About to browse social media? Resolve to do these more high-impact actions that will help your community instead.
- Pick up a book that will inspire you, move you to action, or better inform you about the nuances of an issue. Need some suggestions? Check out ours here and here.
- Find a podcast that expands your perspective, speaks to your soul, or reminds you why being involved in the social sector is so critical. Check out some of our favorites here.
- Connect colleagues and friends that don’t already know each other. Perhaps this is a funder with a nonprofit fundraiser, or maybe someone that could be a good fit on a board. Give some thought to how you can be a connector and lift up the organizations and causes that are important to you.
- Visit a small business, perhaps one even run by a historically disenfranchised minority business owner. Take a look at this list of Los Angeles businesses owned by black entrepreneurs that we love to support.
- Research some local volunteer opportunities and commit! VolunteerMatch features both one time and ongoing opportunities. They also specify which ones work better for groups, older or younger individuals, or those with special skills.
- Go through your closet to find items to donate to a favorite charity. Alternatively, if some of the items that you are ready to let go of are on the pricier side, you can instead commit to selling them on a site like Poshmark and then using the proceeds to make a gift to the charity of your choice as most nonprofits do not have the capacity to resell high end goods at their market value.
- Spend some time goal setting, dreaming, manifesting, and visioning how you want to change the world – and then write them down. This Forbes article explains how the act of writing down and vividly imaging goals makes you more likely to achieve them.
- Take a walk and don’t stop until you fill a small bag with litter you pass along the way. Not only is the walk better for your physical and emotional wellbeing that sitting on social media, you will be helping clean up your neighborhood.
- Call a relative who may live alone. Bring something thoughtful to a neighbor. Reach out and connect with someone who you have been meaning to, but just have not gotten around to. Not all of our high-impact actions to better our communities need to be mediated through formal nonprofit structures. Simply connecting and creating strong bonds within your network strengthens our social fabric, lifts both the receiver and yourself up, and can result in unexpected good!
- Lastly, if you end up on social media, try to be more intentional with your use. Search for and follow, or like, comment, and retweet accounts that are run by disenfranchised individuals, organizations and companies that are working in your neighborhood, or accounts that elevate issues that you are passionate about. We particularly like this post from @jojoansett that encapsulates this feeling:
Don’t use social media less. Use it more intentionally. Follow people who inspire and motivate you. Engage with experts you can learn from. Create genuine, positive friendships. Just stop mindlessly scrolling, complaining, hating and engaging in negativity and bitterness.
— JOJO (@jojoansett) April 11, 2019
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