Cause It’s My Birthday Press Hits aka Mom Ar...

Really why do we do anything but to curry favor with our parents? In my case, my mom. I told her I was up to BIG things this year and that my good deeds wouldn’t go unnoticed. So see Mom! Aren’t you proud of me? At any rate, what I really want to share is that our grassroots campaign Cause It’s My Birthday is closing in just a few days (10/31 at midnight EST to be exact). We’ve kept the donations open all month in part because we’re sooooooo close to our $20,000 goal. Yes, only $1,200 shy. That’s a few clicks of the button from people like YOU. Ahem, just saying. But also because donations REALLY do keep coming in. In large part because of press, blogs, word of mouth and we figured, hey why not keep it open all month.

I wanted to give a press update then – as a follow up to THIS post on the first round of press.

• Triple Pundit by Gennefer Snowfield; It’s My Birthday and I’ll Give If I Want To
• Socialbrite Interview by JD Lasica (video seen at the top of this post); An inventive cause campaign to fight malaria
• Social Earth by Ashley: October 3rd-9th: Bring Out the Birthday PresNETS!
• LAist post by Christine Ziemba: Pencil This In: ArtNight in Pasadena and Sloane’s Birthday Bash
• Escape Hatcher podcast with Susan Baker (this one was super fun, LONG story how I know Susan but she’s one of the first five people I EVER met in LA. Ask me about it sometime. Small world); Sloane Berrent of TheCausemopolitan.com and Causeitsmybirthday.com
• Pirate Cat Radio by Steph Dub; CAUSE it’s my birthday- Fight Malaria benefit
• les pensées insouciantes a blog by Matt Rosen: GPICT – “Cause It’s My Birthday:” A Birthday Celebration and Fundraiser All in One
• Drew Meyers (a Seattle host has this to say): Help Raise Money for Malaria
• SeaMo: Connecting the Microfinance Community happily promoted in Chicago and Seattle (thanks!): Cause It’s My Birthday

Of course to everyone who twittered, facebooked, emailed, spread the word and in general rawked and made things awesome – WOW. This literally could not have happened without everyone’s support and from our nonprofit partner Netting Nations and the net manufacturer, Vestergaard Frandsen to the families you’ve helped and from Doug and I – THANK YOU.

If you liked this post you might like:
What You Can Do To Help Cause It’s My Birthday
#fightmalaria campaign update
The Fight Against Malaria Press for Cause It’s My Birthday!

Melts In Your Pocket Guest Appearance...

Chocolate. You either love it or hate it. Me? I’m of the love it category. Especially dark chocolate and I mean only for the all those feel goodery things it gives you when you have a daily dose. So when my good friend Andrew Seely started a web show, Melts in Your Pocket AND asked me to be a guest star (only his second next to Natasha) well how could I say no? Plus post Cause It’s My Birthday, I was staying at Doug Campbell’s gorgeous Brewery loft to work out of. Bliss.

Now we did go out and buy chocolate together, Green & Black to be precise, but we had a lot to catch up on (he’s launched a show after all and I’m back from Kiva and always on the go) so we didn’t exactly talk about WHAT we would be talking about on the show. Hey, I’m not the web star ok. And in the middle you’ll catch I really have no idea what chocolate smells like (I mean who ever thought such things?) So don’t judge me on that. But you know what – this was definitely stretching my boundaries. It was uncomfortable (theme of the week – and of my TribeCon panel remember?!?) It was fun and I hope you like it. I mean a show ALL about chocolate? What will these kids think of next?

To learn more about Melts In Your Pocket, follow the show on Twitter here.

If you liked this post, you might like:
When You Look For Something
Climate Change, Food Production and You
Day in the Life of a Kiva Fellow

Making Lemonade From Lemons...

You know what would have been easy? Or easier anyway. The day after the day that a part of my world crashed into flames right before my eyes? To go out there and get a new job doing exactly what I was doing. To keep my life basically as it was. To not make a big deal out of things. To keep going on that path I had worked so very hard at.

That, was not meant to be.

I set out on a different journey. One where I gave up my home to be a nomad for an undisclosed amount of time, sold most of my things and put the rest in storage, said farewell to good friends and bought a one-way ticket to South America to go on an adventure. Where that adventure would lead, I didn’t now. I just needed to be someplace, anyplace, from where I was. I told myself I would rebuild from there.

I am one month away from the 1 year anniversary of that change. And I’m nervous now, more frightened than I’ve been all year. You see, all year I was in transition and moving all the time and going from a South American renewal of my spirit to a New Orleans revival of my soul to a Philippines emergence of my humanity. I found comfort in the unknown places and faces and foods and music. I felt connected, but just enough. I went out into the world to do good. I was completely free of whatever strange and curious confines society had put around me.

I’ve told my story all year. Sometimes little bits and pieces, sometimes big chunks, sometimes nothing at all. I have a overflowing suitcase full of elevator pitches and easy get-aways and one-way tickets to my next destination in my always moving and hardly sitting still version of a life.

There is safety you know, in having it all. But there is safety in giving it all away too. People say to me, “I never could do what you’ve done.” or “Wow, tell me how be like you.” And you know what I say? Please don’t. Don’t make me the poster child for giving it all away because I didn’t have a plan, I’ve winged it pretty much all year, and now, nearing the end of that journey, I’m exhausted. Enriched beyond belief, taller, stronger, wiser, more able to understand who I am and the situations around me, I’m all of these things and more. But also plain tired.
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$5 or 5 Minutes = 1 Way to Make a Difference...

You know what people say to me all the time? I want to get involved but I don’t know how. Where do I start? It’s too overwhelming, there is too much information out there.

Well, I’ve heard you, and I’m here to help. Today launches the newest series on The Causemopolitan. It’s called $5 or 5 Minutes = 1 Way to Make a Difference. I’ll show you how with a few clicks of the mouse you can give back. And you know what? That’s not a bad place to start. Remember if you and you and you and you ALL do it, real change happens. So don’t give me any of the “does my $5 really make a difference.” Because it does. And since I’m hand-picking the campaigns, you have my word I’ve checked them out. I’ll only recommend campaigns that are real and authentic, none of that “portion of the proceeds” trash. I hate that.

So come along for the ride. I told you I’d focus more on YOU and not just ME once I got my act together for the next chapter of The Causemopolitan. That starts now.

1) Leave a comment. Go to this post: Philippines floods affect many of our microfinance entrepreneurs. Let’s give them an extra hand! and $5 will be donated to Kiva’s Ahon sa Hirap, Inc. borrowers in the Philippines affected by the recent typhoons. I am biased to this one since it was the women that I was working with this summer. But let me tell you this is the real thing. Over $2,500 has been raised since this campaign started. Every $5 means so much to the women there, so many have lost everything in a typhoon that was of “Katrina” size damage to the countryside. The money is being given by members of a Kiva lending team called The Road. By joining the team you could also help by making a contribution.

Seriously, this campaign is picking up steam. Here are the updated stats:

October 21: Turning words into deed: I donate US$5 per comment on this post
October 22: 208 comments, US$1,040 raised in 24 hours
October 23: 400 comments, US$2,000 raised in 48 hours
October 24: 500 comments, US$2,500 raised. First new loans allocated

Campaign runs through OCTOBER 31, 2009. Go here. Leave a comment. Feel good.

2) Follow @DrewFromTV on Twitter. When he reaches a million followers, he’s going to give a million dollars to Live Strong. So far, he’s at 118,643. He’s got a ways to go. But it’s a cool idea, I mean WHY NOT. Having followers on Twitter is a kind of currency now. Why not make something from it.

You know, this gets me thinking…anyone could do a challenge like this on Twitter. Next time you want to reach a milestone, why don’t you throw a little cause-action into it? Might surprise you how good it feels to run your own campaign.

Read more about Drew here and remember to follow him here.
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Say Hi! Contact Page...

In today’s episode of “I’m Not Perfect” and the web in general telling me to get with the picture, it seems the CONTACT FORM in my blog was not sending me the emails from the form for the last oh…well, I’m not sure. Say 3 weeks?

A Wordpress Plugin should have a built in, “Hey YOU, something’s not working” but it seems that’s NOT the case.

Forms aren’t archived so I have no idea really of who wrote me. But I do get a lot of straight up emails from people saying hi, and the web traffic on the CONTACT PAGE is fairly low, so I’m hoping no one out there hates me for not getting back in contact with them.

At any rate, here’s the deal. The contact page is updated. I love to hear from people who read my blog, so whether by leaving a comment, writing me an email, connecting with me on Twitter, or (gasp) finding me offline – please do say hi and do let me know what you think of my little spot online.

Poetry Wednesday #5 – Wild Geese...

A thank you to the the lovely Joanna Lord (fellow Vermont lover, social media maven and beach dweller) for passing along to me this week’s Poetry Wednesday poem.

***I was at a loss. Got all caught up in trying to find something perfect and was going to give up on the day and then I tweeted a quote:

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” – Mary Oliver #quotes

And Joanna sent me that poem and it’s PERFECT. Why do we insist things be perfect and then trick ourselves out of stuff? Happy to NOT have gone to bed without writing this post.

Just a reminder, Poetry Wednesdays are a chance to get out of my head and find beauty and simplicity in something other than cause or the hectic schedule I create around giving back. So I hope you enjoy…

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

If you liked this post, you might like:

On Friendship by Khalil Gibran
Those Winter Sundays
This Is Just To Say

Spontaneous Trip To Paris...

Main Entry: spon·ta·ne·ous
Pronunciation: \spän-ˈtā-nē-əs\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Late Latin spontaneus, from Latin sponte of one’s free will, voluntarily
Date: 1653

1 : proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency without external constraint
2 : arising from a momentary impulse
3 : controlled and directed internally : self-acting
4 : produced without being planted or without human labor : indigenous
5 : developing or occurring without apparent external influence, force, cause, or treatment
6 : not apparently contrived or manipulated : natural

The day after the Cause It’s My Birthday finale in Los Angeles, a good girlfriend of mine hosted 8 ladies for brunch at her place in the Hollywood Hills. All fabulous, professional, intelligent, gorgeous and tremendous ladies I’m privileged to call friends. Most of them NOT on twitter, not reading my blog, not super in social media. From a lawyer to interior designer, MBA candidate to nonprofit, water resource management to public relations, we all just sat around and caught up on each others’ lives. That included job and boys and professional goals and it was crazy because to some extent, I’m really used to friends in the digital and online space knowing a lot about me. That can be from my blog, to Flickr, to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – part of my whole “deal” during my Kiva Fellowship was to share and make everyone feel like they were involved and knew what was going on and so to sit around a group of girls and kinda have to start from scratch was interesting and fun and challenging in a way too to recall so many memories but condense them succinctly – after all 9 is a LOT of girls and a lot of talking we had to fit in. In the back of my mind was the fact that I now only get to see these girls once every few months and that a few of them are some of my best friends. The friendships we both work hard at, the ones I cherish, the ones that don’t come along every day.

So we sit there and we laugh and gossip and flow from one topic to another the way girls do. My one very close friend had an exciting announcement. She said she had been asked, and said YES, to go on a spontaneous trip to Paris that upcoming week with a guy she had met once. To keep the story short (and get to the point of where I’m going with this post) I’ll just say they met on a plane about 5 months ago, he had just recently ended an engagement, she was ending a very serious relationship and they just sort of started emailing. (This is not a secret story about me, I swear). And emailing some more. He lives in Europe mostly, she lives in Los Angeles and it wasn’t an intense amount of communication, but enough. He had called her the week before about maybe going to Italy to do something or another and she thought about it and suggested Paris.

Why? She had never been. Just about a month ago, finally broken up with her epic boyfriend of her 20’s and moving forward with her life she had heard a quote that stuck with her. It was “MAYBE YOU’RE EXACTLY WHERE YOU SHOULD BE RIGHT NOW.” As in, stop looking forward and stop looking back and just be. She thought about what she wanted in the now and what she wanted was an adventure. To visit Paris. To do something spontaneous.

Turning to us, she asked, “Is this crazy? I mean should I really go?”
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Power of the Blog, A Short History...

My friend Erica O’Grady and I sat together one February morning while we were both squatting in the “Tech Hostel” or more officially “Paige Craig’s beach apartment.” She said to me, “You really should have a blog. It’s a piece of you online.”

“I know, I know. I have a URL. I just haven’t set it all up yet.” I answered. See, I have blogged before. A lot actually. I was a blogger and then Lifestyle Editor for LAist from 2004-2008. I understood how a blog gains traffic and builds an audience. I also had for a long time wanted my own place on the web. I just was overwhelmed with a full-time job at a startup where I was online all the time anyway, LAist on the side, friends, boyfriend, yoga, hiking, dog, LIFE and when was I really going to blog? I journaled. Almost every night in my moleskin. Wasn’t that enough?

“No,” Erica said, “You really should just do it.” It just so happened Jonathan Dingman was also sitting around that breakfast table and said, “I can help. I can set it up for you. I can do whatever you want.” In addition to be a SEO wunder-kind and Wordpress guru, J. also has a few blogs of his own like GInside and I really knew that in order to get myself off the ground, I would need help from friends. I’m savvy, but I don’t know how to set up a blog. Once set up and running, I’m a little better, but I admit hand-holding was required.
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Vegas, New York, Pittsburgh, New Orleans – A...

A little housekeeping. First, I’ve finally updated my SCHEDULE in the upper navigation to show the most recent set of travel and what is upcoming. The piece that is NOT in there but I want to do is exactly which villages I was in while in the Philippines and my journal with those notes is in Pittsburgh so next time I’m back there (hometown for those of you new to my blog and my temporary home base and mailing address to accompany my nomadic lifestyle) I’ll add those barangays and villages in.

What you will notice is that I hit the U.S. running. This could be good, it could be bad, mostly it just IS. Which means life has a way of taking hold and the Cause It’s My Birthday campaign wasn’t going to plan itself, and we had only three weeks to pull everything together so all things considered I don’t regret the lack of sleep or long days leading into the campaign and then, well, the long days and long nights of the campaign itself. All in all, if you have to be out of the country for a few months at a time and miss everyone and want to make a splash – throw a 7 city, 7 day, 7 party tour. I think that outta do it.

So the question burning on everyone’s mind is what’s next? Well, I can’t tell you everything (because a lot I don’t know not because I’m being secretive…or am I…) but I can tell you what’s up right now, where I just was and where I’m going and what I’m doing in those places.
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Cause It’s My Birthday Video Update...

Doug and I shot one last video about Cause It’s My Birthday before I left Los Angeles – this was meant as a HUGE thank you to everyone involved. The video is a bit long – but our focus was to roll through each city and take a moment to reflect and say thank you and be appreciative of the time and effort everyone put into making the event a huge success. After all in a 7-day campaign, we ended with over $18,000 raised. Which is astounding to us.

A few big things to note – each of our donations came from individuals, we didn’t have large corporate sponsors. So that means the donations came from YOU and YOU and YOU. Each city had it’s own look and feel and that was incredibly moving and inspiring.

Any occasion can be an opportunity to raise money or drive awareness. We used birthday and we made it BIG, but you can do something small in your school, in your community, with your family, friends or coworkers. It can be online or off. We had SO much fun with this campaign and I just can’t say thank you enough to everyone involved.

More to come, insights, feedback, tips and tricks. So stay tuned for that.

One last thing – after talking to some friends and advisors – we’re keeping the donations open though the end of the month because people are still just hearing about the campaign now. So if you haven’t made a donation, you still can. You can also click on the Paypal donation widget to the right of this page.

Until next time,
Sloane