Net Cotton Content / On Life and Marketing, Creativity and Ethics

Come to Our Town tomorrow night (Monday)

In 10 weeks, the three-day run of Our Town will close. (This is no time to be nostalgic.)

From now until then, however, we have a rush of activity for volunteers of every stripe and talent.

Tomorrow night, Monday, April 21, at the Available Light [theatre] space in Gahanna, we will have the Big (Fun) Volunteer Meeting for organizing everything. You are invited!

You have mentioned to me that you are interested in helping. (Maybe I was reading your mind?) Please come! Perhaps I'll see you there?

For all the information, here's the time and place.

If you need further persuading, I dare you to watch the following diversion...

Calling all volunteers!

Now is the time to answer the call of The Theatre! She is calling your name!

(Hey, doesn't she look like Thornton Wilder?)

Please, stay focused.

She wants you to volunteer on the production of Our Town which will be presented the last week of June 2008 in Bexley, Ohio.

If you are even the slightest bit interested, please put the evening of Monday, April 21st on your calendar.

That evening, all the volunteer opportunities will be described and scheduled.  (In the technical, high brow parlance of the theatre, we call this "The Big Volunteer Meeting.")

We'll need help every step of the way - back stage, in the scene shop, ushering, costuming, make-up, getting the word out and more. A number of wonderful people have already let us know that they're interested, and we are so very grateful for them, but we need more, more, more! (The Theatre, she is a greedy lover. Mmmm.)

If you have skeells that you'd like to lend, or you'd like to learn some new skeells, please call 614-558-7408 or email the producer.

Or just come to The Big Volunteer meeting. Here's information on specifically where...

Bring your friends. And if you make any new friends between now and then (you can! you will!), bring them, too.

One Big Day of Service / Saturday, April 26, 2008

When philanthropy costs a lot of money, it's hard to do.

When getting involved means you have to commit several months (or more) to a cause, it's hard to do.

Here's an easy way to serve the world.
This is your invitation to get involved.

It City Year's "Youth Serve-A-Thon." But don't let the "Youth" fool you. Anyone from 5 years old and older (this means you) is going to enjoy this. It's engineered like City Year, to create engaged citizens and idealists out of our 17-24 year olds.

That's why we need to be there.
If we want young people to become engaged citizens, it's our obligation to demonstrate that we believe in community service.

These devoted public servants need to see us participating in the community. April 26th is our best opportunity. We cannot let them feel that they are alone, while they work for a year or more in their bright red jackets in our communities.

For this specific event, City Year writes...

"Youth Serve-a-Thon, held on Global Youth Service Day, is a large-scale community service and fundraising event led by City Year corps members to help create positive change in the City of Columbus and help raise dollars for City Year programs. Geared toward middle school, high school and college students as well as teams of City Year alumni, corporations and friends & family, Youth Serve-A-Thon will bring together 400 volunteers to complete high-impact transformative projects such as painting murals, improving playgrounds and beautifying community spaces."

City Year asks us to try to raise $150 each from our friends, but the minimum is the $20 registration fee, for which you'll at least get lunch, a snappy t-shirt — and the opportunity to do a lot of Good Work.

Plus you'll be a role model for today's idealistic youth.

Let's Do This Together — you and I
I'd like to form a Net Cotton Content Team for the Serve-A-Thon.

If you are willing to join this effort, let me know. We'll work at a site together, eat lunch together, and enjoy each other's company as we do something important for the community.

To join the Net Cotton Content Team, please leave a comment on this post or just email me.

To simply sponsor me, send me a check in any amount, payable to "City Year Columbus," to
    Artie Isaac, Pretty Good Guy
    23 North 4th Street
    Columbus, OH 43209

To learn more about the Serve-A-Thon, click to City Year's website.

Free Money

Here's a poorly kept secret. (Young Isaac has been hired to spread the word through viral marketing.)

Today, at 3 p.m. is PowerPhilanthropy Match Day, courtesy of The Columbus Foundation.

Here are the rules:

Beginning at 3:00 p.m., anyone may visit the Foundation's website to make an online gift to a favorite nonprofit.

The Columbus Foundation will match 50% of all public donations of $1,000 or less made online with a credit card through PowerPhilanthropy, while funds last.

Anyone can give, starting with a $20 minimum.

Kind People Are Waiting To Pounce
Let's pay attention to the "while funds last" part. 

The donors of The Columbus Foundation are providing $175,000 for this match. That's a lot of money. But, the viral campaign has been successful. I expect the money to be gone within 10 minutes.

If you take a moment to register in advance, you might grab some of that $175Gs for your favorite charity. Again, you can give as little as $20.

I'll be there.

Let's crash the server.

Come audition for Our Town on March 10-11 at Maryland Avenue School in Bexley

When the going gets tough, the tough start acting.

It's time for us to act.

Our Town auditions will be Monday and Tuesday, March 10-11, 2008, with callbacks on Wednesday, March 12.

The location is Maryland Avenue Elementary School, 2754 Maryland Avenue, Bexley, Ohio.

Please click on the image (above) and share it with your friends.

Should You Audition?

Come to the Our Town blogsite to read more about the audition -- and more.

The Mousetrap

Careful. This is a mousetrap.

And I can see that I am one of the mice.

Here is The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. It's a 20-minute, fast-paced video that explains how we turn the environment into stuff — and then how we get rid of the stuff. And some of the hidden – "externalized" – cost of it all.

I admire the simple design of this presentation and think the overall message is valid. Still, I faced some obstacles while watching it:

It's presented in a friendly voice, but it's disturbing. It works like satire, trapping the viewer.

It might offend your politics. For me, that happened when Annie asks, "Isn't the government supposed to take care of us?" I'm all for being taken care of, but even I don't think that's the government's promise. (But let's not ignore Annie's entire message because of a few individual words. When I feel insulted, I remember how Robert Frost defined being educated.)

It might arouse your healthy skepticism. That's good.

If you are like me, it will certainly catch you in the mousetrap.

Thanks to our teacher and neighbor, Inbar Kerper-Saranovitz, for bringing this story to my attention.

Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation

Are you looking for a worthy cause?

Here's one.

It’s the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation.

I am still surprised — and so disappointed — that Ohio has 50% more suicides than homicides.

It's not that I'd rather have more homicides than suicides. (I'd like none of each, please.) I'm surprised and disappointed because homicides fill our newspapers and fears...

...and yet we barely ever address suicide.

Why don't we address the challenge?
Do we think that anyone's suicide is inevitable and unpreventable — so intervention is not cost-effective? Is suicide such a taboo that we just steer clear of the topic?

That should not be so. Suicide is a major public health problem: the 11th leading cause of death in Ohio, killing 1,200 Ohioans each year, three per day.

More discussion would lead to more understanding. More understanding, I believe, would lead to the saving of many lives. And those lives — the part yet to be lived — can still provide their greatest value to society. 

What can you do to help change the world?

This Guy Blows

Clearly this fellow is trouble. And he certainly seems troubled.

Perhaps he's just misunderstood?

Can we look at him in a different way?

Can we harness his potential?

This is great advertising.
Or not. How do we know if this is great advertising? It's great entertainment if you really enjoyed it.

But it's great advertising if you exhibit the intended behavior — if you join the movement — if you get involved.

What Can You Do?
How about seeing what the Ohio Department of Development is doing to advance alternative energy?

They have great information here, including some cool wind maps. (You think it blows where you are? These maps will blow your mind.)

Then you could check out the Green Energy Ohio folks (who have events you can attend) and the Ohio Wind Working Group.

And, of course, you can forward this page from Net Cotton Content to your friends. You might blow some wind beneath another's sails.

Here's One Thing You Can Do

So do you want to be a little more environmentally responsible?

Receiving catalogs in the mail that you put right in the trash or recycling?

What's a new Greenie to do? I don't know if this is a real deal, but I'm doing it.

I visited Catalog Choice and gave them my mailing address. As I receive catalogs I don't want, I just register the information from the mailing label on the catalog. Then, they ask the direct mail marketers to remove me from the mailing list. And I can always go to the website to add more catalogs and see what they've heard from the marketers.

I'm not against direct mail marketing.
Of course. (We make it at Young Isaac.) But the merchants who send me catalogs I don't want aren't helping their own causes. Rather than send me catalogs that I immediately trash, they can save their own money (and all our trees and landfill) by skipping me next time. That's good for everyone.

It makes direct marketing more direct.

Catalog Choice is free. And it will probably work nicely.

Paul Farmer hits Ohio twice

Back in September, we learned that Paul Farmer is coming to Cleveland on Monday, February 25, 2008.

Now, I hear he's coming to central Ohio, for a speech at the Columbus Academy. According to an email blast from the Academy:

Paul Farmer, a true agent of change in global healthcare, will be the guest speaker in Columbus Academy's 2008 Phil Currier Lecture Series on February 6.

Farmer emerged from a humble childhood of poverty to become a worldwide expert in providing public health services to impoverished communities. His clinical treatments have become the global model for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS initiatives around the world. He received the MacArthur Genius Grant in 1993 and has also received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation and the Global Fund. He was made known to the world by the popular bestseller Mountains Beyond Mountains and a 2005 U.S. News & World Report article (click here to read) that profiled him as one of "America's Best Leaders."

Farmer's speech, which will be free and open to the public, is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in Academy's Schoedinger Theatre. For more information, contact US faculty member Kyle Tong at tong@columbusacademy.org.

See you there.