One Percent
A long time ago my dad decided to give one percent of the gross sales from his lumberyard business to the poorest village in the western hemisphere. Through a little research he was partnered with a village outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti. For years he sent a check to a French nun down there and in time the village’s population doubled as his regular donations brought them food, electricity, running water, a school and musical instruments.
I have always been fascinated by the good that one percent can do. The website www.onepercentfortheplanet.org encourages 1136 companies to donate 1% of their sales to a network of 175 environmental organizations worldwide. Another site, www.theonepercent.org, connects nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance with architecture and design firms willing to donate their time pro bono in the Washington, DC area. Finally, www.onepercentclub.org encourages its members to donate at least one percent of their net worth or five percent of their income to the charitable cause of their choice.
Dad was on to something. I wonder what the world would be like if we each spent one percent of our time consciously doing good. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were nearly 190,000,000 of us between the ages of 18 – 64 in the United States in 2007 and 52,171,000 of us ages 16 to 64, (that’s just over one in four) did some volunteer work that year.
I learned a long time ago never to do math in public, so it is with some trepidation that I offer that 7.3 hours equates to about one percent of your time each month. If you subtract eight of those 24 hours to sleep, your one percent is down to less than five hours each month. What if every single one of us devoted five hours each month to service? I hold a very liberal standard for “service” and define it as everything from the traditional (think building a house with Habitat for Humanity) to doing what comes naturally (a jogger running the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure) to spending a couple of hours visiting with sweet elderly lady across the street, making dinner for the bedridden co-worker with four kids or planting a few of your flowers bulbs in a forgotten part of a community common area.
My request to you is that each month, five of your waking hours are devoted to doing some good. It can make the world better or make your home better, but the end result is that doing good one percent of the time becomes part of your lifestyle. (Groceries? Check. Clean the house? Check. Make sandwiches for the shelter? Check.)
Dad always said that the check he wrote for Haiti each month was the only bill he didn’t mind paying. He loved giving his one percent. What if we all did?
Get out and give back.