20 dollars, 61 authors, fight malaria

It couldn’t be simpler: today is End Malaria Day.  A million people a year still die from malaria.  Bednets keep out mosquitoes and save lives.  You can help.

So here’s the deal: for $20 (Kindle) or $25 (paperback) you can buy a copy of End Malaria.  $20 of the proceeds for every copy go to Malaria No More.  Full details on the End Malaria Day website.

This is worth doing because the cause is worthwhile, the organization is the real deal, and you can actually save lives with your $20.

If you need more motivation, you’ll be getting essays from the likes of Tom Peters, Dan Pink, Brene Brown, Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, Sir Ken Robinson…. (there’s 61 of them.)

This is the exact moment when you think “this is a good idea, I should probably do this” and then you don’t.  Go ahead and do it.  You’ll feel great about it, you’ll be part of something important, and you’ll get a great book in the process.

BUY THE BOOK.

Seriously, BUY THE BOOK.

Then post to Facebook and Twitter (for example: I just bought End Malaria to celebrate World Malaria Day: http://ow.ly/6nFUS).  Email this post to 10 people.  Tell a friend.

Generosity day update

What a long way we’ve traveled since Friday afternoon when we set out to reboot Valentine’s Day and kicked off Generosity Day 2011!

My heartfelt thanks to all of you for spreading the word and for pushing me every day to be better, blog better, do better.

We’ve had more than 3,000 tweets, many thousands of blog views, and some of the people I respect most in the world are spreading the word.  More important still, the #generosityday tweets and posts on www.facebook.com/generosityday are focusing on what people are DOING, which is the whole point.

The list of bloggers who have posted is getting too long to keep track of, but at a minimum you’ll want to check out Jonathan Greenblatt’s post on HuffPo, Alex Goldmark’s post on Good.is, Beth’s Blog, Philanthropy 2173, and the recent post on Time.com.

Brene Brown, who writes at Ordinary Courage has always blown me away with everything she does – and the fact that her “Generosity is my new Valentine” post has 200+ comments speaks to the amazing level of engagement she has created with her readers.  Truly a sight to behold.

Finally, if you haven’t yet, do read the great posts that helped kick this all off: Katya Andresen on The Nonprofit Marketing Blog and Ellen McGirt on FastCompany.com.

As Jonathan Greenblatt said in well in the closing of his HuffPo piece:

I deeply believe that everyone can have an impact — and that, taken together, those small acts can roll up into something truly worldchanging. As we were reminded over the past few weeks in Tahrir Square, every singe person carries the fuse of civic engagement that can ignite our common humanity. Sometimes it just takes a small spark to set it off.

This year, let’s make Generosity Day that spark. I want each of us to repair the world. Lets do it, one small act of kindness at a time.

We ARE doing it, together.  I couldn’t be more excited.