Have you heard the story of the young man who, while walking down an empty beach spotted a person throwing beached starfish back into the sea?

Since there were millions of beached starfish on that particular coast, he went up to his man and asked him why he was doing this. The man explained that starfish were very important to the ecosystem and that he did this when he went down for his daily walk. ‘That’s pointless’- exclaimed the young man “There are millions of them and you can never make much of a difference”. 

Our starfish hero picked up a starfish on the ground, flung it back into the sea, smiled and said – “Made a difference to that one..”

Similar to that story, we believed that our small actions would help to make a better world.  So in late 2013, as a group of friends we startedHelp2grow.org. After experimenting with a few projects, we have now embarked on a promising light weight project – Project 1%. 

Introducing Project 1% :

Project 1% as the name suggests includes each of us pledging 1%.  We pledge 1% of our incomes, time and energy to helping worthy causes.. because we believe that small things can often be the big things. We meet virtually monthly to channel the resources to a partner of our choice. That’s it!  (Perhaps, our favourite part of project 1% is  how easy it is to explain)

Since we began, we’ve made our small impact with the 1% Pledges. Here the causes we funded between Mar and Jun’15 with various great NGOs:

• SOS Childrens’ Village: a year’s education for a child

  

  The 1% impact

• Project Khel: 3 months of sports based life-skills course for 50 children
• Vidyarambam: 4 months of English classes for 40 kids in Chennai & child’s full year education (Shweta’sobservations)
•  Bridging the Gaps (partially sponsored) – a sport-art camp for 120 underprivileged kids to learn about leadership, gender equality and many other things. (Myobservations on transforming lives)

The world is changed one starfish at a time & Project 1% is our step in that direction.Share 1% Care 100% .

—-

This is also posted at Help2grow.org. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done so far and would love to hear from you. Are there causes you would like to fund?  Would you like to share 1%? We’d love to hear from you.