In keeping with the theme of learning to ask for help, I am appealing directly to you, my tens of readers. I have never and I will never ask for money for myself. I won't be adding a Paypal link or be whining ad nauseum about bandwidth costs or any other crap like other bloggers who shall remain nameless. I won't be directing you to my Amazon Wish List or hinting that my birthday is today or coming up. I'm not going to do a series of porn films and travel all across the country and then bitch 'cause my hotel is boring and I have no money. Although, lord knows gay porn in and of itself pays worse than my job, if that's possible. It's the personal appearances and the "very personal" appearances where the real money in paid sex is. Not that I'm offering advice or anything.
What I will do is ask you to donate to charity. Or rather my charitable endeavor. Of course, I'm talking about the upcoming AIDS Walk. If you scroll down a few posts you will see my original memo to my coworkers regarding forming a team to do the walk this year. I got a pretty good response. About 8 to 10 people expressed an interest in participating. It helped that I used non-committal language in the original memo. I was asking for interest not a final say. So I took a few minutes last week to fill out the on-line registration forms and within 24 hours, Shazam! we were a team. I posted all the information at work giving them all detailed instructions of how they could find out team info and register there. I also promised them some mail-in registration forms would be provided shortly. Those arrived over the weekend. To date, four people have registered. It's a start.
The next evening I took a few minutes to create my on-line donation page. Whoever suggested this idea originally, in whatever meeting, this was a brilliant concept and perfect for someone like me. One of the reasons I don't do more charity work is my inherent shyness. While it's always been flat-out out of the question for me to ask for help for myself, it's also always been enormously difficult to ask other people for anything. Even when it wasn't for me. It felt ... I felt, intrusive. It wasn't that I thought whatever charity I was working for was bad, far from it. I never agree to raise money unless I believe the group I'm representing does some good. It was always just incredibly difficult for me to be able to begin the conversation when the sole purpose was to get you to give me something. Like your money. As an example, I composed an e-mail using the AIDS walk template and my own personal message and set it to be delivered to five close friends and family. I deleted it and rewrote it three times before I finally covered my eyes and hit send. I was afraid they would be aggravated at me for askng again after they gave last year. Apparently, it's slightly easier to put the arm on you when I have a firewall and motherboard between us. Yes, I have motherboard issues.
So here goes:
Dear readers,
I am again participating in this years AIDS Walk in Central Park. This is the 20th anniversary of the original AIDS walk and it's one of the largest public fundraising efforts in the country. Your donation will directly benefit men, women and children living and fighting with HIV and AIDS. I know I can be crabby, bawdy, ill-tempered and alternately a hot-head or a curmudgeon. I'm sure I piss people off as much as I make them giggle. Sometimes I'm terribly fearful that I'm just bone-crushingly boring. But this is a worthy cause that is obviously near and dear to my heart. I need your help. I need your money. If you could follow the link at the end of this post and make a donation, any amount you can spare, I would be most grateful.. I've set a modest fundraising goal of only $500. I hope I can raise that much by the day of the walk. 5 or 10 dollars (or more) from a bunch of you will add up. In addition, because I formed a team this year, my group and I will hopefully raise more this year than ever. Again, my only benefit from all this will be indirectly. And hopefully not anytime soon. But you'll be helping a lot of other deserving New Yorkers if you can make a donation. That's it for now. I'll be bugging you about this again before the day of the walk. Unless you (pleasantly) surprise me and meet my goal all quick-like.
Sorry to bother you. Please don't hate me.
And give a little. You can follow this link until I figure out how to add one up top.
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