Dan Pallotta's informative TED Talk, "The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong," illuminates how everything people have been taught about charitable giving is dysfunctional.

Whereas for-profit sectors are applauded for risk-taking, aggressive marketing, and capital and financial incentives, the nonprofit sector is "stuck" begging for money and handouts. Too many nonprofits, he argues, are rewarded for how little they spend—not for what they accomplish.

"We have two rulebooks," Pallota says. "We have one for the nonprofit sector and one for the rest of the economic world."

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Although ten years have passed since the category-five Hurricane Katrina claimed 1,833 lives, the New Orleans community still faces many obstacles . After billions of dollars were spent to rebuild the city, recovery has been slow and challenging. Recognizing this struggle, Lowe's has paired up with Rebuilding Together to continue revitalizing the community.

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Volunteer Power is an organization with a definite focus: to "understand and equip the 21st century volunteer." Managed by Thomas W. McKee, owner and CEO of the training and development company Advantage Point Systems Inc., Mr. McKee is a volunteer, association management consultant, an educator, author, motivational speaker, and trainer. He proficiently collaborates with organizations and/or companies of varying sizes and types. Years of experience and knowledge qualify Mr. McKee to provide nonprofit leaders/visionaries with the content needed to reach their organizational goals. Co-authors Thomas and Jonathan McKee are volunteer leadership experts dedicated to helping nonprofit leaders mobilize the power and passion of their volunteers.

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One of the best and most effective ways to help people is through volunteerism. Not only does it assist those in need but also helps to shape those who choose to volunteer into better, more well-rounded people. The essence of volunteerism is helping others, so when a volunteer sees the changes they are making, it inspires them to keep going. At a time, when there are all different kinds of organizations out in the world it can be difficult for a young person to get involved, not knowing where to begin.

Youth Volunteer Corps of America (YVC) is an organization founded upon the idea that volunteerism inspires volunteerism.

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With increasing data breaches happening every year at major companies like Kohl's, Abercrombie and Fitch, Cigna and Anthem, it is more important than ever to know if your company is HIPAA compliant or not. Federal law requires companies dealing with private health information, or any business that hosts this information on their servers, to be HIPAA compliant.

Even if your company does not need to comply with HIPAA regulations, it is a good idea to protect other sensitive information like credit card numbers and customer employment information as strictly as private health information. Anthem's data breach in March exposed the records of more than 80 million people, many of whom were not even Anthem customers.

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At Giva we search for organizations, large and small, that are doing a great job of changing the world around them for the better; and we are pleased to salute them here.

Idealist

Today, Giva recognizes Idealist, a network of resources for the scholar at heart, dedicated to social change and impassioned by individual hearts. Founded in 1995 as the nonprofit organization Action Without Borders, Idealist bloomed from its philanthropist roots into a hub where over 97,000 organizations offer service opportunities daily; 100,000 unique visitors explore the vast site daily; and a variety of career information resources and blogs are also provided for its international audience daily.

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For the previous parts of this series, please see:
Skills-Based Volunteerism, Part 1
Skills-Based Volunteerism, Part 2: Functional Coaching & Mentoring
Skills-Based Volunteerism, Part 3: Marathon

Standard Team Projects

Think of this type of skills-based volunteerism like consulting, your business delegates forming a team of employees to scope and structure a project around addressing a need or problem for your nonprofit of choice:

• Individuals within each team are assigned a specific role in consulting and working to address a need.
• Like consulting, expertise and research is used to develop a strategy for effectively improving some sort of internal or external functioning for the nonprofit, or resolving an issue that that nonprofit faces.
• Standard Team Projects require careful consideration of a nonprofit's resources, community assets, and of course their mission.
• With careful implementation and oversight from the team, this type of pro-bono volunteerism has the potential to create a significant long term impact on a nonprofit and its ability to create social or environmental change.

The following is an example of a group using Standard Team Projects:

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ICLEI is an acronym you may or may not have heard before. "The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives," founded in 1990, is a nonprofit organization focused mainly on environmental sustainability. They work toward movements in local governments to build a sustainable future. ICLEI is a large organization that, according to their website, branches to "12 mega-cities, 100 super-cities and urban regions, 450 large cities, and 450 small and medium-sized cities and towns in 84 countries dedicated to sustainable development." In 2003, in an effort to reflect their further embrace of wider sustainability issues, they changed the name to "ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability".

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What does the word "kindness" mean to you? The first thoughts that may come to mind are a nice compliment received, or, perhaps, a door held open for another. One organization seeks to make it something much larger than that. The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation is an organization conceived and built on the idea that the small things that people do for one another go way beyond being friendly or helping another person in a small way. They call themselves "raktivists" and their website contains all things "RAK."

The "Kindness Ideas" section of their website is filled with suggestions of ways to be kind to another person, whether you may know them or not - small things such as paying someone's toll, making blankets for the homeless, and even ways to be kind to yourself such as eating a healthy snack or drinking more water. Another section includes "Kindness Quotes" taken from all different time periods and sources to inspire and motivate.

You can share your story of an act of kindness as well as be inspired by the stories of others. Comments are commonly found reflecting one act of kindness sparking another, creating "rak" ripples, perpetuating and spreading the feel-good chain.

They have kindness down to a science, literally! An entire portion of their website is dedicated to why they believe that kindness can be broken down in the same manner as science with resources provided to back up their argument. Their Blog includes great articles promoting the idea that the brain can be trained for compassion and argue that the key to happiness for teens and children are random acts of kindness.

Lessons are available to be brought into a classroom or taught at home. A section entitled "For Educators" contains prepared lesson plans explaining how to utilize and teach ideas encouraging children and teens to be more kind to one another, potentially changing bullying into befriending . The lesson plans work through a site called "Share My Lesson" where information can be found about RAK clubs, videos, as well as project ideas.

This organization is founded upon ways to make the world a better place, one act of kindness at a time, and Giva is very pleased to salute them!