Donations for Ukraine

For the month of April, I’m going to be matching any donation you give to organizations helping Ukraine and Ukrainian Refugees, up to $500 (total). If you donate, send me a picture of your receipt and I’ll match it at the end of the month. Every little bit helps, and this is a way to double your impact.

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Ren and I were at a local Italian joint on a Saturday in early March, about a week and a half after Russia invaded Ukraine starting an obscene and horrific war. We sat there drinking our cold beer and munching on garlic knots, seriously debating whether we should go to Poland to help the Ukrainian refugees who are fleeing over the borden en mass. Of course, we decided that wasn’t the right thing to do because as it turns out, we would be more of a hinderance than a help in a desperate and urgent situation. We don’t speak the language, we don’t have any specific expertise that would be useful, and in reality we’d be taking resources that should go to the refugees themselves. Simply put, we’d be in the way.

In retrospect, the privilege and hubris that we exhibited in even considering that we should go is a bit embarrassing to share. I tell this story now because I think that while the idea of us going to Poland to offer our “services” was flawed, the intention we had behind that thought was one that many of you might relate to. It’s driven by a need to do something, to take action and not stand by watching when we see bad things happening in the world. “If not me, then who?”, and all that.

However, there is a line between being action-oriented and being impetuously ineffective, and sometimes, especially when we feel desperate, that line becomes thin.

There are times when well-intentioned people do more harm than good with their actions. Sometimes helping hurts.

Let me bring this back to how it applies to our businesses for a second. When getting started, being action-oriented is a good thing. Being able so see and quickly act to solve a problem is actually the very essence of being a business owner. In fact, it’s this very mindset that will probably lead you to start your own business. You get tired of waiting for someone else to fix the problem that you see, and so you decide to do it yourself. This action-oriented mindset is an incredible quality, especially for entrepreneurs, and one that needs to be nourished.

But at some point in your business, you need to start delegating to grow and succeed. You’ll realize that finding and paying people who are more skilled than you in a certain area is actually the best way to be effective in your business. So you might hire a bookkeeper or virtual assistant, or buy a website template instead of creating one from scratch.

Being a force for greater good in the world requires the same mentality. Sometimes it requires diving in and using your experiences and skills to head to Poland and help out on the front lines. Other times it requires finding ways to support great organizations that have spent years cultivating the expertise needed to do that work well.

For the majority (though not all!) of us, the latter is where we can make the most impact in this situation — by working hard and then being intentional about how we use our resources to do the most good.

To push forward this effort in our community, I’m going to match your donations, up to $500, from now through the end of April for anything you give to support Ukraine and her people. It can be a charitable organization, or maybe a refugee family or effort you know of personally. Just send me a picture or screenshot of your donation.

Here are some of the organizations that I encourage you to support:

Come Back Alive
CARE International

Keep building,
Will