Each Friday, the another jennifer blog shares stories of those who incorporate philanthropy into their everyday lives – personally and professionally – in a creative and unique way. If you have a story you’d like to share, please contact Jennifer. You can view past posts from the series here.
CausePub is a community of storytellers working together to create best-selling books that directly impact specific causes.
It all started about a year and a half ago when Griff Hanning wrote a book about personal finance. At the time, he was struggling with his own finances and, as he noted to me, he had made a few stupid decisions as an entrepreneur.
The only problem with the book was that while there were some good nuggets in it, people weren’t overly excited about it.
What Griff realized from this first failed book attempt was that he’s at least got a few good stories to share. And though not everyone should write a whole book, you can still make a big impact as a storyteller. He then compiled a book of stories about what not to do, called Hey Don’t and started a Kickstarter campaign. That didn’t raise much money.
Hey Don’t was too negative and didn’t communicate well, so Griff put his idea on the backburner.
In August of last year, Griff re-visited his idea of compiling stories for impact and took it to the next level by starting CausePub. He wanted to encourage people to get off the couch and do something. And what better way to do that than to share stories of couch rebels like him? People who live outside of their comfort zone every now and then.
CausePub’s first project is to publish the book Couch Rebels. The best part is that for every book sold, Blood:Water Mission will be able to provide three people with clean water for one year. That’s because a good chunk of the proceeds of the book will go directly to Blood: Water Mission, a nonprofit Griff heard about on the radio and felt immediately compelled to donate. (You can see a breakdown of where the money goes here.)
Griff liked the grassroots type approach Blood:Water Mission takes to tackle the AIDS/HIV and water crises in Africa. He noted they are made up of a bunch of couch rebels. Future book projects will marry a cause and a theme.
Here’s a quick video that describes how CausePub works and how you can be involved with Couch Rebels.
Couch Rebels – A CausePub Book Project from Griff Hanning on Vimeo.
The goal of this CausePub project is to sell 15,000 copies, which means that 45,000 people could be provided with clean water for an entire year. If you’ve read some of my past posts on the importance of clean water and sanitation, you know how huge this would be.
And because I know I’ve got some couch rebels for readers, here’s how you can be involved:
What’s your couch rebel story?
