Greetings and happy new year! We're thrilled to announce that registration has begun for the
2007 Idealist Campus Conference. The conference will be held in Chicago, IL, on March 23-25, and it would be great to see you there.
From the closing ceremony
a couple of years ago
Please visit the
conference site to get early-bird registration rates for yourself and your campus group, and to learn how you can play an active role in the conference this year.
The 2007 Idealist Campus Conference will be unlike any conference we've ever organized before. This event will serve as an incubator of great ideas for
changing your community and the world . Bring your most creative, ambitious, and practical dreams to the conference, and join 1,000 other students, campus staff, and nonprofit professionals for a weekend of storytelling, skill-building and connections.
Attendees will:
* Join a growing movement of students, campuses, and organizations working to create a world where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.
* Share knowledge and experiences with others at this highly participatory event – present at a Poster Session, join an Affinity Group, and learn how the issues you care about connect to others during Cooperative Group sessions.
* Participate in skill-building sessions to learn how to lead campus and community efforts to connect everyone to the issues that matter to them most.
* Meet with local, national and international nonprofit organizations to learn about jobs, internships and year of service programs.
* Learn how technology can support efforts to build a better world.
...and much, much more. Our Student Planning Committee at DePaul University is hard at work making sure the conference will be inspiring, powerful, "green," and life-changing. Don't miss this incredible opportunity to connect with a global movement of change-makers.
For more information, please visit
the conference site and feel free to contact
julia@idealist.org with any questions. We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!
Best wishes for 2007,
The Idealist Campus Conference Team
Greetings! Earlier today, I sent the following message to everyone who signed up on Idealist over the last year. The response has been incredible, as you can see
here and
here. Thanks to everyone for responding so generously. We are happy and moved and excited, and we look forward to what this week will bring. Thank you!
Dear friends,
My name is Ami Dar, and I am the director of Idealist.org. I am writing to invite you to imagine a better community and a better world, and to see how we can build it together,
starting right now.
This is not a fundraising letter: We've just launched this initiative, and what we need at this point is your brain and your passion, not your money.
After giving you some more details below, we are going to ask you to do three things:
1. Visit
www.idealist.org/imagine to learn more about this new initiative and to see how people around the world are responding to it.
2. Visit
www.idealist.org/meetings to attend or host a start-up meeting wherever you are during the week of February 5-11 (more about this below).
3. Share this message with friends and colleagues.
WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?
Very briefly, we believe that:
1. All over the world there are many people who share similar values, dreams, and challenges.
2. With all the tools we have now, we can communicate like never before.
3. If all of us had more opportunities to connect and work together, online and face-to-face, in neighborhoods, villages, schools, and workplaces, the world would be a different place.
How different? We don't know, but together we can find out.
WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
Because there is a good chance that right now, on different floors of an apartment building somewhere in your country, two people are looking out their windows and wishing there were a garden or a playground below instead of a dirty courtyard. But acting alone can be difficult, and in many neighborhoods, both rich and poor, there is no way for people to know that they are not alone - that down the street, or two floors above or below them, there may be others who would gladly work with them if they only knew where or how to find them.
This problem is part of a bigger challenge: to get involved in our community, most of us need a few things in place. We need some hope and some trust, a minimum of freedom, and access to others who may want to work with us. We may also need more information about the problem we want to solve, stories and ideas from people who have dealt with similar issues, and options for action that make sense to each of us.
Some people have access to all this, but many others do not. As a result, millions of opportunities for action and collaboration are missed every day. Think only of one neighborhood, one school, or one village you know, and of how much more could be done there with the available resources. If you then add up these unfulfilled possibilities all over the world, the picture that emerges can be both exhilarating and heartbreaking.
This sense of unrealized potential is one engine driving this project. The other is a conviction that for the first time in history we - all of us - have everything we need to build a strong global network of people who want to act locally, think globally, and share what they can with others.
To start, please:
1. Visit
www.idealist.org/imagine to learn more about this project and to post your thoughts about it. (This page is in ten languages, so you can also share it with people who don't read English.)
2. Attend or host a start-up meeting wherever you are during the week of February 5-11. During that week, people all over the world will meet in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces to talk about how to create more opportunities for action and collaboration for everyone. To sign up for a meeting, or to post one in your community if no one has done this yet, please visit
www.idealist.org/meetings
3. Help spread the word. Nothing on the internet is more powerful than your forward-> button, and we hope you can share this message with friends and colleagues, by email,
in person, or through your blog, website, or social networking site. (See the bottom of this message, under my signature, for a bit more about this.)
Most importantly, keep in touch. We read every email we receive, and from now on we'll be updating the blog on the Idealist homepage every few hours with news, questions, and ideas as this project evolves.
Thanks for reading and for taking this leap of faith with us. We look forward to working with you and to seeing what we can all achieve together.
All the best,
Ami Dar
A FEW TIPS FOR SHARING THIS MESSAGE
* Forward this email to anyone you know who might be interested in it, and post a message on any relevant mailing list or online forum.
* Tell people at work, at school, or in your place of worship to visit Idealist.
* If you have a website or a blog, tell people about this initiative, and add a
button or a banner to your site.
* If you are on
MySpace,
Facebook,
Orkut,
Friendster, or any other networking site, use any tools they give you to help spread the word. On MySpace we are at
http://www.myspace.com/idealists (just getting started there), and on
Facebook you can join the "I am an Idealist" group.
* Take a picture: pick a place you love in your area, shoot a photo or a video that expresses what this idea means to you, and post it on
Flickr or on
YouTube with the tag "Idealist"
* Lastly, if you use
Del.icio.us,
Technorati,
Digg, or any other bookmarking or news aggregation site, add a link to
http://www.idealist.org or straight to
http://www.idealist.org/imagine
Thanks again!
On Tuesday night we emailed our members on
Idealistas.org, our site in Spanish, and by last night
local meetings had already gone up in Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, and some of them are already filling up. Estamos muy contentos!
As people are posting
comments, many of you are including quotes that express how you feel about
this initiative. Two of the most popular are Margaret Mead’s “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” and Mahatma Gandhi’s “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” Last night we did a search through all the comments, and it turns out that Gandhi leads Mead 12 to 9… So what is your favorite quote about change, action, cooperation, etc.? Please post it as a Comment right under this blog entry. Thank you!
As the
150th meeting is about to go up, here is a range of the places where people are meeting: a youth hostel in San Francisco; a park in Medellin, Colombia; a primary school in Arusha, Tanzania; a public library in Madison, Wisconsin; a Starbucks in Hangzhou, China; a cafe in Bamako, Mali; a hotel in Tiblisi, Georgia; an internet cafe in Accra, Ghana; someone's home in Honduras; a chief's camp in Narok, Kenya; a McDonald's in Karachi, Pakistan; and a beach in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Where will you
meet?
Two weeks ago, we started inviting people everywhere to take part in
a new initiative to connect people, ideas, and resources all over the world. Since then, 242 people in 66 countries have volunteered to host local
start-up meetings to get this idea off the ground. These meetings are happening next week, and if there is one near you, it would be great if you could attend.
Reading all
the comments that so many of you have posted here, it's clear that a) the world needs changing; and b) together we can make a big difference, and we can do it now. So if you have some time next week, and there is a
meeting near you, come meet some great people, bring a friend, and see what we can do together. Thank you!
