The Dream

A few years ago I had a dream that we could build a culture that would become focused on giving rather than taking – on helping rather than receiving – on making a difference rather than collecting stuff for self.  God gave me a vision for what is now called Hands That Give.  The idea of a community coming together behind a cause – funded by giving rather than dues or billing – where members would give from their success to help others who were in need.  That seed was planted in my mind very early in the HTG story. 

The Challenge

When God gave me the vision – there were a number of problems.  Quite honestly, there was no way that dream could possibly succeed.  As I looked at things:

• We were small in number of members
• We had few vendor sponsors in our ecosystem
• We were fragmented in how we did business
• We did not have a common culture of giving as the concept of peer groups was new
• We were an unknown to the media and the industry
• We weren’t really making any money
• We had no way to really know what each other were planning
• We had no trust built yet – we were just getting acquainted

The list of issues was long, and definitely would prevent success if we tried to roll out an idea that was dependent on all those areas.  So we began to patiently walk through a long journey of creating a framework that would someday allow us to make a dream come true and a vision come to life.  In the next post we will walk through the journey and describe how we came to where we are today.