From Milserve to Team Rubicon, the opportunities for vets to continue serving after they’ve come home are increasing. According to a recent report by Civic Enterprises, becoming involved with community service can greatly help the transition to civilian life. This is one vet’s story. 

During his time with the Air Force in Vietnam, Jeff Hottensen lived on almost every continent in the world. When he returned to NY after a little over two decades, he saw an ad in the paper to volunteer with a blind baseball team in Babylon. Eighteen years later Jeff is still stepping up to the plate.

“All those years in the service, I never had a connection to anything. No place was home,” he says. “I wanted to be part of a community, to do something and not move every two and a half years.”

Jeff, now 65-years-old and a customer service rep at AAA, grew up playing stickball in Manhattan and loves that baseball is a sport almost anyone can play. Twist the rules a bit, throw unlikely players on the field, and the game becomes even more high stakes.

Jeff (left) at a recent exhibition game at Citi Field, home of the NY Mets. (Photo via Camille Hottensen.)

“Not only are they beating a disability, but they are beating the system. It’s so much more thrilling,” he says.

Beep baseball works like this: A sighted pitcher throws a beeping ball to a blind or visually impaired batter who is blindfolded to combat any advantage. After hitting the ball, the batter uses their hearing to run to first, even better third base, which is also beeping. No balls are thrown. If the fielder gets the ball before the batter reaches the base, they’re out. The game is over in six innings.

Jeff is currently with Rockville Centre-based Long Island Bombers and has had just about every role from catcher to base judge to umpire at the World Series — in addition to describing items at the gift shop so the players can bring home souvenirs when they travel. He’s suffered bumps and bruises, broken fingers, even a concussion, yet he returns year after year.

“I learned, which I never thought I had, that caring feeling,” he says. “I surprised myself.”

From national service to community service

The first time Jeff met the players he was nervous about how he would act. He’d never been around the blind before.

“I was so scared of saying the wrong things,” he says. “I remember meeting this guy Jack who was running the team. He said ‘Good to see you. Oh wait, I can’t. So maybe it’s good for you to see me.’ ”

The immediate joking made Jeff feel right at home. Eventually he was able to transfer the leadership skills he honed in the Air Force to volunteering. Early on in Vietnam, for example, Jeff was thrown into a role as Branch Chief and had to manage people of all genders, races, and ages.

“I loved seeing young kids come in, teaching them, and watching them grow up,” he says. “Before they ship out you’ve made them into somebody respectful. You saw them build their self-confidence.”

With the Bombers, whose players are increasingly younger, empowering them to not fall into a depression because of blindness is part of teaching them how to swing a bat.

“Her mom said her life has changed so much and that this is the best thing that has happened to her,” Jeff says about a new sixteen-year-old recruit who’d recently gone blind. “How can I quit now? Those things keep me going.”

In later years Jeff has become more involved with organizing. If the weather is bad, he sets up a phone chain. If they’re stuck at the airport on the way to the World Series, he makes sure the players have something to do. Each year Jeff also arranges the LI Classic, a local tournament.

A second family

Above all, being a part of the Bombers reminds Jeff of the tight knit camaraderie he experienced in the Air Force. He and his usual roommate at the World Series, Jim Hughes, have been with each other through marriages, births, career changes, and more.

The Long Island Bombers have been around since 1997. (Photo via the team.)

“The two of us have just grown up together. He was 18, I was 40-something when we both started. Unbelievable,” Jeff says. “You build lifetime relationships over this. You really do.”

It makes occasions like winning a game at the World Series even more special. The year was 2005, the field was Houston’s Meyer Park. Jeff was catching; the Bombers hadn’t won a game yet. It was the last one of the series. Frank Guerra got a hit that tipped the game in their favor. He jumped into Jeff’s arms, and the rest of the team went crazy.

“I just thought it was the greatest moment,” Jeff says. “Without winning a game they might’ve lost a lot of courage and confidence, and not gone to the next World Series.”

Not like the team needed much cheering up to begin with. Jeff is continually struck by is how the players don’t view their blindness as a handicap, a philosophy they spread through local clinics and demonstrations at places like Camp Abilities.

“I never heard one of them complain about something they couldn’t do,” Jeff says. “It’s made me less tolerant about people who whine about nothing.”

The positivity is addicting. Soon, Jeff and his wife are thinking about becoming snowbirds, spending half the time in New York and half the time in Florida. He’s already putting feelers out to see if he could start a team down south and add more years to his umpire uniform.

The question remains: Will he ever strike out with beep baseball? The likely answer is no.

“I’m staying for at least 20 so I can get my retirement pay,” Jeff says, laughing.
____

Inspired to volunteer? The Bombers are always looking for extra hands to carry bats, spot bases, and wear blindfolds. Get in touch by emailing beepball@libombers.org.

The idea

After hearing about someone who had written a thank you note a day for a year, Karen Amarotico from Ashland, Oregon felt inspired to do the same. Since waking up in the middle of the night over a year ago with the idea to say thank you with a pie instead, Karen has given over 390 pies to friends, family, and strangers.

Giving a pie a day away was Karen’s gratitude project.

“There is something sensual about the rolling out of the dough, peeling and slicing the fresh fruit, or stirring a rich chocolate pudding. All of these things seem to say ‘It took me awhile to make this pie, and you are worth every single minute,’ “ she says.

Why we’re adding it to the Idea File

Karen isn’t the only one using pie to say thanks. Idealist staff member Ero Gray recently baked a pie a week for friends and family for one year. This is his Gluten-free Blueberry Cream Cheese creation. (Photo by Chris Machuca via pie-curious.blogspot.com.)

• Brings joy and recognition to people through food. Karen says the best thing of all was seeing that she could bring a moment of happiness to someone with a gift of a pie. “It was a remarkable feeling and such an honor,” she says.
• Small act that makes a big difference. Karen experienced many meaningful encounters through her pies, including brightening the day of a young girl with cancer who lived in her neighborhood. “What mattered most was that I had shown up,” she says.
• Simple to do. If you have the time and resources to put into it, making a pie a day can quickly become routine, as it did for Karen.
• Using your passion for good. During the course of the project, Karen, who had been baking for years, sometimes questioned her impact.  “I would get a thank you card or an email days or weeks later and would know that I had,” she says.  A few people gave small gifts and two people even made her a pie as a thank you.
• Builds community. Many of the recipients of her pies were friends and family but before long she was getting requests to bake a pie for strangers. “In this way I met people who I never might have met and was able to say that someone else wanted them to be recognized,” she says.

How you can replicate it

1. Have a goal and stick with it. The one-year timeframe helped Karen stay on track.
2. Accept support from others. From the start her friends and family lent resources to help. Her friend bought her 250 pins. A neighbor made stickers for each of the pies. Her husband gifted her baking supplies. And so on. “I’d never thought about how I was going to get the tins. I just started baking!” she says.
3. If you bake it they will come. Once the dough got rolling, Karen found that friends and strangers alike started recommending people to receive her pies.
4. Take into account the person who’s receiving the gift and their needs. If Karen knew they had a sweet tooth she would give them a chocolate cream pie. For a busy mom, she would make a quiche that could be used for a quick fix dinner.
5. Think ahead. Karen made pie dough in batches of eight, and had cheese pre-grated for quiche, which helped to cut down the cost of time.
6. Set a budget. The ingredients for each pie averaged out to about $5. After adding in gas for delivery, the project cost her about $2,000 over the year.
7. Start a blog. Karen’s blog has generated almost 30,000 views in one year with people all over the world reading her posts. “I thought that blogging would be a way to share my experiences and perhaps encourage others to begin their own gratitude project,” she says.

Karen continues to give away on average a pie a week and doesn’t see an end in sight. “I’m more willing now to go out of my way to thank or recognize someone even if I don’t know them. I think goodness should be recognized and honored in some way and am happy to do it,” she says.

_

Inspired to start your own gratitude project? Feel free to reach out to Karen for advice: karen [dot] amarotico [at] gmail [dot] com

Do you know of other projects that are fun and potentially replicable? If you’d like us to consider posting it as part of this series, leave a comment below or email celeste [at] idealist [dot] org.

Should we put more emphasis on being happy? (Photo: Rachel Kramer, Flickr/Creative Commons)

As we reported at the end of last year (“Happy Happy New Year!”), the idea that nations should pay attention not just to Gross National Product (GNP) but also to Gross National Happiness (GNH) has been spreading slowly since it was introduced by the former King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s.

This week, GNH will get more attention at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.  During this conference, leaders from around the world will gather in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to explore how nations can combat poverty while ensuring environmental protection. While the agenda includes an array of topics such as job creation, food security, and sustainable cities, attendees will also try to answer this question:  Are economic measures of growth enough to determine a nation’s well being?

For Bhutan, a landlocked country in South Asia, the answer is still no.  At the conference, Bhutan will present a paper based on the work of its Center for Bhutan Studies, which measures the nation’s GNH. The center examines nine domains of happiness - including health, education, time use, and good governance – and uses the results to craft recommendations for policy makers, NGOs, and businesses. Though it started as an informal alternative to the Gross National Product (GNP), today more civic leaders around the world are wondering if the GNH provides more holistic picture of a community’s wellbeing.

Starting in our communities

Sustainable Seattle used the concept in my hometown to develop a local happiness index through The Happiness Initiative. The project has two components: a set of objective statistics used to create a profile of the region’s progress toward sustainability, and a personal survey that anyone can take. The results of the first survey completed in 2011 (summary shown in a graph on page 10 of The Happiness Report Card [PDF]), reveal that my neighbors feel a strong sense of trust and community support, yet struggle with time balance.  The Happiness Initiative also developed a set a of recommendations for policy makers and community members to tackle the challenges presented in the survey.

The Happiness Initiative is branching out beyond Seattle and attempting to measure the country’s happiness. Their first national survey conducted in March 2012, for example, indicated Americans are more satisfied with the state of the environment, education, arts, and culture than with government and time balance.  The Happiness Initiative is collecting more national data now; you can contribute to the next report yourself here.

What do you think? Should we expand the ways communities — and nations — measure progress and success?

Image via the (RED) Pinterest page

Yesterday on Twitter and Facebook we asked folks to share “quotations that help you keep priorities straight.” You responded enthusiastically, citing everyone from poet Mary Oliver to philosopher George Santayana to Dr. Seuss to an elementary school librarian in Urbana, IL.

See a collection of the results on Storify.

I hope these words help you remember what’s really important. Go make today a beautiful one – and please keep the quotes coming! You can comment on this post, tweet (we’re @idealist and used the hashtag #favoritequotesroundup), or leave your favorite on our Facebook page.

Example of an NPR Valentine. (Image: npr.org/valentine/2012)

All over my Facebook feed I’m seeing examples of people and organizations highjacking (lovejacking?) Valentine’s Day “for good.” Whether you abhor the “romantic industrial complex” or you adore the chocolates and flowers, the day is hard to ignore. So it poses both a challenge and an opportunity to organizations: if we play our cards right, we can find fresh, easy ways to show love to our fans and to engage our communities around issues we also want to promote every other day of the year. But these can also easily be lost in the pink-and-red deluge, or strike the wrong note with people who hate the holiday.

Here are some examples I’ve seen today.

• NPR Valentines: Easy-to-download, simple graphics featuring inside jokes for loyal listeners.

• Generosity Day: Cooked up by folks from Acumen Fund, Network for Good, Malaria No More, and Fast Company, this campaign encourages everyone to “reboot Valentine’s Day” by saying yes for 24 hours to anyone who asks for help. Get the rundown on Beth Kanter’s blog.

• Amnesty International, Love is a Right: To push their Facebook friends toward an ongoing fight against homophobia in Cameroon, their status reads “Happy valentine’s day! Take action for those who don’t have the freedom to love without discrimination. http://bit.ly/loveisaright LIKE & SHARE!”

So what can you do if you didn’t focus your energy on a whole Valentine’s campaign?

• Find a quote about love or kindness that ties to your organizations mission and share it through whatever channels make sense for your audience. Kiva‘s Facebook status this morning was “‘Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.’ — Mother Teresa.”

• Write a quick blog post, like the National Peace Corps Association’s cheeky 12 Reasons to Date a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer or Points of Light’s more earnest Everyday is Valentine’s Day for Volunteering.

• Simply show some love for your community. Google for Nonprofits posted to Facebook: “Today we want to share our love for you! Thank you for your continued engagement, your support, and your insights. Happy Valentine’s Day from the Google for Nonprofits Team.”

Seen other examples? Leave your favorites in the comments. I’ll love you for it.

From Flickr user AForestFrolic (Creative Commons)

No matter how you look at it, the next couple of weeks are sure to be full of a special seasonal energy. For some, that energy can verge on manic, which kind of takes the fun out of it.

For example, gift buying can get expensive. PNC Wealth Management calculates the 2011 cost of the gifts listed in the familiar “12 Days of Christmas” song at $24,263 – or over $100,000 if you decided to give a partridge in a pear tree twelve times, two turtle doves eleven times, and so forth ’til your true love’s tree would be surrounded by a jumble of 364 amazing gifts.

Here are twelve things you might do to brighten the season for yourself and others that don’t involve so many visits to the ATM.

Give time:

• Look close to home and find a holiday project where you can pitch in as a volunteer via the search tools at the top of Idealist.org. Just using the word “holiday” in the box marked “What?” and “Seattle” in the box marked “Where?” turned up 11 different and interesting things to do in my hometown.

• …And resolve to volunteer in 2012. Sure, a soup kitchen is an obvious choice at Thanksgiving and sorting toys is popular come Christmas. But can you commit to things after the holiday rush, fight the winter doldrums and get to know your community better? Set up Idealist Email Alerts to stay informed about volunteer opportunities.

Give attention:

• Reminisce with family, friends, or neighbors. Look at snapshots from holidays past, talk about the times when things went right (or wrong – hopefully with only comic consequence), and record stories of holidays past. Storycorps has DIY tips.

• Say ‘thanks’ to someone who works in community service. Look online for the name of the board chair or ED of an organization you admire and write a brief note of appreciation for what the organization contributes to the community.

• Surprise a neighbor with a homemade treat or hand-picked seasonal bouquet. Best of all, do it anonymously, so there’s a bit of happy mystery about how it happened.

• Experience your holiday in a new way. Attend a community group’s concert, dance performance, or play that you’ve never been to before. Even better: Take a kid or two along with you!

Give your voice:

• Read aloud from a favorite holiday story-book. For those who celebrate Christmas, Google Books has an 1849 edition of A Visit from St. Nicholas (or “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”) with fabulous illustrations online for free.

• Sing! In the shower, with a group caroling in the neighborhood, in your place of worship…

If you can, give money.

• Give cash. Times are tough for many of us, but for those who can spare even a few dollars, see my 2010 post full of tips for year-end donations.

• Find a “Giving Tree” (or other community gift exchange for kids) and add your contribution to someone’s holiday cheer. The Marine Corps Reserve’s Toys for Tots is active in many communities.

• Look abroad to places that need our help even once they’re out of the spotlight. Japan is still recovering from the earthquake, tsunami, and related damage to nuclear power plants and tens of thousands of houses. Haiti still struggles with the effects of the terrible earthquake there two years ago. Google Disaster Relief offers links to reliable ways to help out in many parts of the world, as do familiar newspapers and magazines; try a quick online search.

And, since I doubt your shopping list will disappear entirely…

• Give experiences or contributions instead of objects. For theater-goers, a gift certificate for a pair of tickets. For mountain bikers, a membership in the local single-trackers club. Whatever your friends and family love to do, nudge them in that direction and you’ll get the vicarious pleasure of imagining them doing what they like best with your help. Alternatively, spread the warm glow by supporting a favorite organization in someone’s name.

Warm wishes from all of us at Idealist.org!

Congratulations, graduates! Mural photo by Paul Lowry (Flickr/Creative Commons).

Our founder, Ami Dar, recently gave a commencement address to the 2011 graduates of the City University of New York’s School of Professional Studies.

It was a special day for Ami – his first graduation of any kind. From the time he was three, Ami says, “my mother had to fight me every day to get me to go to school (or in the direction of school).” Since he knew his mom would have loved seeing him up onstage, he decided to pay tribute to her and to the lessons she taught him. You can watch the video here.

Thanks again to the CUNY School of Professional Studies for inviting Ami to speak. And congratulations to everyone who graduated this year!

Of course, you can always barter on your own, too. Photo via Flickr user Irina Slutsky (Creative Commons)

The model doesn’t just foster collaboration that isn’t based on monetary worth; it also prevents waste by reusing, sharing, and offering goods – both tangible and intangible. A similar creative dynamic of exchange is what drives the nonprofit Freecycle, a grassroots movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their communities. Yet another network of reciprocity is supported by GiftFlow, an online gift community supported by a social network. It’s much like a virtual free store, with the benefit of user profiles that help people build reputations for generosity.

I’m super bummed that the 2011 Trade School season has drawn to a close. But its host organization, Our Goods, makes sure that the community lives on. Anyone can join any of these sites to participate in the regular flow of object, skill and space exchanges. People trade/give everything from dog-walking for acupuncture, to good handwriting for home-brewed beer. And the in-person meetups won’t be limited to just NYC; folks are starting Trade Schools in Milan, Italy; Charlottesville, VA; and soon, London!

I’m smitten with all of these simple, replicable, sustainable concepts, and with the people they attract. Have you heard of other models like these where you live? If so, can I come visit?

By Flickr User Noel Zia Lee (Creative Commons)

If you’re like me, and you live too far from home to celebrate Thanksgiving with family this year, how about volunteering some time to make turkey (Tofurkey!) day a little more special for those in need?  I’ve gathered up some Thanksgiving Day related volunteer opportunities to help spread the cheer.  For those of you not partaking in Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve also gathered some fall-related opportunities follow below.  Happy holidays, everyone!

Volunteer Opportunity: Thanksgiving Day – Meal Delivery (Washington, DC)
Organization: Emmaus Services for the Aging
In their own words: “Emmaus Services for the Aging meets the needs of homebound senior citizens on Thanksgiving Day by delivering meals to them and spending time visiting during the morning.”

Awhile back, we blogged about One Day on Earth, a project centered around October 10, 2010 (10.10.10):

One Day on Earth is asking you, me, and the rest of the world to film something you’re inspired by on that day, with the hope of creating a time capsule that documents our collective struggles and triumphs. You don’t have to be a seasoned filmmaker to participate—cell phones and digital cameras work just as well—and everything is fair game. The collected footage will then be archived in a database for anyone to access at anytime, with select footage to be used in a feature documentary.

We got an update this week from the folks at One Day on Earth, who created this short video with snippets from the first week of submissions. It’s a great montage featuring faces and places from many continents – buskers outside a train station in Brussels, a crowd gathering at Mecca, an Aruba sunset. If you’re one of those people who got goosebumps watching those videos of Matt dancing around the world, watch this. You’ll feel grateful to be an Earthling.

Want to add your view, your voice, your video to the mix? Today, November 10, is the deadline! Visit the One Day on Earth site to learn more and jump in. And if you like making films yourself, you’ll be glad to know that if you share footage, you then have access to download footage from the archive for your own non-commercial endeavors.