Everyone can be great at giving — Nipun Mehta at IIS
Founder of @ServiceSpace, Nipun Mehta gives an awe-inspiring talk how everyone, despite their social or financial status can be great at giving.
Nipun tells the story about Raghu who had lost both his legs due to polio. Raghu used to beg on the streets for a living. But the good Samaritan in Raghu wanted to be generous and give. He didn’t know how. Raghu lived in a slum co-habited by a lakh(hundred thousand) other inhabitants. Each home in the slum used to have its own set of problems. And the women in the neighborhood found Raghu to be very endearing and approachable and used to share their domestic problems with him. Besides listening to their problems, Raghu wanted to do more for these families. He started gifting tulsi plant (Holy Basil Plant) to these families. This is a plant that the families across India considered as holy. Slowly the entire family started caring for the plant and through it they started caring for each other. In 2 years, Raghu gave about 900 such plants and thus changing 900 such families through his generosity. Raghu’s is one such story that proves that ‘Everyone can be great at giving’. Nipun goes on to tell the story of Shaku Bhen, the janitor and how she preserved small pencil butts and donate them to children without access to pencil. Or Uday, the auto driver who drove a rickshaw in the city of Ahmedabad and his customers paid, not for their own ride but for the next person’s ride. ‘Pay it Forward’ has been a concept, Nipun and volunteers at Service Space had pioneered as part of the Karma Kitchen project in Berkeley. Listen to this one inspiring talk on how giving gets each of us connected to not only everyone but to our inner selves which Nipun calls as ‘Inner-Net’.
About Nipun Mehta:
Nipun Mehta is the founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gift-economy. What started as an experiment with four friends in the Silicon Valley has now grown to a global ecosystem of over 500,000 members that has delivered millions of dollars in service for free. Nipun has received many awards, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service, Wavy Gravy’s Humanitarian award, and Dalai Lama’s Unsung Hero of Compassion. In 2015, President Barack Obama appointed him to a council on poverty and inequality. Nipun is routinely invited to share his message of “giftivism” to wide ranging audiences, from inner city youth in Memphis to academics in London to international dignitaries at the United Nations; his speech at UPenn commencement in May 2012 was read by millions. He serves on the advisory boards of the Seva Foundation, the Dalai Lama Foundation, and Greater Good Science Center.
Follow Service Space on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/servicespace/
Follow Service Space on Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicespace
Personal Blog: http://nipun.servicespace.org/
Organization Website: www.servicespace.org
