Cleanse for Your Cause™

Oh yeah!

In my last post I intro­duced Where’s Your Heart? Foun­da­tion (“Where’s Your Heart?” to our friends) a char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion I’ve setup to improve people’s lives through altru­is­tic liv­ing. I dis­cussed our mis­sion, and I’d like to make all that fancy talk a lit­tle more prac­ti­cal by announc­ing our first event… “Cleanse for Your Cause™”

It’s a par­tic­i­pa­tory event that is both per­sonal (and there­fore more mean­ing­ful) and set in a group con­text (to bring us together and show us how we can have a big impact by work­ing together).

There will be two ways to par­tic­i­pate. First way, com­plete a juice cleanse/fast (or a mas­ter cleanse).

This per­son will decide how long they want to fast, and will pick a char­ity that they want to sup­port. Let me say that again, because it’s important:

1. Every­one starts at the same time, but each per­son decides how long they’ll go. We’re all par­tic­i­pat­ing together, but we par­tic­i­pate equally. Per­son­ally, my longest cleanse is 3 days, but I know peo­ple who’ve gone much longer. I have some friends new to juic­ing (that’s fruit/veggie juic­ing, not steroids!) and I’m hop­ing they’ll par­tic­i­pate for a day or two.
2. Every­one picks their own char­ity. Here’s where it gets excit­ing… what’s mean­ing­ful to me may not be as mean­ing­ful to you. So, as long as it’s a reg­is­tered US char­ity, you can bring it to the event. I’ll be blog­ging more about the import of this con­cept in the future, but suf­fice it to say for now… you can raise money for a cause you care about, even as you par­tic­i­pate in this group (hope­fully global) event.

I like to think that this per­sonal rel­e­vance is some­thing that mag­ni­fies the good feel­ing you get by par­tic­i­pat­ing. For exam­ple, I might walk to sup­port Breast Can­cer Research as a favor to a friend (and be happy to do so). But, if I can walk to sup­port a char­ity that is close to me, I’ll cre­ate a more pos­i­tive feel­ing for myself but not take any­thing away from the walk itself.

This is why it’s called Cleanse for Your Cause, in con­trast to some­thing like Cleans­ing for Peace (…and for the eco­nomic suc­cess of the spon­sor — they charge a lot to par­tic­i­pate in this event!).

Remem­ber, we want to cre­ate, nur­ture and share that feel­ing™. We cre­ate it with the struc­ture of the event, we nur­ture that feel­ing with the mag­ni­fier of per­sonal rel­e­vance, and we’ll share it with our friends…

That leads us to the next way to par­tic­i­pate, as a donor. Maybe juice cleans­ing isn’t your thing. Maybe you hate fresh veg­eta­bles packed with nutri­tion. Hey, no judg­ment here! Through our site (the one still being built) peo­ple who cleanse can recruit their friends to sup­port their effort by donat­ing money to the char­ity the cleanser has selected. This adds a bit of an edge, and hope­fully makes it a bit more fun. Donors make a pledge based on how long their friend will cleanse. It doesn’t have to be a lot — say $1/day. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is the key.

Hope­fully through our site (and this is where my expe­ri­ence as a soft­ware prod­uct guy will come to play) we’ll have an easy to use dash­board that helps peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate around our event, tell their friends what they’re doing, and raise money for their cause. Hope­fully peo­ple will share their expe­ri­ences… maybe why they’ve picked a par­tic­u­lar char­ity, or what they’re going through as they cleanse.

This sounds com­pli­cated. Of course, it wouldn’t be fun if it weren’t! Let me give you an example…

I’m going to par­tic­i­pate in the cleanse. Let’s say I choose to raise money for the Red Cross. And, I think I’ll do a 10 day cleanse. I tell my brother, who’s not inter­ested in juice, and he pledges $1/day to my cause. In fact, turns out my friends are really cool, and all 50 peo­ple I know decide to donate var­i­ous amounts to my effort. In total, let’s say I get pledges for $150/day. If I cleanse for 10 days, as I hope, I raise $1,500 for the Red Cross. If I last an 11th day, it’s $1,650.

Let’s say you want to par­tic­i­pate too. You want to raise money for Grassroots.org, because they’re just cool peo­ple doing good stuff. You get your friends to pledge money to your effort, but you’re less ambi­tious than I am and only think you can do a two day cleanse. Per­haps your 100 friends chip in a lit­tle more per day though, and you raise pledges of $450/day.

So here we are. You and I cleanse at the same time, share the expe­ri­ence (via our site and it’s inte­gra­tion with Face­book). Our friends cheer us on and give us the sup­port we need to get over the hard minutes/hours/days dur­ing the cleanse because they’re vested (par­tic­i­pat­ing) through their pledges. Maybe, some­one even stum­bles across our Fan Page or our web site and reads about the expe­ri­ences and feels some­thing of the good energy we’re gen­er­at­ing because we’re doing some­thing good and hav­ing fun. (Sure beats com­plain­ing, or hang­ing around neg­a­tive peo­ple, right?)

Hope­fully we get a few peo­ple to cleanse at the same time. Frankly, and here I’m shar­ing my per­sonal hope, I’m hop­ing to find 5o peo­ple who want to join us in the cleanse. Remem­ber, even a one day cleanse is awe­some. We’ll even start on the week­end, so peo­ple who want to do 1 or 2 day cleanses don’t have to deal with logis­tics of get­ting juice at work (I fig­ure peo­ple who cleanse longer have prob­a­bly done this before, and have all that worked out).

Wait, there’s more. (Of course!)

But, for now, that’s all I’ll share. I have too much tech­nol­ogy start-up guy in me to give away the whole game before I’m ready to show it. I will add a few things:

1. None of the money raised comes to me per­son­ally. I don’t take a salary, and I am fully fund­ing the orga­ni­za­tion myself (for now… I hope to accept some dona­tions even­tu­ally, but not until I can prove some suc­cess). If you par­tic­i­pate as a Donor, you’ll ful­fill your pledge to Where’s Your Heart? and that pledge will be fully tax deductible (for US res­i­dents). Where’s Your Heart? will dis­trib­ute the money to the char­i­ties them­selves (and that’s why we can’t work with inter­na­tional char­i­ties right now… in short, US tax law has very strict com­pli­ance with how money crosses board­ers when used for char­ity — and it’s too com­plex for us/me right now as a start-up organization).
2. I will be choos­ing Where’s Your Heart? as my char­ity though! So, I’ll be quite moti­vated to cleanse myself out nice and clean.
3. There’s no min­i­mum dona­tion required. In fact, if you just want to be a part by cleans­ing we’re happy to have you as part of the event.
4. I really really hope that even though we’re focused on US char­i­ties right now, we get some peo­ple in other coun­tries to par­tic­i­pate in the cleanse. It was a real dis­ap­point­ment to me that I couldn’t work glob­ally, and believe me when I tell you… I know how to bend rules. Give me a year or two, and we’ll have the IRS writ­ing rules into the tax code because of that “Bressler guy”.

Until our site (and the appli­ca­tion to deliver this event) is done, I’m not going to pick a date for the event. I hope it’ll be in July. We will start on a Sat­ur­day so that peo­ple doing a 1 or 2 day cleanse don’t inter­fere with work.

In the mean­time, what can you do to help? Plenty!

• Become our fan on Face­book, so you know when we run the event.
• Share this post with friends (email, twit­ter, Face­book), espe­cially if they make/drink fresh juice regularly.
• Know any juice bars near you? How about ask­ing them to put our event on their event cal­en­dar and/or pro­mote it in their store? Please intro­duce me, and I’ll have a chat with them.

What if you’ve never done a cleanse before? What if you’ve never even heard of such a thing… or of the health ben­e­fits of juic­ing in gen­eral? Stay tuned for my next post. I’ll share my per­sonal expe­ri­ence, and how I got started juicing.