[Alma Mata] Idealist.org

[rebecca.hope at almamata.net]

Please find below a message from Idealist.org an excellent new website  
with links to thousands of not-for-profit organisations, internships  
and voluntary activities.

Best wishes

Rebecca Hope
Alma Mata Global Health Network
www.almamata.net




Dear all

Would you share your socks? Let me explain.

Last month, at http://www.idealist.org/imagine , we invited everyone
on Idealist to imagine a better world and to help build it together.

The response was overwhelming. People in 70 countries organized 300
start-up meetings in less than three weeks, and more meetings are
planned for the weeks of March 12-18 and April 23-29, at
http://www.idealist.org/meetings

After seeing some photos from these meetings - at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/idealist - I thought this might be a
good moment to tell you about an experience I had when I was 19. This
led me to start Idealist.org, and it's still the best way I've found
for expressing this whole idea.

I was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Peru and Mexico. At 18, I was
drafted into the Israeli army for three years.

I was stationed on the Syrian border, where every day I had to spend
hours on a watchtower, looking through a telescope at the soldiers on
the other side, who, in turn, spent their day watching us watching
them...

On weekends the Syrian soldiers got some time off, and one afternoon
they played soccer for a while. Watching them play made me see them
as I never had before, and sparked a thought that seemed so crazy it
made me laugh out loud, and yet it?s stayed with me ever since.

That week it had been raining hard, we had been soaked for days, and
I had been thinking about how in my unit, and in every other unit I
knew, there were "good guys" who I could trust with my life, and who
would give me their last pair of dry socks if I ever needed them, and
some other guys who would not.

As I was thinking about this, and watching my "enemies" play across
the barbed wire, it suddenly occurred to me that the same must be
true on the other side - that in any Syrian unit I would probably
find people I could immediately trust, if only I had the opportunity.

This should have been obvious, but when you live in a place that?s
been involved in a conflict for a long time, the "others" are often
so dehumanized you rarely think of them as people just like yourself.

But as soon as that thought hit me, everything changed. I looked
across the border, and I thought: "Wait a second, this is all wrong.
This fence is running the wrong way. Wouldn?t it make more sense for
those who share socks, on both sides of the border, to get
together...?" And that?s when I laughed out loud.

Life is a bit more complicated, of course, but the desire to reach
across the border - any border - never left me, and later it led to
Action Without Borders and Idealist.org.

I believe we are living in a very special moment. For the first time
in history, we have the means to reach across every boundary and
difference that separates us, and find new ways of working together.

We can do this, and we can do it now. Please share this message with
anyone who would give you their last pair of socks (or to whom you'd
give yours) and invite them to join us at Idealist.org. Together we
can build a global network of people who want to make our communities
and the world a better place, starting right now from our
neighborhood, school, or workplace.

During the week of March 12-18, and again during the week of April 23-
29, people all over the world will be meeting face-to-face to
continue building this network, and it would be great if you could
attend a start-up meeting wherever you are.

To find or host a meeting in your area, and for more details about
this whole initiative, please go to http://www.idealist.org/meetings

Thanks so much for reading and sharing this message. We look forward
to working with you and seeing what we can all do together.

If you want to reply to this message, feel free to do so. We can't
always write back, but we read everything we receive.

All the best,

Ami Dar and the Idealist.org team
See us at: http://www.idealist.org/en/about/gallery

Action Without Borders is a nonprofit organization with offices in
New York, Buenos Aires, and Portland. Our website,
http://www.idealist.org , is one of the most popular nonprofit sites
on the  web, with jobs, volunteer opportunities, events, and
resources posted by 65,000 organizations in 190 countries, and over
50,000 visitors every day.

If you have never visited Idealist, the quickest way to explore the
site is to enter a keyword or two in the search field at the top of
the page, and take it from there. You can also sign up for email
alerts with new opportunities matching your interests and location,
and receive them in your mail box every day.

See us also on MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/idealists and on
Facebook in the "I am an Idealist" group.
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