Helping others can be easy

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The banner at the top of givemeaning.com reads, "the power of plenty." Perhaps an odd choice for a site that connects donors to charities in want and people in need, but at givemeaning.com people come together, raising not only much-needed funds, but building a stronger community – creating abundance through compassion.

Actress Babz Chula, independent contractor Mike Favel and firefighter Marc Shapiro have all benefited from the platform offered by Givemeaning. Each has been struck with cancer and each is facing enormous emotional and financial burdens as a result.

Independent columnist and PR consultant Rory Richards started the fund for Chula, to help with the costs of her treatments for Waldenstrom's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Richards raised more than $60,000.

"What I loved most about it," said Richards, "is you can set up a profile: 'I'm giving to this cause because...' and I said, 'Babz is a great friend and a great person and we need to have her here for as long as we can.' You write a little blurb and then you e-mail the link to all of your friends and all the people in your universe and they sign up. There's a ranking that ... [is] not just based on how much money you've given. It's [also] based on how many people you've sent that link to, which I think is a real powerful nuance to the site."

Once a project reaches its final goal, the site passes you onto other organizations or people. There are a number of causes to which a person can donate, said Richards, from projects in Africa to a family living in poverty in the United States.

"It's about community and it's about interdependence, which is the model of the future," she said.

Givemeaning.com was established in 2004. While individuals have been and are being helped through the site, Tom Williams, its CEO and founder, said he actually started Givemeaning out of frustration with charitable giving at large. He had just moved back to Canada from the United States after having had a successful career in the technology business there and was taking some time off. He read about, then followed in the newspaper, the court case of a seven-year-old child in Toronto who was being severely abused. Motivated to help the child, Williams said he searched for weeks for a charitable organization to which he could donate. As he was doing this, he realized that here was an area in which the Internet could be of service.

"People react to things, don't know the organization, don't necessarily know how to make it happen, but know what they want to see," he said. His solution was givemeaning.com, which initially only connected potential donors with specific charities. It was when a friend of his wife became seriously ill that he reluctantly agreed to expand its focus.

"It wasn't about strangers being asked to support her," he said. "It was just her network of friends and family going out to their friends and their friends' friends and saying, 'This is something that matters to me, this is why, would you support her through the site?' Sure enough, within four weeks, we had raised her $32,000 through the site. And we were just blown away by that."

Locally, Teri and Russell Favel have set up a fund on givemeaning.com for their father. Part of the profile they have written on the site reads: "This is his third time battling cancer, lymphoma, and [he is recovering from his] second stem-cell transplant. The financial stress our parents have to deal with every time my dad has been sick is tremendous. This time around, our dad is so weak and is unable to work at all [Favel is self-employed, with his own renovation company.]... We just really want our dad to be able to recover without worrying every day how he is going to provide for our family. Our mom works so hard full time, as well as tries to take care of everything at home. This is the reason we have decided to try to give our parents the help that is very much needed."

The Favels goal is to raise $55,000. As of Monday, they had raised about 20 per cent of that amount.

"The Jewish community [were] the first people that did step up," Teri Favel told the Independent, "and that was comforting because knowing we have a synagogue that we go to and then knowing all of our close friends that are Jewish [would help], it kind of gets forwarded on from there, so I definitely knew that there were at least that amount of people out there who would be willing to help us.

"And we do have close family friends that I've known from Talmud Torah and school," she continued, "and they've been helping us out emotionally all along through this as well. That was definitely something I had in mind [when creating the website fund] and especially then seeing the response, that just confirms it - how lucky we are."

One person who was motivated to respond was Estelle Bleet, a neigbor, who contacted the Independent about the story. She said she was concerned about the Favels' plight for a number of reasons.

"Firstly, because I know them and I know what hard workers they are and what hardships they've had and what an amazing family they are and my heart goes out to them," said Bleet, holding back tears. "Because I know who they are and I can make a tiny, tiny bit of a difference, I just feel strongly about it."

Marilyn and Bernard Hooper are also donors to the Favel fund. They don't know the Favels personally, but found out about their situation through e-mails about the website, where they read the article that Teri and Russell Favel had written about their request for financial aid.

"If we could help in any way to further his treatment, that's what we wanted to do," Marilyn Hooper told the Independent.

"I think we're all very sensitive to what a devastating disease it is and how it wreaks havoc on the family and everybody. It just touched my heartstrings and I felt compelled to do whatever little bit I could."

It is this aspect of the site that Williams said is remarkable: "the outpouring of human compassion, friend to friend to friend to friend, that's really the wonderful story about how the site works."

In addition to Chula's and Favel's project, there is the Marc Shapiro Support Fund. According to his profile, Shapiro is a 28-year-old firefighter at Vancouver International Airport: "He has just been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and is being treated at Vancouver General Hospital. He needs help with medical costs, as well as support for his mom and family to be able to come and be in Vancouver with him while undergoing treatment." His friends are asking people to help him toward the goal of $15,000 and, already, 85 per cent of that amount has been raised.

As with all endeavors, there is the potential for fraud on the site. Williams is conscious of this fact and Givemeaning does such things as validate medical claims. However, one of the site's main attributes is that it attempts to make things as easy as possible for the people who set up the funds.

"Just to show how unbureaucratic this is," said Williams, referring to the Favels and Teri Favel's request for help, "maybe within the first 48 hours of accepting funds into her fund at the site, they had a particular drug that had to be purchased from a particular store in Richmond and we were able to facilitate that purchase within three hours of her making the request.

"So we really understand that in these kinds of situations, where the family are playing caregiver and being so involved, they don't want to go through more hoops. We are actually trying to say, 'Look, don't worry about the payment and the bureaucracy. You tell them to call us and we'll take care of what can be one of the more stressful and burdensome aspects of caring for a loved one who's sick.'"

Givemeaning projects all have measurable charitable goals and 100 per cent of all money donated goes directly to the charity. Donors receive a tax receipt and can check out progress updates on each project's webpage. To donate or for more information, visit www.givemeaning.com.

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