Pro-Social Behavior and Categories (by week):
January 1-7, 2012
-CNN named its 2011 Hero of the Year as Robin Lim, a midwife who helped thousands of low-income women have healthy pregnancies and births [Philanthropy, Heroism]
-At school, Erica and her friends are selling cookies to raise money for her breast cancer walk [Philanthropy]
-Singer/Actress Katharine McPhee became a spokesperson for Malaria No More [Philanthropy]
-Justin Churchman, a boy who decided to build 18 houses in Mexico
-Every year after Christmas break my mom makes us go through our clothes and donate anything we don’t wear anymore to Salvation Army [Philanthropy, Kindness]
-Two years after the devastating earthquake in Haiti
-Payal and Raichel are planning a volleyball tournament fundraiser for NHS [Volunteerism]
-NHS students tutor other kids for free during their Eagle Blocks [Volunteerism, Kindness]
-YUGA is planning a fundraiser for Heifer International and Child Soldiers International [Philanthropy]
-(I don’t know how recent this was but…) Drew Barrymore is a World Food Programme Ambassador Against Hunger and traveled to Africa to help directly
-Jenny sells cookies everyday in school to raise money for her service trip to Peru
-The woman at town hall waved everyone’s parking ticket who got one at the boating launch if we promised not to park there again because she thought it was dumb since the lake was frozen [Kindness]
-Actress Amanda Holden became a Make-a-Wish Foundation Ambassador [Philanthropy]
-My camp friend told me about her NHS bake sale fundraiser for a local homeless shelter [Volunteerism]
-Our neighbors adopted a dog from the MSPCA Animal Shelter [Compassion]
-Seth created a student-run project called Food for Thought to fight hunger locally and show teenagers their potential to make change [Philanthropy, Compassion]
-NHS is holding a clothing and toiletries drive for a homeless shelter [Philanthropy]
-KT Tunstall has a concert to celebrate WWF’s Earth Hour 2012 [Philanthropy]
-My parents sponsor two children and their families in Mali
-Selena Gomez announced her second annual charity concert for UNICEF [Philanthropy]
-Kim Kardashian auctioned off her used clothes for the Dream Foundation [Philanthropy]
-Michelle Obama is featured on an episode of the Nickelodeon show iCarly to support military families [Compassion]
-British TV presenter Helen Skelton set off on her expedition to be the first to bike to the South Pole for a charity called Sport Relief [Philanthropy]
-Raichel volunteers at the Main Spring House once a month [Volunteerism]
-A charity called Smile Train performed its 250,000th cleft repair in China
-The church I work at funds a school in Ghana
January 8-14, 2012
-Teen actor Jordan Van Vranken hosted her second annual Bowl-A-Thon to raise money for the Ronal McDonald House [Philanthropy]
-As I said in my Random Acts of Kindness Log, I saw a girl pick up a piece of trash and throw it away on her way to her car in a parking lot [Philanthropy]
-A woman in Dedham
-Singer JoJo teamed up with AT&T’s It Can Wait Campaign to help stop texting and driving [Philanthropy]
-A girl in Framingham
-The Abundant Table Club holds bake sales after school to raise money to help feed the hungry [Volunteerism, Philanthropy]
-Payal volunteers at a hospital every week [Volunteerism, Compassion]
-LeBron James is an a PSA about highlighting the dropout crisis in America
-A woman is honored for donating 100 gallons of blood [Philanthropy]
-Many people on Facebook shared a video for Human Trafficking Awareness Day [Philanthropy]
-A man saved his dog that had fallen through the ice in a pond [Heroic Act]
-A man moved out of his house into a makeshift tent in his backyard so that there would be more room for his dogs (he took in more than 40 strays) [Compassion]
-VISIONS club is planning a Cultural Buffet to benefit the World Food Programme [Philanthropy]
-A guy found out he had inoperable cancer, so he proposed to his girlfriend and they got married in the hospital; staff members decorated the room and helped coordinate the event for them [Compassion]
-Students from the genocide course held an awareness meeting for the genocide in Darfur [Philanthropy, Compassion]
-Clayton Kershaw and his wife created an orphanage in Zambia
-Photography Club sells cards and calendars to raise money for Hope in Bloom (creates gardens for breast cancer patients) [Volunteerism, Compassion]
-A man in Utah
-My friend’s mom is a regular volunteer at a food bank [Volunteerism, Philanthropy]
-A cop tried to save a boys life by giving him CPR [Heroism]
-Avicii is on a “House for Hunger” Tour with Feeding America [Philanthropy]
-My aunt is training to do the Avon Breast Cancery Walk [Philanthropy]
-Woman created a school for children of sex workers who are discriminated against [Philanthropy]
-The Sharon Public Library is hosting a “Read Away Illiteracy” event [Philanthropy]
-Singer Morrissey joined the No Cruel Cosmetics campaign to end animal testing for cosmetics sold in the EU [Philanthropy]
At first these seemed easy to find, Sharon High School seems to be full of people who want to make a difference- or it least want community service hours to put on their college application- but then I realized I didn’t have nearly enough. Finding them in the news took some serious Googling; good news just isn’t good news. People don’t want to hear about that stuff, they want the more interesting and scandalous stories; they want to hear about what’s wrong in the world, not what’s going right. Finally I stumbled upon http://www.looktothestars.org/ which has all the charitable things celebrities are doing, which helped tremendously. It least when they do something, it gets written about.
A lot of the motivations for these things I questioned though. As I said earlier, most Sharon High School students (definitely not all though) just want to be able to say that they volunteered a lot on their resume, and celebrities might be (although we’ll never actually know) just be doing it for the good publicity. Because of my stance on the whole altruism versus egoism debate, the rest I’m sure had incredibly good intentions, but in the end I also believe they were doing it for themselves because they wanted that “good feeling” that you get from helping someone. It is by no means selfish, but it can’t be labeled pure altruism either. They volunteered or donated or helped someone because it would benefit other people’s lives as well as their own.
Humans are essentially selfish- but due to kin selection, they rely on each other for survival, and thus the well being of other humans is essential to our own well being. To help ourselves, we have to help others- that’s just the way it works!But on a smaller level, most of the things I listed did not help their own survival; they did them because they wanted to. A genocide taking place on a completely different continent doesn’t affect us whatsoever, yet people feel like it is their responsibility to help. Those are the people that have spread what their “kin circle” to include not just their close family and friends, but everyone. People who don’t help I think just don’t have a wide enough “kin circle”!
These all made positive impacts because whether they raised a lot of money or only made a slight difference, it was a start and only leads to more. It is proven that kindness spreads just as much as negative emotions/behaviors, so even attempting to help will inspire others to help too! For example, the person that left the biggest impression on me, was Justin Churchman, a boy who decided to build 18 houses by the time he was 18. [video: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/01/03/cnnheroes-churchman.cnn] A lot of people don’t think they have the power to help at this age, but he is proof that age doesn’t really matter. This definitely inspires me to make a difference- not starting when I get older- but now. This pro-social behavior that he exhibited could really be labeled as any and all of the six things we had to categorize them under. Almost every single thing I listed easily fell under more than one category because they are all so closely related, and to think that all of those spread so easily, it definitely gives me hope for mankind.
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