La Vida Idealist

Travel writer Maureen Moore will forever be a California girl, but her global soul has lured her to climb the funiculares in Valparaíso while learning Spanish, dance salsa with habaneros in Cuba while working in tourism, speak Mexican street slang while serving chelas at a bar in Guanajuato, and most recently spend 2.5 years in Lisbon, Portugal while working for Doctors of the World and teaching English. Having recently returned to Los Angeles, she is pursuing work in nonprofit management within cultural arts and education.

Over the past two and a half years, I have really come to understand philanthropy on both a personal and societal level. Neatly packing up my content life in Los Angeles and shipping it on the adventure express to the Western-most corner of the Iberian Peninsula, I slowly settled into a very different sort of existence in Portugal’s capital city of Lisbon.

Why Lisbon and what spurred the move is pretty irrelevant. For lack of a more exotic answer, I was just ready for something else, and that something was the slightly mysterious and little touched corner of the Iberian Peninsula which spoke a language I wanted to learn and was a mix of what I envisioned to be Latin, European, and Arabic influences with a bit of salty Atlantic sea. What unfolded was a journey in learning Portuguese, making friends, working and supporting myself on local currency, and all the while being an observer of the Portuguese culture, with my eyes and ears privy to a bit more local access than the average, thanks to my acquired language skills and job stints at Médicos de Mundo and International House language school.

There is much to be applauded about this humble, fairly homogeneous culture that has somehow steered clear of Western consumerism and nutritional excesses, maintaining their local traditions and honoring their sea-faring ancestors by living off a healthy diet of fish and non-processed foods. But the living experience (which for the sake of this particular argument) was really just a foreign context – it could have been any – for gleaning insight on another culture, which in turn, shed light on my own. As I struggled to plan fundraising events for the foreign humanitarian organization I was working for while trying to understand their relationship to philanthropy, I began to better understand my own country’s thoughts on the matter. Having traveled for pleasure and work all of my adult life, I’ve had plentiful experiences in the Americas and Europe, chances for both insight and participation. But it wasn’t until I was truly part of somebody else’s system – visa and social security number to prove it – could I understand, and more importantly, appreciate, what was so special about my own.

Growing up as a middle-class Californian girl, I was taught to share with others, expected to give of my time and energies for fundraising events andcommunity projects, learned that I had the power to initiate and create opportunities that would impact someone other than myself, and then also learned how to nicely package it all up in documented form as part of an unspoken admissions requirement to get into a good university.

The fact is, we Americans grow up doing just that. Giving, lending, sharing, partaking, creating, and organizing: all for a greater good. (Of course there are plenty of other motives too; we could all write a piece on the “Me generation” so just stick with me on this one.) We do not wait for someone else to instruct us about what to do, how to start, or where to take initiative. We founded our own system by joining forces with each other, volunteering, and gathering as individuals to build something for the larger community’s benefit. Now that the system is in place and age has shown its wrinkles and ailing parts, we – through organizations, community partnerships, and individual action – fill in the gaps and mend those broken parts. The scale extends from small to large and community threads are patched together thanks to the free-willed help of many. Cultural institutions are built due to the initiatives of individuals and meanwhile the state has its citizens to thank for a job well done.

Recently settling back in my own culture, I find myself in the middle of the job search like so many others out there. What keeps my spirits high in this gloomy economy are the amount of amazing organizations out there mobilizing people and their energy to tackle these little and also really big issues that affect all of us on a daily basis. (And yes, volunteerism is on the rise thanks to unemployment.) What I am really getting at here though is our deeper-seeded relationship with the culture of philanthropy. I know that even for myself the common definition has probably strayed a bit from its origins. It’s not about giving money or handing out charity. Philanthropy is about private initiatives for public good in order to improve the quality of life. As the name well embodies, it’s about loving (philos) humankind (anthropos). And it is in action all around us, all the time.

This weekend I was privileged to be in company with a group of about forty women writers in a WriteGirl volunteer training session for their upcoming year activities. Uniting to pool their talents and resources for a community in greater need, these women showed their commitment not just for a day of service, but they committed for the upcoming nine months of events. The group committed to each other and the community they were to serve as if it were a job, their duty. The return on their investment? Immeasurable social benefit for all parties involved.

As we moan and complain about the current state of affairs, raise hairs over the future of this health bill and shake in fright and disgust as the school system erodes on a daily basis, we have the power to take action and do what we can to contribute to something better. Idealist.org recently launched their proposal to facilitate a massive community network of idealists, using the brain power and resources we already have to address the gap between our desire to influence change and our action.

So all I am sharing here is that we’ve already got what it takes. As the daily news focus seems to consistently thrive off of the lack, the broken, the corrupt, let us not forget we do not need to wait for the help of the state to take a small action of responsibility for our future and the betterment of humanity. We created this nation, and we have set an example to the rest of the world of how individuals, working together outside of the traditional workforce, can make a difference. But we need to keep our model strong by taking initiative now so we can access and enjoy all of the human potential that is waiting.

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