Change Lives. Begin with your own
I have been someone who has often struggled to figure out what life means to me. If it is only mine to revel in, possibly it would have been an easy choice, but that concept always left me empty. I deeply resonated with what I had written in an essay sometime back -
"If our presence makes a difference to the lives of someone else, we are not only our own. If our mere breath gives solace to someone else, we are not our own. If mere presence, without words, without effort, makes someone's life feel complete, then our life is not merely ours."
Making a difference wherever we are, to go out on a limb to hold someone who is falling, to give a hand to steady someone who is tottering, are things which always gave purpose to me. But I was struggling to see how to make it a narrative out of of this, so I could expand my life.
And thus the years went by - my days were full, but my life seemed empty.
So, when a dear friend told me about SVP (Social Venture Partners), and how the people involved - professionals, business owners, young entrepreneurs, homemakers!! - were working with solid, authentic, beautiful non-profits to bring about change, I was ready to jump in.
It was almost as if I was waiting for something like this to come into my life.
It's five years now, and there is a massive distance I have travelled. In meaning, in experiences, in community, in realizations. Life has, suddenly, taken on an additional meaning, an additional consciousness, to everything I do, like a layer which was missing.
My closest friends are now those with whom I discuss how to bring disabled people into the mainstream, how to give meaning to trafficked women who are saved, how to enhance the education of the poorest to make it practical for them to make an honourable living, how to raise money for a school dedicated to tribal girls.
Life takes on another perspective when you know there are lives you are touching, when you know there is someone looking out to you to change their destinies. It is a privilege we carry with us, in our comfortable lives, that we are able to bring change in the world we live in - and, along the way, change ourselves in ways which are way more profound than we can ever imagine.
SVP identifies non profits for authenticity, for relevance, and finds ways in which we as partners can add value to them, and then a bunch of us (called Lead Partners) start to engage with the non-profits. We are advisors, consultants, partners, coaches, mentors, investors to them - and something more. And we become symbiotic to their fortunes.
As a step towards making non-profits self-sufficient, SVP created Fast Pitch, a wonderful initiative to bring stirring stories of worthwhile non-profits to the larger world. Ten stories, an opportunity to know them, be moved with what they do, to support them.
We complain incessantly about how flawed our worlds are. Fast Pitch gives us the opportunity to rectify that in significant ways.
Fast Pitch is a way to start a lifelong journey with just a click of a button. I have registered for it already. I urge everybody who is reading this to do the same.
Change lives - maybe change your own.
Fast Pitch is an online event, accessible from wherever you are. On April 24, 530 pm.
Register now for Fast Pitch: https://lu.ma/fastpitch2025
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