Top Stories Colorado Springs

Posts Tagged ‘business giving’

A new innovation is transforming many lives in the villages of India by bringing light where there used to be darkness.

The New York Times published a piece named, \”Husk Power for India\”. Power, which is common in the lives of most in advanced countries, is a rare bonus in far-flung areas of underdeveloped countries. What was once cattle feed is now used to generate power – rice husks.

Growing up in rural Bihar State, Manoj Sinha knew what it was like to sit in the dark. Being an engineer with Intel Corporation he had all the skills to make a lifelong idea come alive. He led the development of his electricity equipment that generates power from rice husks and other farming waste and now he sells it to villages across India.

Sinha is what could be called a social entrepreneur because he feels business is a solution to key social issues. \”Business leaders must realise that the world\’s poor need investments more than handouts,\” he says, adding, \”these are customers, not victims.\”

The article stimulated me to think about gifting in a different way prompting me to ask myself, \”what is the most ideal form of giving?\” Is it learning, business transaction or aid work? There are so many methods to make a difference. One way of gifting can appear to be more effectual or maintainable than other ways based on the way it is conveyed, seen or applied.

I then came to identify there were eight sections to giving as a form to perceive this. So, let me outline the eight methods; which in effect are often \’phases\’ of giving as well.

Phase one: Exigency – salvaging and helping others who are suffering due to natural calamities, epidemic diseases or other insurmountable problems.

Stage two: Relief – providing relief from long-standing hunger, poverty, diseases, handicaps or discrimination which otherwise would continue or worsened because of the lack of information, education or resources.

Stage three: Remedying and defense – internally, bodily and psychologically. Many people carry injuries that may be invisible but could be severely confining their lives. Giving the remedy to release the buried trauma creates better facilities for them while giving proper protection gives them a sense of defense.

Stage four: Training – giving better training, knowledge and skill instruction to create empowered and practical solutions to resource creation while encouraging people to identify their singular talent to survive.

Stage five: Creative investment – lending a hand, money or resources to those who have great potential to make a difference. This gets leveraged many times as the resources increase and passed on to many others who again make more out of the opportunities given.

Phase six: Maintainability – working collectively involving the people in the local surroundings, creating maintainable society – ecologically and communally.

Stage seven: Empowerment – empowering and inspiring the people to unleash their true potential and motivation to make a difference. In this group of giving, the aim of giving changes from \’giving to the people who are in need\’ to \’giving people opportunity to give to others\’ and to the community.

Stage eight: Cherishing – just doing whatever we like to do to tend and care for others. No approach or expected upshot exists in this stage of offering. \’Giving\’ does not even exist here in the physical sense of the word, as there is no sense of owning or decision or craving to modify things. This is where we do not even have to consider anything, we give out of a sense of our own fulfilling sensations.

What we also find is that at each of these eight stages of giving there are different things that the giver receives.

One: Sense of bonding

Two: Sense of wellbeing

Three: Relief from pain (our own)

Four: Gratification for our own understanding, talents and situations

Five: Long-term sense of commitment and contentment for our own life

Six: Better ambience for our own life and for the lives of others we treasure and revere

Seven: Soul fulfilling inspiration and dedication to our own purpose

Eight: Love

Giving has many levels and experiences depending on the giver and the receiver. And the \’stages\’ do not describe which one is more important than the other. All are necessary.

I was fortunate to have an experience early in 2008 while travelling with a group of dedicated businessmen through India to see how we could be more useful in our giving. I was blessed to have one exceptional happening that made me think about what \’effectual giving\’ actually meant.

We were in a small town one day. Four of us had just called a taxi to take us to another town in the vicinities. We bargained with the driver with care as our hotel staff had told us beforehand that we could be duped since we were not local.

We chose to stop in front of the local train station for a short interval en route to the town. While the others went to use restrooms, I struck up a conversation with the driver of the taxi, standing nearby. With his limited English vocabulary and a smiling face that showed his black front teeth to advantage, he told me that he lived in the outskirts of the town and that he had a young wife and two kids who attended the local school – I began to feel a relationship with him.

I patted him on the back for having an affectionate family and told him that I also had two kids of the same age as his. When the others came back the driver instantly asked us to come to his house for food. I thought it was just a formality he wanted to convey at first. However, after leaving us at the centre of the town, he was particular that he would wait for us till we were done with our traveling around the town. And he actually did. I was in fact quite taken aback to see him still standing by the side of the road next to his taxi even after an hour. We hopped back into the taxi and he whizzed off up the road to where his home was.

When we arrived we were actually quite shocked to see how he was living. It was almost like the same condition (if not worse) to the lifestyle of people living in slums we had visited previously. From the nice new taxi he was driving, who could have imagined

As the car turned into the narrow unsealed road between the hut-like houses that were constructed with crudely made concrete blocks and painted mud walls, we felt contrite about having agreed to his invitation. For a brief moment I felt mortified. \”How could I have exploited the generosity of a man who didn\’t seem to have anything and I didn\’t even get any edible stuff or presents for his family\”, I thought.

As we got into his house, we saw a small pot and a stove on the mud floor. His shy sweet wife smiled and blushed at the sight of visitors and vanished into the cupboard sized storeroom of the house. As I looked around, I saw the man\’s neighbours giving the woman a few cups over the crumbling concrete walls. They simply didn\’t have enough cups in their house. There was just a single small room that had a lone cot and an old galvanised trunk adjacent to it.

The driver hastily drew out three hand-woven mats from the trunk and spread them out on whatever little space there was on the mud floor and put one on the bed.

Steaming cups of tea and hot snacks arrived soon. Both his kids as well as kids from the neighbouring houses came to see us and remained at the doorway. The six of us could just squeeze into the tiny room. I was curious to know where his children were sleeping. I thought maybe they had another space somewhere. To my astonishment, he just pointed at the chest and said with his happy smile that it was their bed.

He happily told us that he was an amateur dancer in the town and showed us some plaques on the sill above the bed. Enthusiastic to show us his dancing proficiency, he ran outside all at once. From somewhere music came flowing into the tiny room. He had no apparatus for music within the house, it was coming from outside. Surprised, I looked around to see him reversing his vehicle towards the back of his house keeping the doors open with the radio of the car blaring forth!

The time moved fast (with his dancing and the many more cups of tea that followed) and very soon it was time to thank them for their great warmth and courtesy and make our move. As we got ready to leave and express our gratitude to him and his wife, he pulled out the best of all the rugs he had, and just gave it to us. It was one of the very few things he owned. It was impossible to believe that he was offering it to us.

We all politely declined his gift and walked out saying goodbye to all the people waving at us. We got confused about this whole thing. Should we have given some money to the family as their life obviously looked very limited? Should we have accepted his prized gift?

As I was thinking about this life-changing experience a few days later, I thought about the refusal of his gift. He looked disappointed that we didn\’t take the gift. It wasn\’t just about saying no to the gift that stuck in my mind.

I realised that the sense of discomfort I felt was actually coming from perceiving him as less fortunate. I was thinking that I couldn\’t possibly take anything from someone who had so little.

But did he really have so little? Maybe he had more – a lot more.

Maybe the real present we could have given him then was to receive his present in utmost deference and thankfulness.

All actions of gifting and getting are essential for us to fill our world with plenty and contentment equally for both giver and getter. We can begin doing this instead of assessing and defending one over the other. The perfect act of gifting and getting needs no further clarification.

Manoj Sinha\’s words continue to reverberate in my mind, \”these are customers, not victims.\” I can picture the happy faces of the rural folk who are now pleased to have power in their hamlets and the kids who now can read books and happily do their homework at night.

Discover more about how Buy1GIVE1 (BOGO) can transform your business using Cause Marketing. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory