Doing Good Feels Good

Photo by Shifaz Abdul Hakkim on Unsplash

Hello my dear happiness nerds, welcome back!

I have been busy, among others, with doing loads of fun-raising 😃 I’ve given two workshops about it and am planning to give more workshops in the future. People love the idea and it’s catching on.

For those of you who don’t know: Fun-raising is the very simple idea of (a) offering a service that you love doing and are reasonably good at, and (b) instead of people paying you or you doing it for free they donate to a charity of your choice. So, for example, you could give a guitar lesson and let your student donate $50 to the awesome Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN).

In my case, I’ve been giving motivational and psychological counseling for $100 to $140 per session for 15 sessions this year so far (with an estimated 5 more to come). So, you can imagine the impact that is possible as an individual (though, as previously noted, most of the change regarding the climate crisis has to come from the political/industrial level). Almost two thirds of the money went to the aforementioned CfRN, so with those donations alone I pulled an estimated 2400 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to removing the average lifetime pollution of 6 Swiss persons (each living to the age of 83 years).

So this is the potential of fun-raising. Even if you only do a fraction of this – because, who has the time, right? – you still can do a substantial difference over the course of your life. Likely a bigger difference than any lifestyle change – even though I encourage you to also, for example, fly less, eat more plant-based food, and reduce your shopping (especially clothes and electronics). All this is, of course, is an added benefit to the other goals of fun-raising, like having fun, doing good, and connecting with others – all scientifically supported ways to live a happier life.

I want to close with a recent example: A few weeks ago, I started a career counseling project with a friend (they are my client). We made the deal that for the 1st session they would donate $100 to teamseas.org, an awesome ocean cleaning project that is really going strong right now (check out the link to see what it’s about). I pledged to double their donation, because we are both passionate about the beautiful sea life on our (after all mostly blue!) planet.

The donations for the next sessions are likely going to CfRN again, but I’m also considering Plan International. They support the education and sexual self-determination of girls worldwide (btw, also one of the most effective measures to combat climate change according to the awesome Project Drawdown). I have to do a little bit more research on them, though, to see if they are the most effective option in this regard.

I hope I could inspire you to start your own little fun-raising project. Here you can find out more about how to actually start a project. Also, please consider giving to teamseas.org, it’s a really a cool project and giving makes you happy, I promise 😊

Much love

Thomas

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