Earlier this year I had an idea… in the shower… which is often where the best ideas happen, I reckon.
It was a little niggly idea at first. But it grew and grew, until before I knew it the idea was a project. Which is now happening. The idea in a nutshell: Write the World notebooks, unique notebooks designed to make the world a better place. Our point of difference: 100% of the $10 purchase price of each Write the World notebook sold goes to The Life You Can Save to go towards effective charities. That’s right, 100%.
“Just one $10 notebook can provide safe water to five people for a year or help protect six people from malaria for up to four years.”
I jokingly call it the love project. It’s such an apt name for it. I love so much about it. Selfishly, I love that it allows me to use my skills – working with specialists like designers and printers, creating, writing, implementing, organising. Oh yes, I’m an organiser!
I love that it’s increasing my horizons, allowing me to talk to and meet interesting people I wouldn’t have otherwise come across. It’s broadening my own world.
I love that the whole family is engaged in the project, offering ideas and suggestions and ever so patiently listening to my constant updates and latest Write the World thoughts.
I love that the idea has been so positively embraced by every single person I’ve told about it. It’s a project that seems to bring out the best in people.
And I love that The Life You Can Save has agreed to be our project’s donor charity. It means the project is totally aligned to where our family has been putting our effective altruism efforts for the past 24 months.
Our family will be directing our monthly effective altruism donations to Write the World for the foreseeable future. We have funded the design and printing of the first 1,500 Write the World notebooks ourselves. For an initial outlay of $4,500 – which we would have donated to effective charities anyway over the course of the coming year – we will eventually be able to direct $15,000 in notebook sales to The Life You Can Save. More than three times what we would have otherwise being able to donate.
Because that is another thing I love about the love project. It has this magical multiplier thing going on. The more we print, the less the notebooks cost. The more we sell, the more we donate. Say, for example, we increase our print quantities in the future – with economies of scale, the notebook production price goes down and for a $5,000 initial investment, we’d see $30,000 donated to The Life You Can Save in notebook sales. How magic is that?
Our aim is to sell 100,000 notebooks by 2040, raising $1 million dollars for charity in the process. To date we have sold around 500 notebooks, so only 99,500 to go!
By Kate Tapping. Inspired by the work of ethicist Peter Singer, Kate and her family have been exploring effective altruism which brought her to launch Write the World notebooks in September this year. Each notebook costs $10 with the full $10 donated to effective charities. Find out more at www.writetheworldnotebooks.org