Junior LemonadeMakers. How wonderful is it, that this girls who have been rescued are in turn helping those in need. When you read the full story the other thing that really stood out for me was how the Girl Scouts had just donated all of these first aid kits two weeks ago to these girls, so that they had them to give to those in need in their town. Divine influence in that the universe was already moving things around for the future needs of the town.
If we could show each other the same compassion and care as people showed for these feathered friends the world would be a happier place.
If this made u smile, #share it to spread the smile!
Posted by The Logical Indian on Thursday, March 19, 2015
Think about what would happen if we all talked to one coffee shop and asked if they would set up a “pending coffee” tab for their store, and then we just took some time each visit to ask the person in front or behind us if they knew about the pending coffee tab at this coffee shop.
How many people could this small act of kindness impact?
We don’t have to be rich to make a difference. Something simple given to someone in need is all it takes to be a LemonadeMaker.
There truly is nothing that has ever gotten in my way during this journey so far, other than myself. I am living in this space of knowing that anything is possible, and that LemonadeMakers is a world changing idea whose time has come.
Very soon the website will be launched. I have grown a following of close to 1,000 men and women, and everyone that I talk to about LemonadeMakers gets very excited about the wonderful things that we will be doing. The plan is to grow the site to help the nonprofits and when we reach several success stories to begin marketing our reality T.V. show.
Why Lemonade Makers – I remember how after my nephew was killed and my sister’s nonprofit that she had started fizzled out; that I saw a way that I could reach out and make a difference by helping SMALL NONPROFITS that get started every year to be more SUCCESSFUL.
#overcome #tragedy #nonprofit #socialgood
In April of 2010, my family was devastated by the murder of my 19 yr old nephew Carl. Carl’s day had started out with him surfing and he was so excited because he was finally able to execute a maneuver that he had been working on for some time, and one of his friends caught it on video. He then went to work at O’Neil’s Surf Shop and later went to spend the evening at a friend’s. They walked across a park to visit with some friend at a neighboring apartment. Around 11 PM they went to walk back across the park to his friends condo, so he could pick up his bike and go home. As they left the apartment complex a gang banger stepped out of the bushes and shot Carl three times, he passed away in the ambulance on the way to the trauma center.
Word on the street is that the apartment complex that Carl had just left, has some gang members that live there and that this guy was from a rival gang and was supposed to be killing some member of this other gang and shot Carl by mistake.
Carl was my younger sister’s only child and she was devastated. I had to come to terms that there was nothing I could do to fix this, I couldn’t take her pain away and make everything better as I had when she was young and would skin her knee. With our encouragement, she started a nonprofit called “Mother Grizzlies Against Gangs”, and they had some marches and rallies to draw attention to the gang problem in her town. After a few months, she ran out of money and the nonprofit went silent. As I am sure you have experienced in your own life, it was one of those moments that caused me to take a look at my life and ask, Do I make a difference? Carl’s murder however sparked something down deep inside my soul and I knew that no matter what, I was going to find a way to make a difference in our communities – not just the one that I lived in, but every community, in this nation, and around the world.
This took a lot of meditative thinking – what could I do that would lead to a real impact? I did a lot of research when my sister’s nonprofit went silent, and I discovered that this happens a lot. So I came up with the idea of creating a company that would work with the individual “mom and pop” charities that we all have in every town (like my sister JoAnn had started), and help them to raise the funds they needed to make an impact in their communities individual social needs. In addition; we would teach them how to become a celebrity for their charity and raise awareness and get people in their community really involved with them. We would create a community forum where the LemonadeMakers can get together and help support each other with successful ideas and brainstorm new ideas to raise awareness and community involvement to support their charities.
At BraveHeart Women’s annual convention in Los Angeles, Rise 2013 we announced to a crowd of 1,200 women LemonadeMakers was being created. It is a website platform that will give a base for all of those women and men out there, who are what we are calling Lemonade Makers. Life gave them a lemon, through a loss – it could have been a death, a devastating illness, the unbearable sadness of children who suffer from lack of food, healthcare, homelessness, drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness – any one of a myriad of things. These women and men took that lemon of what seemed like unbearable heartache, and they formed a charitable foundation and have set about helping others. They are trying from that heartfelt place of passion to make a difference in their community and to the world at large.
This base will help them to educate themselves on the missing pieces they need to bring their visions to the world. It will provide a place to create a bigger impact and to collaborate with other Lemonade Makers. We will celebrate each other’s successes, and we will lighten the loads they carry so that they can keep on impacting and changing lives for the better. We will look at the near misses and see what we can do with out of the box thinking to make a bigger impact on our world. We will create videos and interviews, and leverage social media to the fullest extent, so that these Lemonade Makers create the positive changes in this world that we all need.
From this platform we will then create the reality T.V. show which will be televised internationally, as these Lemonade Makers show the world what is possible when a visionary is given the right tools and encouragement to fully expand out their vision and change not only the situation in their own town, but the situations that we all see on the world news every day in our living rooms, into something positive and world altering. I think that you will all agree with me that this is something that we need in our world – the encouragement to be the difference
Many of you know that five years ago in April, my family was devastated by the murder of my nephew Carl. As I am sure you have experienced in your own life, it was one of those moments that caused me to take a look at my life and ask, Do I make a difference? It was a defining moment because I realized that with all the giving that I do to charitable causes (what I had convinced myself was making a difference in this world), wasn’t really coming from the heart. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, because I did. I gave a lot to cancer research over the years because almost every member of my family that has passed on, has had cancer. Even now today, there are seven members of my family either actively in treatment or in remission from some sort of cancer.
Why I say it wasn’t coming from the heart, is because it wasn’t coming from a passionate desire to roll up my sleeves and do anything I could to make that difference. I wasn’t really fully invested in making a difference for anything. Carl’s murder however sparked something down deep inside my soul and I knew that no matter what, I was going to find a way to make a difference in our communities – not just the one that I lived in, but every community, in this nation, and around the world.
This took a lot of meditative thinking – what could I do that would lead to an international impact? I came up with the idea of creating a company that would work with the individual “mom” charities that we all have in every town, and help them to raise the funds they needed to make an impact in their communities individual social needs. I would help them to fundraise; make a celebrity of their charity and raise awareness and get people in their community really involved with them.
So I thought, how do I do this? I reached out for some coaching with Kim and Vito, the creators of BrandU – and they helped me to expand this vision out to a Reality T.V. show. They helped me to see the impact that a T.V. could have as it was something that could be seen around the world. Sage Lee with Small Business, Big Brand helped fill in the vision even further. I saw that my vision was much bigger than I had dared to dream for myself. In fact it was so big, that I realized that I needed to step back and start working on a network for myself. I was a nobody, sure I had achieved success in my career at the bank, but in the world at large, no one knew who I was.
So I put that vision on a back burner and went out to start meeting as many people as I could. I went to seminars and educated myself with several training programs and started introducing myself to all of these individual networks. It is probably how I met you.
I became very active in BraveHeart Women and collaborating with the wonderful women I have met there as well as other communities that I joined. I know that Sage, Kim and Vito probably thought that this was a step backwards and were afraid that this vision was probably going the way of a good idea that never gets expressed.
But here I am two years later from that initial vision and I am still going strong on bringing it into reality. I call the past two years phase one. Now I am ready for phase two. A lot of people have listened to this story and are supporting me in bringing this off of the vision board and into reality. One of them is Ellie Drake the founder of BraveHeart Women. With her mentoring I will be unveiling at Rise 2013, a website platform that will give a base for all of those women out there, who are what we are calling Lemonade Makers. Life gave them a lemon, through a loss – it could have been a death, a devastating illness, the unbearable sadness of children who suffer from lack of food, healthcare, homelessness, drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness – any one of a myriad of things. These women took that lemon of what seemed like unbearable heartache, and they formed a charitable foundation and have set about helping others. They are trying from that heartfelt place of passion to make a difference in their community and to the world at large.
This base will help them to educate themselves on the missing pieces they need to bring their visions to the world. It will provide a place to create a bigger impact and to collaborate with other Lemonade Makers. We will celebrate each others successes, and we will lighten the loads they carry so that they can keep on impacting and changing lives for the better. We will look at the near misses and see what we can do with out of the box thinking to make a bigger impact on our world. We will create videos and interviews, and leverage social media to the fullest extent, so that these Lemonade Makers create the positive changes in this world that we all need.
From this platform we will then create the reality T.V. show which will be televised internationally, as these Lemonade Makers show the world what is possible when a female visionary is given the right tools and encouragement to fully expand out their vision and change not only the situation in their own town, but the situations that we all see on the world news every day in our living rooms, into something positive and world altering. I think that you will all agree with me that this is something that we need in our world – the encouragement to be the difference.
A lot has happened in my life in the past 6 months. In November I was privileged to be on stage with the BraveHeart Women’s Conference and present information on my launching of my nonprofit called Lemonade Makers to over 1,200 women and then to introduce Marianne Williamson as the next speaker. My speech was very well received and it took me three hours to leave that evening, because so many women were excited about the program. Lemonade Makers is going live in March and I am currently seeking Board Members for my nonprofit. I am hoping that you will consider being one of the board members.
After my nephews death, my sister started a nonprofit called “Mother Grizzlies Against Gangs”. After a few marches and rallies it sort of died out. What I discovered as I researched other families who had lost a loved one to a violent death, is that a lot of people try to create something positive from losing a loved one, and like my sister they sort of fade away after a year or two. While they have the best intentions, they don’t really know how to run a nonprofit as a business, and so once their money runs out, they end up closing up the charity. They are missing some part of the puzzle to create a successful nonprofit.
What I am creating with Lemonade Makers, is a forum/community where they can gather together to learn from each other. We will create online training classes to teach them the basics of the business; how to fundraise; create a steady cash flow through several streams of income; how to get corporate sponsorship; how to use social media; etc…, whatever they need to be able to become successful in their passion of making a difference in their town and in the world. We will be able to help each other copy what works, and figure out how to make what didn’t work out as planned better. As we create and build this community around the world, (within 1 yr to 18 months) we will begin filming a series for a reality show that is sort of like the show that was on TV several years ago, called “Home Improvement Makeover”, and instead will film how each charity grows from struggling to make a difference in their town, to figuring out how to engage their own community to step up and help them make a difference. What we want to highlight is that one person taking a stand can make a difference, because they inspire a community around them to join with them to make that difference.
Part of the creating of community around Lemonade Makers will be those who join the forum because they want to support those specific causes that the various charities will represent. They can become Ambassadors with volunteering time and resources as they are needed, or they can become fans, who want to be supportive but not as physically hands on in their support.
I hope that you will consider being a board member as I believe that you would be a valuable member of our community. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, and thank you for taking the time to consider my invitation.
Yesterday you were so alive riding the oceans waves, yes, life was so simple and innocent
But now your soul has left behind your flesh, and your bones lie there just an empty cage
Help me, I can’t breathe as this news fractures my life, I am so unsafe, I just can’t balance
And grief engulfs me, and anger rages, and I just can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe from hearing the news on T.V or reading the printed pages of your murder
I feel the thunderous storm of emotions pass through me as lightening strikes my heart
The senselessness of your passing, the gunshots of a stranger who tore our lives asunder
And so I grieve, and the sorrow burns as it drowns me, and I can’t breathe.
The hours pass into days as I stumble down this long road breathing with heavy sighs
The days spent in crying, and the primal screams of the dark nights merge into numbing weeks
Yet storm clouds break up as I begin to see the healing of the rainbows blessings
And so I grieve and I begin to breathe, I breathe love.
Life carries on with unending support of love that is surrounding me and protecting me
Forgiveness is the answer, so I move past the limitations of grief, rage, and sorrow
To live in limitless love, light and joy, and my heart-lines align to the universal love
And so I breathe love, and I add grace, I breathe, I breathe grace.
Love from Carl’s heart washes through me, cleansing and healing every part of my body
A warm wave it ignites an inner fire of transformation that love is the ultimate expression of grace
It illuminates the greater vision for my life to emerge from within me, a graceful unfolding,
And so I breathe love and grace, and I add forgiveness, I breathe, I breathe forgiveness.
I release the need to blame you Carl, myself, or anyone else for your ending.
I release fears grip on my soul, and I choose to walk this path with love
I have experienced a grace inspired event that challenged me and I have awakened
And so I breathe love, grace, forgiveness, and I add joy, I breathe, I breathe joy.
Grace has opened a door whose light illuminates my next step as I step out of the darkness
I share this, your gift to the world, that love is the ultimate expression of grace
As I practice this belief, practice will yield to insight, which yields to reimbodiment, which yields to manifestation.
And so I breathe love, grace, forgiveness, joy, and I add hope, I breathe, I breathe hope.
As I breathe love, grace, forgiveness, joy and hope, life becomes a celebration again
And as I let my light shine, I unconsciously give others the permission to do the same
I will live like there is no tomorrow, I will live like there was no yesterday
I will breathe, I will breathe love, grace, forgiveness, joy and hope and manifest it out into the world.