Posted on September 27, 2011 @ 8:00 am by ehuizenga

Put Aside Your “Everythings” and . . . “Do Something!”

By Michelle M. Ernsdorff, Founder, Compass to Care, a nonprofit that schedules and pays for the travel arrangements families require to seek the best cancer care for their children.

“One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.”
—Henry David Thoreau, poet, writer, philosopher

We all have moments when we feel like we have to do everything. It can be exhausting. We have to go to work and clean the house and cook the dinner and pay the bills and attempt to be everything to everyone. It is an easy race into which we can get caught. Oh, and someplace in there it would be nice to sleep. So, who really has time for anything else?

But somehow, someway, 63 million unique individuals in the United States, people just like you and me, take time out of their day—putting aside all of the ‘everythings’ on their to do lists—to give of their time and talent for someone or something else. It is not that these people have more time in their lives or less to do than others. Often, it is quite the contrary. What they do have that separates them from the average person is a desire to make a difference by dong something for someone else. We call them volunteers.

When I was younger, volunteering centered solely on community projects. My Girl Scout troop sent us little girls into the park to pick up trash to beautify our environment. And my school (shout out to the St. Joseph Ramblers) had all of the students collect food for the poor. These were great introductions into the importance of volunteering.

Fast-forward to 2011 and I find myself the leader of a new charitable organization. And yes! We need volunteers. But unfortunately we cannot have large groups come in and paint our walls, because we don’t have an office—which means no walls either. Nor can we use volunteers to answer the phones, because we have one phone that happens to serve as my personal cell phone, too. (And it would be a bit inappropriate to have a volunteer taking my personal calls, although that might be nice!)

What we do need are highly talented individuals to support us with vital business growth activities, such as marketing, PR, strategic planning, technical assistance—the list is long. One of those things we have desperately needed was a new website.

And voila! On February 21st, a prayer had been answered when an email from Maris at EPIC showed up in my inbox!!!

When she inquired about the creative project I would be interested in having the rally team complete, I was a bit hesitant to tell her about our website. I know it’s a big of a project and I know how much design firms wanted us to pay to have it done. So, I thought: No way would they do all of that. But over the past 8 weeks, a group of dedicated, creative, talented volunteers have made Compass to Care their own “something.”

I’ve said “thank you” to this team over and again. However, words cannot encompass the true gratitude we feel for each member, who used his or her individual expertise to support our organization. So the best thank you we can give is to pay it forward by putting aside our own “everythings” and doing “something” for the children with cancer we serve.

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