Giving Fun

A week or so ago, at the benevolent prompting of my son, I added a new advertising section to my blog, called "FUNsponsored Ads." These are ads for things I personally happen to believe in - sponsored, as it were, by my sense of, well, fun. I don't get paid for them. Nobody's counting clicks. But it makes me feel good to know that I've been able to somehow further the good fortune of what seem to me to be "good" things.

The FUNsponsored Ads section currently features three organizations. (You can find them - and soon other sites of similar ilk - by clicking here). Each of these sites demonstrates a different approach to helping people do good. They are all fund-raising efforts. But they are also somehow fun.

One site allows you to give smal loans to people who really need them - loans without interest, personal loans to people who are genuinely trying to improve their lives and their world. People you can believe in. It works, because it's more fun to give to people than it is to give to institutions. It makes it personal, even though, if you choose, you can remain anonymous. And they're just loans. Acts, not so much of generosity as of trust.

Another offers you the opportunity to give other people the opportunity to give charity - a gift of giving, you might say. In a way, it's the ultimate charitable act, giving others the chance to be charitable - for free.

Yet another lets you bring a fun technology - a playground toy - that in turn brings clean water to villages whose very lives depend on it. The toy itself is fun. It's fun to see people having fun. It's fun to know that that the fun you are helping to give people is constructive, meaningful, healing.

Each tells us something about the art of fund raising. Each honors the fun inherent in giving. Each invites fun as much as it invites giving.

Too often, the people who are involved in trying to raise funds get a little too desperate. They send out pleas, they cajole, they beg, they try to make you feel obligated, to make you feel that if you don't give, you're somehow a bad person. But giving is not about being "good." Giving is about fun. It's a kind of fun, I guess you might even say "flavor" of fun, that feels good all by itself. It feels good when you get thanked. It feels better when no one even knows you're the one that gave them that gift of health or sustenance or promise.

For the fund raiser, each of these sites represents an approach that honors the fun of giving. Each seems like fun, looks like fun, feels like fun, and yet each is clearly about charitable acts. They're not about dinners or auctions or raffle tickets. They're about the joy that comes with giving joy.

Now that times are hard, now that giving is even more desparately needed, it's these invitations to fun, these initiatives that are sensitive to what makes giving so much fun, from which we all have the most to learn, the most to gain.

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