This year, GreaterGood SA aims to attract 20,000 volunteers to give just one day to help make a difference to projects across the country on Do It Day. It’s easy to think that one day is unlikely to make too much of a difference. But to understand the potential of Do It Day, it is worth reflecting on the difference that one person can make in one day. Take, for example, the story of Galia, who heads up a Cape Town-based charity.

By Dylan Edwards, SASIX Evaluator and Writer

On any given Thurday, Galia wakes up early in her Claremont home. During the rush of getting her teenage children ready for school, she makes her way to her front gate, where she meets a group of Zimbabwean men. They rely on Galia to keep the crafts they sell on the side of the road in her home, where they are safe from unwanted attention: the beaded wire fruit-bowls, flowers, and animal figurines that they work so carefully to make would certainly be stolen from them if they took them back to the townships where they live.

Likeminded people

Sometimes she gives them donations of wire and beads – the raw materials for their crafts. After dropping her kids off at school, Galia drives to a number of collection points dotted around the city, where she picks up donations of sandwiches, fruit, and bottles of water. She then drives to the Department of Home Affairs in Nyanga township. Here she and a number of likeminded people hand out the donations of food and water to refugees that are often forced to queue for days without a meal or anything to drink. She also hands out flyers with telephone numbers of shelters and other organisations where these people can turn to for help.

Some people give her hand-written pages that she will take home and compile into typed, professional-looking CVs, giving them a better chance of finding the jobs they need to support themselves and their loved ones.

Hope

By the time she pulls into her driveway in the evening Galia is tired. But the people that she meets inspire her to go back again and again. Her greatest gift to the people she meets is not food for the hungry, raw materials for the craftsmen, or CVs for the jobseekers. Her greatest gift to all these people is hope – a gift that is so rewarding to give because the giver always shares in it.

Imagine the potential

If Galia is able to touch so many lives in one day’s kindness, imagine what 20,000 people could achieve. If so many people give just one day to a good cause, that adds up to 20,000 days – that’s nearly 55 years! So it is no exaggeration to say that the potential of Do It Day is to accomplish decades of good work in just one day.

Imagine the number of people that could be fed, children that could be taught, schools repaired, animals nurtured and loved or trees planted in 20,000 days. Imagine the contributions that could be made to creating cleaner, safer communities.

18th September is the day

Now, write it in your diary, mark it on your calendar, programme it into your PDA or set a reminder on your cellphone. Tell your friends, family, colleagues or classmates that 18th September 2009 is Do It Day. Go to doitday.co.za, join the group on Facebook, and follow the event on Twitter.

Find a project in your area that touches your heart where you can make a contribution. Whether it is with skills, materials, muscle or simply time, everybody has something to give, and 18 September is the day to do it.