Happy Blog (Action) Day

It’s my Blogiversary today!  Yes, 3 years ago today, I started this little thing and I’m still going.  I’ve written 376 posts and I have 341 CSS readers.  I get about 350 views per day and a lot of those are thanks to the Pillowcase Dress Instructions.   I’ve had 1,960 lovely comments and Akismet has saved me from 10,650 spam comments.

Today is also Blog Action Day, an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Their aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.  This is the second annual day – last year’s issue was the Environment and this year is Poverty.   At last count, there are 12,559 sites participating – which translates to 13,396,688 people via RSS Readers for those sites.

I am going to tell you about my experience with Kiva, a company I love.  They are a micro-lending organisation that is changing people’s lives and giving them ownership of their destiny and future.

I first started lending to Kiva on my birthday in April last year.  I wanted to do “something” and this seemed like such a great way to help somebody out.  It’s not charity, it’s money to invest in businesses to help people get on their feet and go from there.  I really love that I can loan to someone else once my loan has been repaid fully and just keep on going, or throw some more money in when I feel comfortable in my own life.

I like to choose women who are in the sewing industry, or women’s collectives but I try not to be too picky about who I loan to – based on trivial things like my own interests.  The thing is, that everyone listed as needing a loan has a good use for the money, so sometimes I like to view the list by “popularity” and then go to the last one (the most unpopular) and fund that loan.

This is the first person I loaned to, a tailor from Nigeria, and she needed $400.00 to buy a new sewing machine and some more fabric.  I kicked in $50.00 and other lenders made up the rest of the money.  Thinking of a woman like this, making her living sewing and repairing clothes in conditions I can’t even begin to imagine – while I sit in my lovely studio full of enough fabric and notions to stock a small store is all the impetus I need to throw another $50.00 someone else’s way. How about you?

Happy Blog Action Day and Happy Blogiversary to me!  To celebrate both, I am going to kick in $1.00 to my Kiva account for every comment left on this post so please say hello for a good cause!

Tagged as: birthday, blog, blog action day, blogging, blogiversary, kiva, microlending, poverty