I am the first one to complain at times of the very annoying aspects of the modern digital and social media world. From being tethered to our smartphones or being constantly driven by notifications of all genres or just wasting so much idle time browsing the vast Internet instead of being present for others in the physical world.
While there is a very strong momentum building towards living a healthier more balanced life and pursue a more purposeful and mindful existence - momentum driven by early leaders such as Soren Gordhamer and his "wisdom 2.0" movement; there are occasionally examples on how we are individually profoundly and personally very touched by the positive impact social media can have for the greater good of others fellows.
I was reminded of this over the last week.
About a year ago following a Hacker News post by Paul Graham, I stumbled on Watsi (www.watsi.org) - the first non-profit that YC funded. In a nutshell, Watsi is a donors social platform to fund medical treatments required by underprivileged people around the world.
I really liked the concept and their early implementation and ended up donating for one case, shared the info with my Facebook friends and rather quickly forgot much about it.
Fast forward to last Valentine's day when I received the following very nicely thought-through message from Watsi reminding me of it.
It doesn't matter what you do on Valentine's Day. You've already changed 1 life by donating to a patient on Watsi. Thanks for spreading the love, even when nobody's watching. People like Yishak love you for it.
This made me feel very good, I naturally clicked on Yishak's case, and rapidly decided to seize the moment to fund another case.
And that's when the really hard part came in - as you can imagine every single case on the platform deserves to be funded. I ended up choosing to treat a kid named Wensley for two primary reasons. One he is a kid (2 year old) and 2nd he has a condition called Hydrocephalus which I've gotten to be aware of via good friends of mine from 20 year back.
These friends unfortunately had one of their kid suffer from the condition and have been since then dedicating a huge portion of their lives ever since then to foster awareness, research and support for this rather rare condition.
Once my donation completed, I again posted about the case on my Facebook and called out my friend Lori about it suggesting she could also forward it to her network and therefore increase and speed up the probability that Wensley would be fully funded.
And that's when things took another great and uplifting twist. Not only did Wensley get funded super fast.
but thanks to the power of social media, the story took a life of its own and here is how Lori tells the tale.
Our friend Bernard Desarnauts who we know from being in tech 20 years ago sent me this a bit ago...I shared it in hopes of raising funds and today we contacted a neurosurgeon who participates in the Hydrocephalus Clinical Research Network who happens to be performing neurosurgeries in Haiti as I write. Wensley is his patient he believes (spellings are various due to literacy issues), he saw him yesterday and he says he has quite a few patients on the fundraising site below. It is affiliated with his group/hospital. Watsi.org and Project Medishare. Thanks Bernard, thanks to any donors and to all of the medical personnel who do medical missions in developing countries.
I love the story as it shows how the vast interconnected digital networks can at times collide to create a greater good. Final words, if you can spare a few dollars (minimum $5) please head to the Watsi site and support Peterson who can also be treated in the next days by the same surgeon.
Also Xconomy wrote a detailed story here on how Paul (and Lori) got involved to support Hydrocephalus and what they are doing to support this.
Update: Thanks to your generosity, Peterson has been fully funded but you can support other kids at https://watsi.org/partners/project-medishare
Update 2: thanks to the amazing response. there are only 2 cases from this MediShare project that are not fully funded. $2,500 to go. $5 minimum. We can do this!