Summary: We’re thrilled to participate in another Blog Action Day. Bloggers and podcasters like us from around the world and across the internet all post about a single subject. And fittingly, this year’s theme is “The Power of We.” Now that’s a theme we can get behind. In fact, our biggest challenge has been to filter through all of our BIGG ideas about this subject! Listen to this post! Click a player to hear George & Mary-Lynn on The BIGG Success Show Podcast. (Duration 5:00) iPhone/iPad/Adroid/Mobile Podcast Player The first Blog Action Day was in 2007. BIGG Success wasn’t around when they did it so we first participated in 2008. The theme that year was poverty. Collaboration across continents We bring this up because we talked about collaboration across continents that year. It was about a group of farmers in Ohio working with a group of farmers in Kenya to end poverty in a village of 5,000 people. The power of we! This amazing feat was started by the vision of one man – the minister in the village in Kenya. He didn’t want his people to be dependent on outsiders supplying food and other essentials. Now we want to share two stories: The Women Roofers The Women Roofers are professional women – in the Rutherford County, North Carolina area – who voluntarily ban together to help people who can’t help themselves. The power of we! When a recent widow with no money found herself with a leaky roof, she made one phone call. The Women Roofers showed up in days, according to a story on CBS News. Nell Bovender is the driving force behind the group. She arranges for donations of supplies and organizes the volunteers, who – in most cases – have never hammered a nail in a single shingle. That doesn’t slow this group of BIGG goal-getters down one bit! They saw a problem and they’re fixing it one rooftop at a time. Code for America Code for America is also known as “The PeaceCorps for Geeks”. Tech stars take a year off to work here in the States, helping government use technology to solve persistent problems. Founded by Jennifer Pahlka, this group built an app for the city of Boston that made a game out of keeping fire hydrants clear of snow. Citizens adopted a fire hydrant. They could name it. They could paint it. But they had to shovel the snow away from it or risk losing their beloved hydrant. It went viral – Honolulu now uses it to make sure their tsunami sirens have good batteries in them. Seattle uses it for storm sewers. In total, nine cities are using this app today. They can do it faster and cheaper than government. In Jennifer’s TED talk, she offered another example – software to help parents decide which public school was best for their kid. Through normal channels, this would have taken two years and $2 million dollars. Three people from Code for America only required two-and-a-half months. The power of we! The power of we begins with me! But we haven’t told you the rest of the story. Jennifer closes her TED talk by saying we need to lend more than a voice. We need to lend a hand. The power of we begins with me! To fully capitalize on the tremendous power of collective action, we must all take individual responsibility. We can’t look at a situation and just complain. We have to be willing to take action as well. We can’t wait for someone else. We have to be the one. In all the stories we shared here, there was one individual who inspired other individuals. The power of we begins with me! You can’t take on the problems of the world. But you can take on a problem in your corner of it. That’s BIGG success! What are your experiences with the power of we? Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file | podcast: http://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00832-101512.mp3
