Live. Play. Create. Imagine New Ways to Make a Difference
I’m back from a little detour to enjoy Northern NSW and Southern Queensland with my family. Of course it was lovely to get away – and I enjoyed playing with my new toy, ShakeItPhoto on the iPhone. We enjoyed the beautiful beaches of Byron Bay, the calm of the Hinterland, the drama of a dust storm and the glitz of the Gold Coast.
There are a couple of groups on Flickr where you can shake it up and submit your ShakeItPhoto pics.
Do you have a favourite photo app on the iPhone?
If you follow my blog at all, you’ll remember me asking for donations to help a bunch of women out of poverty. People around the world responded by blogging, tweeting and most importantly donating $7,000 to a 2 year microfinance project! And more great news is that I just got the first report from Opportunity International Australia. I am thrilled to introduce you to the 12 women who are now starting or building their small businesses to get out of poverty, and save for their children to go to university.
Furao Trust Group
The Furao Trust Group is composed of 12 female members. Furao is a small village on the outskirts of the nearest town, however the closest market from the village is still 7km away. Furao Trust Group members have to travel 10km to buy stock for their businesses at the large public market in Roxas. In Furao most homes have two rooms, so families often sleep in their living room. Water is accessed from a communal well.Furao Trust Group members are engaged in various small businesses including tricycle driving, piggeries, vegetable gardening and barbeque vending. With the loans received, members can invest in larger quantities of their product or can expand their range of stock. Members meet with a loan officer every Thursday to make their loan repayments and receive business training and mentoring. Members also enjoy the strong friendships created within the Trust Group.
Client ProfileNorma Diampoc runs her own sari-sari store business. She is married to Augustus, a farmer. Together they have three children: Cristine, 24 years old, Alma, 22, and Elgie, 18.
Out of the hardships she endured as a child, Norma has become a strong business woman. Being part of a family who did not have enough resources to provide for their needs, she was forced to leave high school early.Norma usually opens her store at 8am and closes it at 9pm. She chose to open a sari-sari store because she is able to earn a living and still fulfill her responsibilities as a wife and mother… (read more from the report)
Usually these women have no access to capital, therefore are unable to obtain business loans. However with microfinance in a Trust Group, they are able to co-guarantee each other’s loans.
Thanks again for collaborating with me online to show your care and generosity. Your tweets, blog posts, encouragement and donations have made a huge difference to these women, and to the future of thier children.
I know it starts in November, but I’m already thinking about participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. Planning outlines and writing plot notes is allowed, however writing doesn’t begin until November the 1st and then you have a month to write 50,000 words. The organisers also host a Young Writers event in November http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/
I only made it to around 6,000 words last year, but I really enjoyed the process. It’s all about quantity, not quality, which is a fun creative challenge in itself. Imagine what you might write if you sat down to write 2000 words a night! You’ll end up with a (nonsensical?) novel roughly the length of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Great Gatsby. You might even learn something along the way!
I’m mentioning it now, as a reminder to myself and to you in case you’d like to participate. You can choose any genre you like! I wonder which genre I’ll choose this year? In the meantime, I need to read some more fiction (any suggestions?) to get my creative juices flowing.
So, will you have a go with me? I’m hoping that if I start planning now, I might make it it 20,000 words this year.
And if you make it to 50,000 words, you’ll probably end up doing a happy dance, like this girl (amazing what you can find on Youtube!!
Each day, scattered amongst layers of information on the web, I find pretty pictures. When I discovered the images of i.Anton I connected on Flickr so that her lovely images would appear in my RSS feed.
So, in between blog posts I find pictures such as these. I love i.Anton’s use of light, colour and composition, but I especially like how each picture captures a moment and makes it all *shiny*.
‘What we want art to do for us is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalise the things that have no duration.” John Ruskin(1819- 1900)
images used with permission from i.Anton (thank you!).
You can add your contacts’ photos into your RSS feed by subscribing on the Flickr Contacts page (if you have an account) http://www.flickr.com/photos/friends.
Do you like to weave wonderful things into your webby experience? What are your favourite sources of inspiration?
If you want to understand more about social media marketing, you may want to get along to the Social Media Masterclass this Friday 4th September in Melbourne. David Meerman-Scott, Author of World Wide Rave will be sharing case studies and tips for Marketing and PR experts to learn about using social media effectively. Iggy Pintado, author of the informative Connection Generation is promoting a special deal for the event- head over to his blog to find out more.
Also coming in September – the MarketingNow! Conference which is now free (with a donation) with speakers Darren Rowse (Problogger – who recently inspired me to try and fix up my About Me page), Gavin Heaton (from Age of Conversation), Stephen Johnson, Laurel Papworth, David Armano (who, it turns out, drives the same motorbike as my husband and has the same taste in monkeys. Yeah that’s the kind of thing you find out through Twitter!) , Jim Stewart and Simon Young.
Unfortunately it looks like I won’t be able to attend either event – but I did manage to get along to Laurel’s Social Media Marketing Workshop a few weeks back, where Laurel shared some great insights based on her professional experience, and helped to get my social networks organised! I liked it when she said “If it works, don’t do it again” (or something like that) which was the approach I took with my fundraising journey for Opportunity International Australia. Just because raising $1300 through blog posts worked one time, doesn’t mean I tried the same thing for the next event.
It was also reassuring to read techniques for social media marketing recommended in David Meerman-Scott’s book World Wide Rave, which I had used in my fundraising blogging challenges. Great suggestions, focused on people. As he says in the book “When you’ve got something worth sharing, people will share it – no coercion required.”
I’m learning – Keep it fresh. Listen and be engaged. Look for fun ways of doing things. Then start again (it’s always new)!
Some fundraisers make it so easy to participate, that only moments after a friend sends you a link to the Fanpage on Facebook, you find yourself setting up a fundraising page with your own avatar, blog post – even the options for online donations via Paypal and Visa have been taken care of . You have Tweeted the link to a couple of thousand people, because it was almost effortless. So, if you like you can join in with this fundraiser for Ovarian Cancer Research by setting up your own page (it’s easy peasy) or donating towards mine over the next month, so that an early detection test to save lives can be created. There’s even money to be won.
Surprisingly, only $300 has been raised for the entire online event so far – will you help to make a difference?
Update: You’re amazing – already $100 donated today. And it only took me 5 minutes to set up. Thank you!
wonderchatter