525,600 minutes. The musical RENT said it best – how do you measure a year? Today marks my one-year anniversary with Iowa Interfaith Power & Light. There are a lot of ways that I could measure this last year. It could be measured tangibly in social media engagements, emails I sent, lists I pulled, or letters I stamped. In fact, since I started with Iowa IPL, there have been 14,613 social media engagements, 81 organizational emails sent, between 25-30 lists pulled, and several hundred letters stamped. Even though these numbers reflect a lot of the work that I have done with Iowa IPL so far, these numbers don’t do the year justice, nor do they paint the entire picture of what this last year looked like.
This year was also filled with many things that cannot be measured. Outside of work, I was plagued by challenges in my relationships, health diagnoses, and, like so many of us, the monotony of the day-to-day. It’s easy to focus on the negative, but this year was filled with amazing things too: The exploration of hobbies old and new, meeting some of my nearest and dearest friends, and further growing in my spirituality and its connection to the world around me. Even if these things could be measured in some tangible way, the number itself would not be able to express the depth and impact of these experiences.
So how do we measure what we feel with our hearts? How we feel about something may not be able to be measured tangibly, but how we express that feeling can be. In the nonprofit world, this might look like attending an organization’s event, talking with a friend about an organization’s work, or making a financial gift to an organization we are passionate about.
The giving season is here and Giving Tuesday (November 28) will mark the official start of Iowa IPL’s year-end campaign. This year, the theme of our campaign is “Give Gratefully”. With this theme, we urge individuals to think about why they give and what it means to give a grateful gift.
So I ask you, dear reader, what does it mean to you to give a grateful gift? Out of all the ways a year can be measured, I would like to measure this last year with Iowa IPL not with numbers, but with the beautiful patchwork of people, experiences, and grateful gifts instead.