Reading a post today from Kevin Roberts where he talks about the impact of the ‘Do One Thing’ approach to sustainability, his description of the “virtuous domino effect” also seemed a good fit for Unsip.
Interestingly at the end of 2009 his company Saatchi and Saatchi’s Hudson Street New York agency and HQ distributed free coffee mugs to their staff and began offering free morning coffee. As a result, in the first quarter of 2010 alone the office reduced the number of paper cups and lids used by 9,005, and saved $4,237 in the process.
YKIP foundation is improving the lives people in Bali through grassroots Health and Education Projects.
The foundation provides simple and cost effective programs and solutions to improve the health of both adults and children.
For tiny sums of money Ykip provides support to hearing impaired children with hearing loss detection programs and by providing hearing aids to children who desperately need them.
There is no universal hearing screening at birth in Bali and there are many hearing impaired children who could benefit from hearing aids. Children who do not hear well enough to develop language before the age of 6 or 7, will probably never be able to do so.
The impact on the future of many children through these programs is huge.
These children’s lives are transformed as they are enabled to communicate, become educated and go on to live independent lives.
Your $3 coffee will pay for three babies to be tested for hearing loss at birth.
Our friends at Mitrais are working hard to develop a cool iPhone App for us.
The App will be free to download and will update the Unsip website, your Facebook page and Twitter status when you’ve ‘unsipped’ and ‘made something good happen’!
It will be a great way of showing the impact we are making together.
We can’t thank David, Erwin and their development team enough for helping us to make a dent in the universe.
Your body is a temple and you wouldn’t touch the stuff!
Perhaps you drink green tea, bottled water or a great glass of wine?
The point is you don’t HAVE to drink coffee to get involved in the Unsip movement and to ‘make something good happen’.
You just need to commit to the idea that $3 or the equivalent in pounds, pence, lira, euros or whatever is a tiny amount that can positively impact on someone’s life somewhere in the world.
We are talking about providing carers for orphans, books for children and water for communities.
Can you believe that we consume 400 billion cups of coffee every year?
In the USA alone 400 million cups of coffee are downed every day!
That’s 146 billion cups a year.
Starbucks is on track to generate more than $7 billion in 2010 purely from selling beverages, which accounts for about 60% of the comapny’s revenue.
And I haven’t even mentioned Italy yet. I’m sure you get the picture.
We’re spending A LOT of money buying coffee.
It is expected that by 2012 coffee sales in the USA will grow to $59 billion!
Imagine the change we could create if we could funnel just a tiny amount of that money to people making a difference.
We’re not asking you to stop having your coffee experience every day. We’re asking you to start by giving up just one and telling a friend who will join you. Then they’ll tell their friends, their family and their Facebook and Twitter networks.
And before we know it we will have made something extraordinary happen.
Childs i Foundation is a charity working at grassroots level to help solve the problem of baby abandonment in Uganda, where there are 2 million orphans.
Their work involves setting up a support programme to help mothers at risk of abandoning their babies; a transitional home to provide short-term life-saving care to abandoned babies; and a family placement programme to ensure every child grows up in a loving family.
The charity was founded by former TV producer Lucy Buck who experienced the pain of having a baby boy die in her arms when she was volunteering at a babies home in Kampala. This drove Lucy to quit her job, move back with her parents and work full time to get Childs i off the ground.
Following two years of hard work the Malakia Babies Home opened it’s doors in May 2010 and is already providing a loving home to nine (at last count) beautiful babies. Childs i Foundation has used the power of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube to reach a wider audience and gain the much need support of money, time and love.
So how can the cost of a latte help the amazing work Childs i Foundation is doing in Uganda?
$3 provides a loving carer for four babies for a whole day!
Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us. The fact is unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.
But this isn’t the only problem, in Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours every year just walking for water. Women and children usually bear the burden of water collection, walking miles to the nearest source, which is unprotected and likely to make them sick.
Time spent walking for water and resulting diseases keeps children from school and mothers from taking care of their families.
charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. This is part of their mission statement;
“One in eight people in our world don’t have access to the most basic of human needs. Something we can’t imagine going 12 hours without.
We’d like to introduce you to a few of those billion people. They are very real, and they need our help. They didn’t choose to be born into a village where the only source of water is a polluted swamp.
We invite you to put yourself in their shoes. Follow them on their daily journey. Carry 80 pounds of water in yellow fuel cans. Dig with their children in sand for water. Line up at a well and wait 8 hours for a turn.
Now, make a decision to help. We’re not offering grand solutions and billion dollar schemes, but instead, simple things that work. Things like freshwater wells, rainwater catchments and sand filters. We know how to help millions.
Start by helping one.”
So what does the cost of your unsipped coffee provide? $3 provides clean safe drinking water for one person in the developing world for a whole year!.
Room to Read was founded 10 years ago by John Wood a former Microsoft executive who while on holiday in Nepal came across a school library without any books for the children to read. Within a year he had left his job and begun to set about changing the world by helping to educate children in developing countries.
So how does giving up your coffee help to educate children in the developing world?
$3 buys three local language books in countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, Zambia and Cambodia.
That’s a book in the hands of three more children who deserve to have the opportunities that we all take for granted. All for the price of a latte.
If you’ve unsipped and would like to donate to Room to Read head straight to their donations page and find out more about how your donation can make a difference.
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