Saturday, March 04, 2006
What a week
GiveMeaning has moved into its first office! Since starting in December 2004, we have all worked from home with occasional days worked as a team from my apartment. The office is located in the Downtown Eastside (two blocks east of Main) which for those of you who know Vancouver is also one of, if not, the poorest neighborhood in Canada.
There have been repeated break-in attempts to the building including a successful one that occured the day before we began painting the office where a thief broke through a skylight, jumped several feet down into the suite, stole a monitor and then kicked through the wall (the door was locked) to get into the hallway and walk out the front door. All for one monitor!
We share our office with Medicians Sans Frontieries (Doctors Without Borders) and our next door neighbour is Oxfam. I brought from home a big poster of a drawing I drew when I was 9 of a stick man dropping a heart into a bucket of hearts with the caption "give money out of your hearts." It appeared in an Oxfam newsletter and 18 years later GiveMeaning's first office is next to Oxfam. Maybe to others this doesn't seem significant but to me, it reaffirms that GiveMeaning is what I've been meant to do.
I realize that what I'm grateful for most is that I show up every single day and love what I do. I love interacting with people, I love being on the front lines of customer service, I love interacting with people in the charitable sector who have as much passion as I do, I love applying my intellectual energy to ideas where I can see real impact being made as a result of those ideas.
Many thanks to Jeff Cutler and New Vision Projects for donating his time to paint and help beautify and secure our little space. I know I speak for everyone on the Vancouver staff when I say that we're really enjoying our space and feeling even more inspired and productive than before! New Vision did a great job in a very short period of time and both New Vision's and Jeff's personal contributions are really appreciated by all of us at GiveMeaning!
There have been repeated break-in attempts to the building including a successful one that occured the day before we began painting the office where a thief broke through a skylight, jumped several feet down into the suite, stole a monitor and then kicked through the wall (the door was locked) to get into the hallway and walk out the front door. All for one monitor!
We share our office with Medicians Sans Frontieries (Doctors Without Borders) and our next door neighbour is Oxfam. I brought from home a big poster of a drawing I drew when I was 9 of a stick man dropping a heart into a bucket of hearts with the caption "give money out of your hearts." It appeared in an Oxfam newsletter and 18 years later GiveMeaning's first office is next to Oxfam. Maybe to others this doesn't seem significant but to me, it reaffirms that GiveMeaning is what I've been meant to do.
I realize that what I'm grateful for most is that I show up every single day and love what I do. I love interacting with people, I love being on the front lines of customer service, I love interacting with people in the charitable sector who have as much passion as I do, I love applying my intellectual energy to ideas where I can see real impact being made as a result of those ideas.
Many thanks to Jeff Cutler and New Vision Projects for donating his time to paint and help beautify and secure our little space. I know I speak for everyone on the Vancouver staff when I say that we're really enjoying our space and feeling even more inspired and productive than before! New Vision did a great job in a very short period of time and both New Vision's and Jeff's personal contributions are really appreciated by all of us at GiveMeaning!
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