Thursday 13 February 2014

Power of generosity - a touching talk on gif-tiv-ism

Let this blog find you meaningfully contributing to situations around you.

Today I received an unexpected email from a friend – Vishal Haria. I almost deleted it as it looked like auto-generated bulk mail. Something told me to click on the video link instead. It was truly worthwhile.

As I started watching the video (24 min duration), in first 2 minutes I realized it was something very profound. I paused and called my wife Ruchi to also watch it with me. It was really worth the 24 minutes spent. We were touched by the talk to our core & were in tears at different moments.

Click on the picture below to watch the video or use this link http://youtu.be/p_QLGvp_stI



This is a video of the talk given by Pavi Mehta of Service Space (http://www.servicespace.org/). She talks about practicing unconditionally generosity and how it has the potential to change the way world works & how we humans look at each other & the world.

So far my notion of giving, charity, social work was about ‘HAVEs’ doing something for ‘HAVE-NOTs’. And I found it tough to relate to the concept.

The concept in this talk is different. It is more like peer to peer generosity.  It is about shifting general premise to ‘people want to be selfless’ and ‘we are hard wired to contribute’. In Service Space initiatives, they work with 3 principles that appear totally contradictory to business sense:
1. Stay volunteer run (no paid staff) – people said “it won’t scale” 
2. Don’t fund raise, serve with what we have – people said “it won’t sustain” 
3. Focus on small acts – people said “it won’t be effective”
They have scaled, sustained & blossomed into 500,000 members across the world.

The core theme as noted from their website is:
Change yourself, change the world: We believe in the inherent generosity of others and aim to ignite that spirit of service. Through our small, collective acts, we hope to transform ourselves and the world.

Our aim is to create a shift from
̵    Consumption to contribution
̵    Transaction to trust
̵    Scarcity to abundance
̵    Isolation to community”

Do have a look at the video. Some of the stories that touched us in the video include: Karma Kitchen experience and a guy who got robbed by a teenager with a knife.

May this video move you into a new way of thinking about this world & human race, as it did for us. 

Warm regards,

Rohan

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