Be Open

Pat Shepherd, Founder & Chief Doer of Things

Lets face it, I’ve had a privileged life. I’ve been lucky enough to travel, work in jobs I’ve loved, have food on the table and recently my partner and I bought our first house. Can you relate to any of the above?

Don’t get me wrong, we have tough days and we have challenges, but in the end we are so lucky compared to so many who didn’t win life’s lottery. It also means we are in a privileged position to help make good shit happen, some of us just need a bit of inspiration to remind us how we can make a difference.

In my late 20’s I was lucky enough to stand on top of a rubbish dump on the Thai/Burma border, with migrant and refugee children who had escaped the brutal government of Burma, to the relative safety of Thailand. You may ask why I say, lucky.

Well, it opened my eyes even more to the importance of giving a % and supporting other humans in this world. I’d always given to charity in buckets here and there, but seeing the needs on the border and how much a dollar could do was the big turning point in my life. It inspired me to set up One Percent Collective and to simplify the regular giving process.

So in 2012 I decided to ask my friends and family to give 1% of their income on a regular basis to Kiwi-based charities that are having an amazing impact in Aotearoa and beyond. For the average Kiwi, that’s less than $1.50 a day.

We started with 6 charities and as the Collective grew and more people signed up to give their 1%, we grew the amount of charities we supported. The dollars keep coming in on a regular basis, allowing the small organisations to forecast better and to spend less time stressing about building their own regular giving programme, meaning they can focus more on impact instead.

With 14 charities now part of the Collective and almost $1.5 million raised we are, for many of our partner charities, now their largest source of regular funding with no strings attached, meaning every dollar has much more impact than if it came through other time and resource heavy fundraising channels.

However, we are at a crucial time where I need to ask you, ‘who do you give to?’

Over 500 generous givers have joined One Percent Collective, but without big marketing budgets to spread the word, it’s really tough for us to break through the noisy digital world and reach you with our simple message about regular giving. We really need your help to make this generosity movement crank!

This journal puts us in control of our media, it limits the restrictions the big tech giants like Facebook and Google have over us, and it allows us to reach thousands. Ultimately, while we have pretty pictures and great stories, the end goal of producing this journal is to inspire you to join our Collective, so that through regular giving we can support our partner charities to have even more impact in this world that we are all responsible for.

The joy with regular giving is that you can kick back with your feet up, knowing that the charities you support are making an impact each and every day.

200 new givers would mean over $100,000 extra raised per year. That’s thousands more meals to those in need, kids learning about the world, gardens planted, coastlines cared for and a whole lot more.

It’s an honour to have Jacinda open this with such lovely words around kindness. Kindness and generosity have changed my life, they even found me a wife (read about that in Laura’s giver chat) and I know from so many givers that it has changed their lives. Some dive right in, volunteering with our charities, attending our events and keeping in touch via our stories. While others are more than content knowing that 100% of their donations are going to the charities they chose to support with their hard earned dollars.

I hope you enjoy learning a little more about One Percent Collective through this issue of The Generosity Journal and I do hope we can inspire you to join us. The Collective have helped us shape the direction of One Percent Collective and we’ve done our best to ensure it’s a great giving experience. So now’s the time for us to grow the movement and inspire more people to give their 1%.

Stay awesome and thank you for giving a %.