More recently, though, she’s quietly been building up a small empire on Jolkona’s Pinterest, carefully curating all the stuff that inspires us and you the most. If you haven’t seen our Pinterest page, check it out here, or click on the image below:

As opposed to the linear format of Facebook with its endless scrolling down and infuriating “page loading” status bar, Pinterest reads more like a comic book with a series of different boards. Each board is its own category, making organizing and accessing different pins wonderfully simple.

Jolkona was recently featured in a top 10 list for best non-profit Pinterest pages by the social media news gurus Mashable. Daljit herself later featured in another piece by Mashable for 10 tips on how non-profits can use Pinterest effectively. Needless to say, we’re very proud of her!

If, like me, you don’t know all that much about Pinterest, here’s a useful infographic deconstructing how it’s used and what it’s all about:

[click on the infographic to enlarge]

It’s hard to think that I’ve ever thought of myself as either an activist or philanthropist. I spent much of my time in college advocating for the women’s and LGBT communities in all the usual ways—organizing panels, participating in rallies, even producing “The Vagina Monologues” one year. I majored in Women’s & Gender Studies, led the campus’s most ambitious women leaders in an initiative to improve access to feminine hygiene products across campus, and attended all the feminist lectures offered.

I think I did it because after spending my childhood watching men behave discriminatingly towards my mother in the Middle East, reading about the plight of women in Afghanistan and Iran in high school, and experiencing my own fair share of new age, social media sexism in college, it only made sense. So when a student parent approached me on campus with horrifying narratives of insensitive faculties and outrageous policies, this too only made sense to pursue.

It began as a small group—two graduate students and myself. I had introduced the first student parent to the President of the Graduate Students Assembly who, to our surprise, said he had already been working on advocating for policy changes himself. We spent weeks seeking out more student parents and suddenly stumbled upon what seemed like an underground community of folks who were too tired from studying, grading papers, and working side jobs to make ends meet to share their issues with anyone.

And I listened to their stories.

I listened to the way the nurses on campus had mistreated them, the way so few buildings had comfort rooms or changing tables, the way the university daycare was unaffordable and had a year-long waiting list, the way academic advisors spoke to them as though they instead needed to speak to Services for Students with Disabilities. Young parenthood, I learned, was hard, and young parenthood in academia was even harder. Even the simplest of things, like library access, was restricted to mothers on maternity leave who needed materials to continue their dissertation work because of their so-called “inactive” student status.

Change came slowly. Our group grew. And once we compiled a comprehensive list of grievances and identified numerous achievable goals, we began to make our asks around campus. We asked for improved bus routes that would no longer force moms to walk up a hill with their baby and their books just to reach the daycare, we asked for student parents to have an administrative resource to help them navigate through the university bureaucracy, and we asked for discounted breast pumps to be sold at the university pharmacy.

We were successful in achieving most of these things. When I was elected Student Body Vice President, my Executive Board and I cut our stipends and used the money to create a need and merit-based scholarship fund for students who exemplified our campaign narrative of “Together Students Can.” We organized it in a way such that each of us could choose a student who best exemplified our own interpretations of the adage.

When I saw one applicant in particular, I knew immediately of his hardship. He was a bright international student from Korea with a family, and he was making a profound academic impact while struggling to make ends meet. I count few moments more precious than the one when I was able to hand him a $1000 check and he told me he couldn’t express how much it also meant to his wife and son.

And on my first Mother’s Day as an alumna, I’m thinking about them—the incredible student mothers and parents I met throughout my college career. I realize now even my small-scale organizing had a profound impact on the lives of people whose courage in the face of adversity remains, in my mind, unparalleled. And I realize now how easily all of us can make an impact.

Jolkona is the epitome of making our small drops add up to create a ripple of change. And as you celebrate this Mother’s Day with your loved ones, I ask that you look carefully at what you can do. Perhaps you can elevate Haitian women from “poorest of poor,” provide healthcare for Nepalese women, or prevent postpartum depression for mothers in Japan.

We no longer need to fear the overwhelming inability to impart positive global change—the answer is now at our fingertips.

On Mother’s Day, find and give to one of over 15 projects which supports mothers and their infants the world over by going to our projects page and filtering your search by selecting “Improve Maternal Health” or “Reduce Child Mortality”.

Or give one of our Mother’s Day gift cards to a Mother you love – you choose the amount and the recipient, they choose the project, they see the impact. Click here or on the image below:

Knowing my birth was imminent, my father had taken my unruly siblings to the park with our visiting grandmother. My delivery was quick and problem free. So quick, in fact, that my meant-to-be midwife, an American neighbor of ours, was my first visitor. Dad rushed back to the park in our bright, beat-up orange VW van and, so the story goes, turned up triumphantly exclaiming, “It’s a boy!” Upon realization that she was still the only girl amongst her siblings, my sister cried. I have since forgiven her for that. (And clearly from the way she’s clutching me in the photo below, she got over her disappointment with some speed.)

When I reflect on the story of my birth, I feel a certain simplicity and sacredness – just my parents and I, alone together in a small bedroom in a faraway place. I feel fortunate. Fortunate that both mother and child were safe – it helped that my parents were doctors and knew what they were doing. Fortunate that I was loved and protected. I had siblings that doted on me, a father who worked hard to keep a roof over us with food on the table, and a mother who cherished and adored me.

Story vs. statistics

But why am I writing this? I’m writing this because with Mother’s Day approaching this Sunday May 13th, we want to emphasize the importance of story, especially individual story. At Jolkona it is necessary that we talk about statistics, of course. Statistics give us the overarching picture. But what fuels the fire that drives us is the story behind each statistic – the individual. This is why we give you, the philanthropist, not just the chance to change statistics, but to actually glimpse into the life of the individual behind the statistic by seeing exactly how your donation makes an impact.

Mother’s Day projects

We have over fifteen projects at Jolkona that support mothers globally by improving maternal health and reducing child mortality. One such project is run by our partner MADRE. MADRE works with groups of Palestinian and Israeli midwives to help women safely deliver their babies in the West Bank and Gaza. Your gift of $50 provides a “safe birth” kit containing medical supplies for delivering newborns. With $50 another statistic is reversed and a story is changed.

The story of my birth is a happy one. Likewise, my Mum’s story – her motherhood over all six of us – has equally been a happy one. But there are so many mothers – millions globally – whose stories of motherhood are weighed down with profound uncertainty and fear, or worse, mired in tragedy and grief. Help us change that.

For Mother’s Day give the gift of impact; change one story:

1. Go to our project page here
2. Filter your search by selecting “Improve Maternal Health” or “Reduce Child Mortality”
3. Choose a project
4. Give
5. See how you changed a life

The stretch

Give to Jolkona through the Seattle Foundation’s webpage between midnight and 11.59pm (Pacific Time) today – May 2, 2012 – and you will receive a pro-rated portion of the matching funds from their “stretch pool”. The amount of the “stretch” depends on the size of the stretch pool and how much is raised in total donations on GiveBig day. For example, if Jolkona receives 3 percent of the total donations during GiveBig, then it will receive 3 percent of the stretch pool.

Put more simply: the more you give to Jolkona, the more the Seattle foundation will match.

The Kona fund: help us help others

We have over 120 projects at Jolkona. And today we’re asking you to support one of our very own, the Kona fund. By giving to Jolkona via the Seattle Foundation you enable us to continue our mission: to reach out to and connect a new generation of philanthropists with our global partners and their projects through our innovative microgiving online platform.

Give Back. GiveBig

Here’s your chance to help us help others. Give to Jolkona via the Seattle Foundation webpage and watch your donation stretch. To do so, follow the very simple instructions:

1. Go to Jolkona’s page on The Seattle Foundation website today between 12am – 11.59pm (PT). (To be eligible for stretch funds, your donation must be made through The Seattle Foundation website).
2. Click on “Donate Now.” Donations can only be made by credit card. Give a little – or a lot – and watch it stretch!
3. Tell others about your donation through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Encourage your friends to GiveBIG to Jolkona.

Stretch your donation; enlarge the love. GiveBig.

This week we’re highlighting two great events in our calender: Seattle Foundation’s GiveBig (blog post to follow tomorrow) and World Give Day. To encourage giving to these two campaigns, we wanted to present to you the raw facts about how successful online and social giving truly is.

This infographic was created by the brilliant Blackbuad, a software and services provider to nonprofits:

[click to enlarge infographic]

This year, World Give Day turns 2 and will be celebrating its third annual event. Friday May 4th is World Give Day 2012.

World Give Day came about when GiveForward co-founder realized that while there were a few days set aside in the philanthropic calendar to encourage people to volunteer (last week’s National Volunteer Week being one of them), there weren’t any devoted specifically to encourage people to give. She decided to fill that void, and thus World Give Day was born.

What is it about?

The idea is wonderfully simple: creating unexpected joy by giving. And similar to Earth Day, there aren’t any rules or regulations about what and how you give. You can give your time volunteering, you can give your money by donating to a project, you can even give someone a smile or a hug. It truly doesn’t matter. At its epicenter, it is about getting more people to become actively involved in their community to raise awareness about their favorite cause. If there’s something you’re passionate about, then give in that name and show how a small gift can make a big impact.

Spread the word: Crowdfunding

One of the best things you can do to participate in World Give Day is simply by telling people about World Give Day. Start a conversation with a friend, like the World Give Day Facebook page, follow World Give Day on Twitter and tweet using the #giveday hasthtag. When people start talking, things start happening. And when things start happening, then crowdfunding happens.

What is crowdfunding? It is the collective effort of people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. These supported efforts can be anything from disaster relief and non-profit support to political campaigns or startup companies seeking fundraising. Crowdfunding has preserved communities, saved lives, and transformed our capacity to give entirely with our hearts and visibly see the effect of our giving directly.

We like crowdfunding at Jolkona. It epitomizes what we’re about – people making small donations that make a big impact. And every small donation, like a drop of water, collects to make that ocean of difference.

With over 120+ projects you can be the difference and we will show the change. Be the difference, see the change here. Participate in World Give Day.

In case you didn’t know, National Volunteer Week has been around since 1974 and is all about inspiring, recognizing, and encouraging people to seek out imaginative ways to engage in their communities—and what better way than by volunteering, right?  This week is about demonstrating to the nation that by working together, in unison, we have the fortitude to meet our challenges and accomplish our goals.

National Volunteer Week is also about taking action, encouraging individuals and their respective communities to be at the center of social change—discovering and actively demonstrating their collective power to foster positive transformation.

We feature volunteers on a monthly basis at Jolkona as well as at the end of the year, not only to recognize them for their efforts and contribution to Jolkona and society, but also to help inspire others to volunteer as well. I truly believe that often times by volunteering the volunteers get more out of it then they’d imagine.  So many friendships have been formed through our volunteers and I think volunteering with anything you feel passionate about adds more purpose and substance to your life.

We started our volunteer program out of necessity because of our limited budget to hire people.  And what we found was that there are so many people who want to volunteer more than just their time, but they really want to offer their skills to make a difference.  So at Jolkona our volunteer program is all skilled-based and lines up with people’s skills and interests.  I hope to continue to see Jolkona work with such passionate volunteers and that volunteerism grows more and more every day.

What sort of volunteer work do you enjoy?  If you volunteer with Jolkona, what do you enjoy the most about it?

Check out some of our past featured volunteer posts for more reasons why you should get involved in volunteering in your community.

Happy National Volunteer Week everyone!  And a special THANK YOU to all the Jolkona volunteers – past and present – that have supported us over the years.  We truly would not be here today without your support!

42 years later the environmental issues that plague this planet rage ever louder, but so too does the crusading Earth Day. This Sunday, April 22nd, is Earth Day 2012.

What is it about?

The Earth Day Network connects with over 22,000 partners in 192 countries to broaden, diversify, and mobilize the environmental movement. On Sunday over 1 billion people will voice their love and appreciation for this planet whilst demanding for its protection. It is a campaign designed to provide people with the opportunity to unite in their call for a sustainable future, directing them toward quantifiable outcomes. One of those quantifiable outcomes is the Billion Acts of Green project. Yes, that’s one billion not one million.

A Billion Acts of Green

This mother of all projects encourages individuals, organizations, businesses and governments to support the campaign by performing environmental actions, such as biking to work, picking up garbage off the street, or planting a tree. The goal is to reach one billion actions by the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012. The accomplishment will be presented at the Rio +20 Conference to be used as a lever addressing the UN’s inaction and inspiring leaders to reach a global agreement.

What can I do?

Simple: pledge any act of green you can think of and let the people at Earth Day know here. At Jolkona we have 16 partners that are directly involved in environmental protection. With $5 your donation plants trees in countries from the Philippines, through India, Senegal, to Haiti. With $10 your donation teaches youth in Costa Rica about water conservation. With $24 your donation conserves rainforests in Tanzania. With $40 your donation builds a fuel efficient stove for a family in Nepal. With $100 your donation trains environmental youth advocates in Kenya.

Go to our projects page and select ‘Environment’ under the ‘Projects’ column to view all the appropriate projects. Join us and a billion others in the call and pledge to protect our planet Earth.

For more information, resources, and ideas go to the Earth Day website.

Follow and share the movement on Facebook and Twitter.

Tweet using the #earthday hashtag.

Today we are giving a big thank-you to Sumaira Arastu, long standing Jolkona enthusiast and donor. She generously shared her thoughts about giving and why Jolkona is meaningful for her and her life:

What was your first impression of the Jolkona foundation?

Well, I learned about Jolkona when it was still a seedling in the womb. Nadia, the co-founder, and I had gone to college together and she told me about the idea of creating an organization where students and young professionals can contribute in a meaningful way even in a limited financial capacity. The idea of a small act having a larger impact seemed very appealing to me.

Which Jolkona projects have you donated to that stand out?

I believe that health is a foundation to success, without health our education, wealth, and interests cannot be enjoyed. This is why the projects that focus on helping people gain access to health care or focus on preventative care are most appealing to me.
What do you enjoy about giving to Jolkona projects?
I really like the transparency of Jolkona. It is great to be able to track every single penny. Also, I identify with Jolkona’s mission, so it’s rewarding to be able to be part of something that helps realize my ideals.

If you had to describe Jolkona in 4 words, what would you say?

Vital, Innovative, Effective, and Ambitious

How would you describe philanthropy?

Philanthropy to me is about feeling alive. It allows us to build connections with people through any resource we can share. This makes us feel like we are part of something larger and more meaningful. To live for yourself is utterly lonely and you miss out on a feeling of community. I think that part of evolving as a society and as humans requires us to support one another and share our resources so that all of us can realize our potential. This ultimately benefits everyone, even if it means a small sacrifice in the short term.

What are your hobbies? Do you participate other community projects or events in your spare time?

I do. I enjoy volunteering with youth programs so when I can, I volunteer with a program called “Up and Running Again,” which is a group that works with inner city high school and elementary students to train for a half marathon with the idea that such training will allow them to set goals for themselves in all parts of their lives and know that they can achieve them. I also volunteer for Junior Achievement, a program geared to helping elementary students learn more about the business world, so that they can become inspired to contribute in a meaningful way to the development of their own communities.  Otherwise, my hobbies mostly consist of eating chocolate and drinking coffee .

Giving is contagious. Share a small token of kindness to start a chain reaction of sharing and growing. Start here.
Tweet your first time donating with @Jolkona on Twitter, or share your story on our Facebook.

In case you were on the moon (with Jeff Bezos’s private aerospace company perhaps), the issue of Amazon’s apparent absence in the philanthropic life of its hometown (Seattle) featured in an article belonging to a wider four-part series by the Seattle Times questioning some of the company’s practices.

View from an Amazon office building, South Lake Union, Seattle. Photo credit: Flickr, Cliff Hung

First of all, I don’t really wish to comment on the other issues regarding Amazon’s ethics of business, mainly because capitalism doesn’t strike me as a particularly ethical system in the first place. It’s a paradoxical argument, in my view. And secondly, because we’re talking about philanthropy here, not business. Which is precisely my point.

The truth is, a company has legal obligations to its shareholders, employees, customers, and…. well that’s about it.

At the heart of philanthropy is not corporate business. At the heart of philanthropy is the individual promoting the well-being of man-kind. Businesses, though, are about people, and so one could argue that it would be beneficial for them to care about the well-being of the community and people they serve.

But as we’ve seen the foundation of almost every business is a visionary individual. Likewise, the foundation of almost every non-profit is not thanks to a corporation, but to a single person with a single mission. A case in point, of course, is our own CEO, Adnan Mahmud, who started Jolkona whilst simultaneously holding down a full time product manager position at Microsoft.

Microsoft, though, is a good example of a large corporate business that does encourage philanthropic participation from its employees, offering donation matching, volunteer matching, and pro-bono software to non-profits, among other company wide philanthropic initiatives. The question, then, becomes can businesses like Amazon become serious participants in encouraging individuals towards philanthropy and they themselves as a company promoting the well-being of others? Absolutely they can. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they indeed should.

According to a study by Corporate Citizenship 85% of Americans have a more positive image of a product or a company when it supports a cause they care about. Whilst 79% of Americans say they would switch from one brand to another if the other brand is associated with a good cause. It’s hardly rocket science, but in a nutshell: a company is likely to make more money if they are seen to be connected to philanthropic causes. Tom’s shoes is an excellent example of this.

The gain for Amazon, then, in theory, should be greater profitability. But if philanthropy equates to profitability, then one might ask why has Amazon not done more for philanthropic initiatives in its own community. Clearly, though, they’ve assessed what is most profitable for them, and at the moment they seem to be saying corporate philanthropy is not the direction they want to go in. You can’t criticize them for that. Can we criticize them ethically, though? We can question them, yes. But I still don’t believe corporate businesses have obligations to philanthropy. Whether or not, though, Amazon will suffer an eventual consumerist backlash is yet to be determined.

The possibility remains that if Amazon becomes more philanthropic it could improve its own bottom line, which in turn would be a win win situation for shareholders and the community.

Does Amazon have a obligation to philanthropy? No. Might Amazon benefit from taking part in philanthropic activities? Very possibly, yes. Could Amazon have a big impact on the philanthropic community? Absolutely they could.  But again, I personally believe philanthropy is more about the individual, not corporate business. Non-profits need and value the help of corporate businesses, but we must rely on ourselves to better the world around us.

Don’t ask what Amazon can do for philanthropy. Ask what you yourself can do for philanthropy.

Be the change you want to see in the world here.

This post was written by Gabriel St. John.  He is a volunteer with Jolkona and contributes and manages the blog.  He has a Masters of Research degree in European Languages and Culture. He hails all the way from Cornwall, England, where he studied at the University of Exeter.