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photo: HANNAH SALWEN Keep Your House Need help translating a sense of outrage into action? You don’t need to sell your house. Here’s a list of some personal causes or issues you might be interested in, and some simple projects you and your family might undertake. Environment Turn down your thermostat to cut your heating bill in half. Take the bus or carpool to cut transportation costs in half. This will reduce your “footprint” and free up money to donate. Hunger Eat more vegetarian meals to cut meat bill in half. Eat out half as often and donate funds. Health Take a “staycation” to cut your vacation bills in half and donate to the Ronald McDonald House, so that others can visit their sick kids. Get your teeth cleaned once a year and do more flossing and donate to Operation Smile. Substandard housing Donate half your weekend to building a Habitat for Humanity house. Substance abuse Buy half the sodas or cups of coffee you drink in a week. Donate the savings to a rehabilitation program. AIDS Buddy with someone infected with HIV and eat with that person twice or more a week. Treatment of soldiers Use half your free periods one week to write personal notes thanking our military personnel for their service. Cancer Cut off half of your hair and donate to Locks of Love. Physical disabilities Download half as many songs on iTunes or cut your concert attendance in half and donate to those with hearing disabilities. Girls’ self-esteem issues Cut your makeup spending in half or go to the beauty salon or spa half as often for manicures, Homelessness Eliminate your lawn service and mow the yard yourself. Donate the savings. —HANNAH SALWEN
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‘PLEASE HELP’
By HANNAH SALWEN I never knew if “defining moments” were real or just theory. Then I lived one. It was fall 2006, and I was 14 years old and coming home from a sleepover. As we pulled up to a stoplight about a mile from my house, I gazed out the window and spotted a man wearing ragged clothes. His cardboard sign read “Hungry, Homeless, Please Help.” It was a scene I had seen hundreds of times living in Atlanta. But this time, I looked to my right and as I turned, a beautiful black Mercedes pulled up alongside us. I toggled back and forth between the haves and have-not of the situation. I said to my dad in the driver’s seat, “You know, Dad, if that man didn’t have such a nice car, that man there could have a meal.”
My dad thought about it a second and answered, “Yes, but if we didn’t have such a nice car he could have a meal. But what happens tomorrow? And the next day?” The light turned green and we drove the mile to our house. But I was still angry about the situation, and that night at dinner I couldn’t wait to tell my brother and my mother about the incident. As we sat down, I shoveled a fork full of fried rice into my mouth and didn’t even wait to swallow before I replayed the scene for them of the homeless man and the Mercedes. I was so angry—at myself and at our family for not doing enough to fix the world’s injustices. Finally, after half an hour of listening to me demand more action from our family, my mother challenged me: “What do you want to do, sell the house, give up your room?” My eyes lit up. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what I want to do.” So that’s what our family did. We sold our big, beautiful house, moved into one half its size and decided to give away half the proceeds to charity. From this crazy moment, my family embarked on a journey of transformation, from a family defined by what we own to one defined by what we give. We have traveled several times to Ghana, where our funds are helping more than 30,000 villagers move out of poverty. Our partner in this effort is an amazing organization called The Hunger Project (www.thp.org), which enables communities in the developing world to recognize their own ability to envision and build a brighter future. Along the way, my dad and I wrote a book about our family project and have done more than 80 talks about our story, teaching people how they can be more generous than they ever dreamed. All in all, it has been an amazing experience, and I want to tell you about three of the lessons I’ve learned walking along this unusual path: 1. I never knew my heroes would be people living on less than $1.25 a day. Let me tell you about Comfort, a remarkable woman I met last summer in Ghana. Comfort lives in the impoverished tiny farming village of Besease. A few years back, she lamented that she and her neighbors had to walk for miles to bring palm nuts to a processor that would then turn the nuts into oil for cooking. They also had to pay for the processing. “We could do that,” she told her neighbors. “Why don’t we all contribute a small amount of money each week to a fund and buy a press for our village?” The villagers of Besease did just that, pooling a few bills each per week until they had enough to buy a press. Not only did the local villagers not have to walk anymore, but villages from other communities began bringing their nuts to Besease as well. Cash began flowing into Comfort’s town, and jobs were created. Comfort knew just what to do with the funds being generated: build a preschool and kindergarten for local kids. So they did, and another wonderful thing happened: Enrollment jumped from 20 to 50 in a single school year. Comfort had seen it all along, a chance to bring in money and then help bring more education to her small town. 2. I never realized how many people share my passions and want to help change the world. When our family started doing our project, we didn’t know many others who cared as much as we did. Then we started hearing from people doing their own projects. The kids at Rye Middle School decided to time their showers, then cut that time in half to help the environment and save on water bills. A girl from New York’s Chapin School wrote to me that she dreamed of owning a mansion until she heard about our project; that night, she cleaned out her bedroom closet and donated half of her clothes to Goodwill. A man in Hawaii sent me a $50 check with the payee line left blank, instructing me to write in any organization’s name. We even heard from a mother in suburban Chicago who read our book and sold her own house (much to the shock of her kids) because she worried that her family had become too focused on consumption. Maybe the most telling sentence I’ve heard all year came from Gayle Beshears, who won Philanthropist of the Year in Colorado Springs, Colo. “I didn’t know I was a philanthropist until I read it in the paper. I thought I was just having fun.” 3. We’re all needy AND we’re all rich with gifts to share. My father and I had always expected that our book would be read by suburban moms worried that their families were sleepwalking in an earn-spend-earn-spend cycle. But at a book tour event, a tall African-American man approached our table. “I know you wrote this book for white soccer moms,” he told my dad, “but it’s the poor, black inner-city kid who really needs you. Will you help me?” The man’s name is Ed Mos, and he’s a social worker serving some of the worst-performing schools in metro Atlanta. Slowly, we began to work with him, helping to teach inner-city kids that they can feel powerful without joining gangs or having babies. The tool, which Dr. Morris saw (and honestly we didn’t) is the power of giving half—in other words, helping kids recognize that they have plenty to give even without having financial resources. I knew we were on to something amazing when I heard about the second-graders at Oakley Elementary School. Each year, the kids there receive two Toys for Tots gifts. This time, they each gave away one to another needy child. Afterward, all they wanted to talk about was how they gave, not what they got. I almost cried when I heard that. Hannah Salwen is a senior at Atlanta Girls’ School, where she plays volleyball and is on the student council. With her father, Kevin, she is co-author of “The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). She is an adviser to the United Nations Foundation Girl Up campaign and was named one of Glamour Magazine’s Amazing Young Women for 2010. For more information, go to www.thepowerofhalf.com
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