On Giving Back

One of my resolutions for 2015 was to start giving back to the community. But new year resolutions don’t usually mean much. Just some wishful thinking hoping this will be the year you suddenly wake up to be a person that follows up on them.

Since I started working, I was lucky to be surrounded by incredibly intelligent and giving people. They made it their mission to improve the web and design community. Although I helped organise some events and get-togethers, I never took it upon myself to further it. Part of it had to do with being young. But mostly, it was never a priority, and thus, always postponed.

Last year all that changed and a few interesting projects made me a little bit closer to my goal.

Side Projects

For a few years I wanted to create a website to help people donate part of their tax return to NGOs. It’s one of the benefits the state gives to Portuguese tax payers. There was never a simple way to actually find institutions to donate your money. That meant the money always ended up going for a few organisations that could do some publicity or tv ads. Last year, with the help of a few friends, we launched meio por cento. It’s a simple site that does just one thing. Help you help other people.

Mentoring

At Seedrs we decided to join Faber Ventures summer internship program. We selected a junior designer to intern with us and work on prototyping what our iOS app could be. It was a huge amount of work, and she did great! My job was to mentor her, point her in the right direction, and then just let her do her thing. And she did with flying colours. So much so that we asked her to join our team after the internship finished.

Teaching

I was lucky to be invited to join some really smart people to teach in a new post-graduation course at Faculdade de Belas Artes. The goal of the course is to introduce Digital Experience Design to the faculty students. After much thought and some initial doubts, I accepted.

Besides sharing your knowledge, teaching forces you to edit, compile and structure information. And that’s not a small task. At all. I’ve been teaching for 3 months and it’s been an amazing experience and a huge challenge. It’s incredibly gratifying and I’m learning a lot.

Events

As part of the post-grad course, we’re also organising the DXD Talks. The talks are free for anybody to join. The goal is to get students in touch with people that have been in their shoes and managed to grow their careers. It’s all about sharing experiences and getting people to talk to each other. We are two sessions in and there are many more to come. You should stop by for the next one :)

I’m happy (and a bit surprised) that all this really happened.

My personal goal for this year is to continue to expand on this resolution. To do so, I will start writing. This is something that I always wanted to do, but always found a good excuse not to… you know the drill.

There’s not a specific number of posts per day/week/month that I want to write. Nor any grand plan with the topics I’ll cover. It’s just about documenting and sharing some of my thoughts. Forcing myself to be more open and structured.

On giving back.