to “Love Thy Neighbor” by offering help to those you know and love – and those you’ve never met – who are struggling through this harsh recession.
Give Money
One of the most direct and effective ways to help those in need is to give money. Whether you’re offering money to a loved one or donating to a local charity, giving cash out of your pocket makes available a number of assistance options, including buying clothes and food, paying bills and more.
Donate Clothes, Food and Even You
If you feel that you’re not in a financial position to offer money, there are plenty of other great ways to give what you already have in your home. For instance, you could:
- Donate your clothes and complimentary items:
Organizations like the Goodwill and Salvation Army are among the many that would love to have you to donate clothes, blankets and bedding that you no longer need. After you donate, the organizations sell the items then use that money to help members of their community, making your donation well worth it. - Donate food: If you have canned goods in your home, you could donate food to local churches or community organizations. Or you could contribute to larger organizations that contribute to community food banks, like Feeding America.
- Donate you: While you may not have money, clothes, food or other miscellaneous items, you do have blood to give. Donating blood is a simple process that could save many lives. Even more, some organizations actually pay you for your time and contribution. It’s definitely worth the 30 minutes you may be giving up.
There are other ways to donate as well, including offering tools and supplies to Habitat for Humanity, which helps rebuild communities by restoring or building new homes from the ground up.
Educate Your Neighbors
Another great way to give to those in need during the recession is through education. Whether you’re good filing taxes, managing money or writing resumes, there’s someone who could benefit from your expertise.
Here are some particularly interesting ways that you could volunteer your time to people right in your neighborhood:
- Help find employment: You may know someone who is not very Internet savvy but needs to find work. If you’re knowledgeable in this area, you could help locate job opportunities by connecting them to online unemployment resources, including job boards, social networking sites and great career advice blogs. Simply setting up online accounts could make the difference in finding a job, so why not offer your expertise to give a neighbor another shot at employment?
- Teach personal finance: It’s more than possible to save money during the recession. If you believe this and are doing it yourself then you could help a friend or neighbor do the same. By teaching personal finance budgeting, you could offer an invaluable resource that would be useful, not just during the recession, but for years to come.
There are plenty of other ways to offer your personal expertise, including providing knowledge on credit reports, helping to fill out mortgage applications, or even teaching how to invest. However, if you’re looking to volunteer with organizations, this volunteer website is a great place to help you match your interests to various organizations’ needs.
The satisfaction of helping your neighbor is one that you should not overlook. By giving to someone in need during this recession, you are indeed fulfilling the greater purpose of serving your fellow man and making this world a better place.
The 10 Day Give – Starts Today
Today is the kick off of the 10 Day Give – proposed and spearheaded by Bob of Christianpf.com. I believe this is the 2nd annual version of this event. I didn’t really participate last year but I am going to try hard to take part this time around. I invite you to join in as well!
There are a few posts on Christianpf.com that provide more info about this event – check out the kickoff post or the FAQ to get more details. There is also a sign-up page for it (maybe if you actually sign-up for it, it will keep you motivated to continue throughout the 10 days).
So, I just signed up and I’m going to read more of the info on Bob’s site to get some ideas on how to reach out and give to those around me. Remember, this is not necessarily giving money – it’s just giving (of your time, expertise, whatever). And it’s only 10 days. Again, I urge you to sign up and give and then see what happens for those around you and for you!
Warning – upcoming glimpse into the mind of an engineer – not for the faint of heart
As I mentioned, I just signed up right now but I’ve been thinking about this for a few days and I actually started yesterday in a tiny, tiny way. My parents have been visiting for a few days as a stopover on their way to Florida. Last night I drove with my Dad to fill up the tank with gas for the rest of their trip. And I knew that I had a 10 cents per gallon credit at the gas station so I decided to give it to him as a tiny “give.” Man, I can’t tell you how hard that was to do….I mean, it would have been nothing to give my parents $1.30 or whatever it came out to be, but the engineer inside of me reared his ugly head because their gas tank was half full!! Whenever I use these credits, I only use them on our van and only when it is empty. I know, it’s insane – but I can’t help it! Anyway, I forced myself to do it and was glad that I did something that was (although admittedly stupid) kinda hard for me to do.
I’m sure that’s much more than you ever wanted to know about me, but I’m trying to be honest here. And I suggest that you take the opportunity of the 10 Day Give to try to push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit. Maybe you’ll end up expanding that comfort zone and making yourself a better person as a result. Good luck!
My 40 Day Journey to Generosity is Complete…but are we there yet?
If you remember, I actually made a New Year’s Resolution this year . The main focus of the resolution was to internalize the quality of being more generous as a person. Ever since my wife and I got married, we have given a set percentage of our income to our local church, various missionaries, and other ministries. But even with doing that, I am not a naturally generous person. I find myself having to remind myself that it is a good thing to be generous with my time and money. So, now I am on a quest to try to smooth off my rough edges in this area.
A few weeks ago I wrote about my first tangible effort to start smoothing….a 40 day devotional I was going to try . I signed up and I started receiving the emails and now I have already completed the entire 40 days of learning. S0, it is time to debrief the program and my experience.
GiveWithJoy.org’s 40 Day e-devotional focused on generosity
So it turned out that this program was basically a review of finances from a Biblical perspective. Well, it wasn’t just about finances. To give you a flavor for the myriad topics touched upon, here are some examples:
- God is the owner of everything
- Don’t trust in your riches, trust in God
- Don’t live for this life, but for your heavenly home
- Beware of greed, hoarding, or selfishness in your life
- God blesses you financially so that you can be a blessing to others
- God will reward you for your faithful generosity and diligent labors
- Realize that God can use anyone and any resources to provide for His work
- When you help the poor and needy, don’t do it for public recognition
Obviously, these are but a few of the topics covered (there are 40 days after all)
There was a lot of good stuff in there
I’m not sure which I found most useful each day – the numerous verses related to the topic of the day or the inspiring stories from people who saw awesome things happen in their lives as a result of adopting God’s view on generosity and giving. The site also included a daily cartoon…but frankly I didn’t think those were all that funny most of the time!
For me personally, however, it was a little off the mark from what I was expecting. This devotional was geared more towards generosity in relation to giving to your church and other ministries. I was hoping it would be more focused on increasing my interpersonal generosity (is that a phrase?).
That being said, it was still very useful and I enjoyed reading through it. Now, some of it was review after reading Your Money Counts but there were many new verses that were great ones to read and reflect upon. And the daily anecdotes were quite inspiring as well to see how God works in people’s lives when they trust Him fully.
If you are looking to investigate how God views money and giving and trusting Him and numerous other topics, then I would recommend that you sign up at GiveWithJoy.org . You’ll get an email each morning for the next 40 days that links to a page on the website. I’m sure that you will learn quite a bit from the Bible and hopefully you will be inspired to get serious about your giving and your generosity in general.
To answer the question posed in the title – I’m definitely not finished with this journey yet. As I mentioned, this didn’t really scratch my personal generosity itch. I am better off for doing the 40 days of study, but me as a naturally generous person: that is still a work in progress unfortunately (I’ll keep trying, I promise!)
Photo Credits: lepiaf.geoMy First Tangible Effort to Increase my Generosity – GiveWithJoy.org
At the beginning of the year, I actually made a New Year’s Resolution . This was a big deal for me since I literally can not remember the last year that I did the resolution thing. My resolution was to work on being more generous . Leslie from Spilling Buckets made a comment on that post about how she was interested in seeing how I was going to implement that resolution. It was an excellent point to raise because I had no idea how I was actually going to follow through on that (other than reminding myself over and over to be generous).
I feel like I’ve actually started to experience a bit of success increasing my generosity. I do feel that I have been more generous lately, but unfortunately I still need to make a concerted effort to do so. I’d really like to internalize this characteristic and make it a more natural expression of who I am rather than something I have to force myself to do.
So I have finally found a method that I hope will start moving me in the right direction. I heard on the local Christian radio station to which I sometimes listen (when I’m not listening to my fancy new iPhone) an ad for the "40 Day Journey to Generosity." My first reaction was, "hmmm, that’s interesting." That was quickly followed by, "Hey! Wait a second! They said ‘generosity’ – I need to check that site out."
So, I did and I signed up for GiveWithJoy.org’s 40 Day Journey to Generosity. It is a daily devotional (sorry, "eDevotional") that is mailed out to you via email. Today was day 1 – so I’m on my way to generosity! The devotional lists a number of scripture references as well as some key takeaways, a 1 minute true story, a cartoon-of-the-day, and some additional aricles and worksheets.
I can’t really endorse this thing yet as I’ve just started it this morning and I don’t really know much about the site or its owner (Dr. Brian Kluth). But if you’d like to take the journey with me, sign up at the website and send me an email if you want to discuss anything that you’ve read on any particular day. If I find out this is some kooky thing, then I’ll be sure to disclose that in a future post!
The focus of today was "God is the Owner of everything." The purpose is to get back to basics and ground yourself in the fact that everything we "have" is actually owned by God and has been given to us by Him. One of the takeaways: "When we give to God, we are just taking our hands off what already belongs to Him." Good truth to remember there…so far so good!
Has anyone out there heard of this site or its owner? Is anyone else on the Journey to Generosity?
Exploring the “Hows” of Giving to Help Others
I’m sure we’ve all heard numerous times regarding the importance of giving. Everyone from your pastor to various bloggers have discussed it. I’ve even talked about the importance of giving in the past. ChristianPF is preparing to run a 10 Day Give challenge to inspire others to make it a priority as well. For Christians, the most basic impetus is that God tells us to give and to help others. But all people (ok, most) have a sense that giving to help others is a good thing to do – it’s good for those you are helping obviously, it’s good for the world as a whole, and it’s good for yourself as well. So, we’ve talked about "why" we should give, I’m curious "how" people give.
Large or Small?
Do you give small amounts freely whenever you get the chance? Like dropping $5 at Cold Stone for their Make-A-Wish donations or giving a few bucks for Alex’s Lemonade Stand donations at Rita’s? (we apparently spend a lot of time at dessert type restaurants) Or do you save it up to give only larger donations? If so, is this because you feel there is a greater impact giving significant amounts? Or is it for tax deduction purposes? We tend to do both – more of an emphasis is on larger donations, but we also occasionally give small donations at random times (like at Cold Stone last night) (if using Twitter and Plurk is considered "microblogging", would that be called "micro-donating?")
Directly or through Charitable Orgnizations?
Do you only give to established charities or through organizations? Or do you like to target your giving directly to the people in need? The former seems a lot easier to do and maybe you feel like you can be assured that it will go to better use (as long as you’re comfortable that most of the money is actually getting into the hands of people who need it and not being used for administrative costs). I personally don’t have a lot of experience giving money directly.
Scheduled or Spontaneous?
Do you schedule your giving so that you ensure it gets accomplished? I mentioned earlier that I like to automate as much as possible in my finances and also that I actually have a a special tithe fund to make sure I do not lose track of any money we’ve decided to give. My wife feels that this is somewhat sterile. She thinks there is too much regimentation and process and not enough heartfelt giving. She would like to do more spontaneous giving whether or not we have money allocated in our tithe account to do so. How about you? Do you like to schedule and automate it or just give as you are lead to give? Do you keep close track of how much you give or just give when the opportunity arises?
Why Types of Charitable Organization?
If you do give to charitable organizations, do you typically give to a certain type of organization? For instance, if you are a spiritual person, do you give only (or mostly) to related charities or do you give to secular ones as well. Or, if you are an atheist or agnostic, do you give only to secular charities or do you also give to religious ones that you feel are doing worthwhile work? For our scheduled giving, we typically give to Christian organizations but for our micro-donations we give to all organizations. In the book I’m currently reading, Your Money Counts , the author suggests that Christians should give mostly to Christian organizations. His rationale is that all people give to secular charities while only Christians give to Christian ones. I’m curious if that is true…it probably is.
So what does this all mean?
I’m not really sure what it all means. I’m just curious to see where everyone stands on this. I imagine that most people dabble in a mix of the few options I discussed. Maybe not, maybe I’m the loner who worries about making sure I donate all the money I "said" I would.
I do think we will all agree that helping and giving are two very good things that we can do for each other. And though this post was written in the context of giving financially, giving doesn’t necessarily have to be solely about money. Maybe that should have been another question – do you typically give financially or otherwise? For instance, in the process of starting up this blog, I have been blessed with much help from established bloggers and have learned a great deal and made some new friends. And that certainly was good for the one being helped (me!).
Photo Credits: Victory of the PeopleSubscribe to Borrow From None
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