What my christmas has been like for the last six years
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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Dear Geekfriends,
With Christmas and all its blessings coming around the corner, I thought I would like to share what have been around my life the last half a decade.
UPDATE: I humbled by your generosity and therefore proclaim that I personally will donate €10 for every geekgold I receive into this year's project!
UPDATE 2:  I no longer can guarantee the 10€ : 1GG charge, since I thought that max 100GG would be donated (and I doubted even that...!)(and my wife's birthday is coming up in two weeks...) But, don't worry I will see that the GG is not used in a selfish manner!
Remember this is not about me, I have just done what is my responsibility to help my fellow man and hopefully this thread can be a source of inspiriration of you to do the same!
Update 3: If you want to contribute to this, you may make a donation by paypal to victory(a)victoryzine.com and I will guarantee that every single cent is given to a family in need.
Update 4: I will use the many gained from this, to officially sponsor 25 families with a special greeting from the boardgamegeeks bunch. I hope we can help 125 this year!
Update 5: Please come with suggestions how I can turn this GREAT amount of greekgold (more than one man can handle!) into money that could help these families. I plan of auction of the lot, but I feel that it wouldn't generate that many euros (when I looked at the other auctions).
A big thank you to all your comments, it is words like these that give me strenght to continue. I reckon I put about hundreds of hours of work in to this project and the first five years I lifted absolutely nothing in salary. This year I have 400€ for three months, so I can focus a bit more at the work that needs to get done.
Update 6: Sorry that I have not been able to answer all your email and geekmails, I have been showered by them and it really touches my heart.
A funny detail on the present project is that we are cooperating with two major supermarkets of which one is sorting and finding every child's gift and pack's them down in to boxes, just for us to fetch. We also have a sweet 25-50% discount there.
Update 7:: I've started an auction (item #13) where you can help the families by trying to win 650GG. Every cent goes directly to the families I will not keep a cent!
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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It all started in 2003 when I as a 23 young man was watching all the (mostly) awful consuming we humans were doing...
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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And then I realized that there are probably many people who cannot afford to even purshase a single gift for their children. And I thought that perhaps I could organize something so that even the poorest in my hometown could get a gift.
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3.
Board Game: Familys
[Average Rating:4.75 Unranked]
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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So I went to the city's office and asked: "Are there any poor families in this small town"?
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4.
Board Game: Shockwave
[Average Rating:7.09 Unranked]
[Average Rating:7.09 Unranked]
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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The answer was shocking: in my little town of little above 55,000 citizen there were over 2000 families being labeled as poor.
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
-
Then I got an Idea. I thought that I would try to help 100 of the families that were in great need.
My plan was to organize a project where each of the family would receive 3 bags of Christmas food and every child would receive a gift of his or her choice.
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6.
Board Game: Letter
[Average Rating:6.94 Unranked]
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
-
So I decided to write a letter, which was going to be distributed by the goverment to these families. And if the familiy would accept this help, they would return the letter (at no cost) to me.
In this letter the family wrote down the details; diets and most importantly what his or her child/ren wanted to get as a christmas present!
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7.
Board Game: Money!
[Average Rating:6.63 Overall Rank:753]
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
-
Oh, then there was this sweet little problem of having no money (as a poor student I was back then). I calculated that I needed 10,000€ and that in just two weeks!
I remember I was at great despair many times and cried, but something urged me to continue...and guess what...people from everywhere started to donate money to this project (in the end we ended with a surplus of 4000€, which we used next year)!
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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Ok, so we got the money...but man what a task it is to LOCATE every freaking strange item the children wanted!
Yes, the boardgames were easy to get, but a BRATZ-doll is not easy to find as a 23-year old single man ;-)
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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Well, after some agonizing treasurehunting we finally got all the stuff and one night we made all the packages (89 families had answered the letter I sent and we carefully wrote on the presents: "To Lisa from Mom", as we don't wanted the children to know that we had given the presents. We wanted the child to believe that her or his mom/father had, even during the difficult circumstances, given the present to him/her.
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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Oh, then we personally delivered all the packages to all the families. It was a joy inside my heart to see how surprised the families were when we arrived. Many didn't actually believe that we would come and almost everyone was astonished of how much food/presents we gave them.
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11.
Board Game: Holiday
[Average Rating:4.30 Unranked]
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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After a project like this, I usually take a holiday. And while bearing in mind that many families have been blessed, it is with ease I go.
And then in April I start planning the next year's project.
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12.
Board Game: Future
[Average Rating:5.67 Unranked]
Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
-
As for the future: my vision is to see this project in every city in Finland. Already I have seen it started in 5 or 6 other places and I hope that someday we could cover all the 2000 families in my hometown (Vaasa).
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Anders Olin
Finland
Vasa
Aaaaah, geekgold
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If you want to enter the auction (of 650 GG!) go to this Geeklist.
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Gloucester
Herent
Vlaams Brabant
This post will probably end up lost between all the others, but I just wanted to say that you're doing something really amazing here.
I only got 0.01 GG and a thumbsup... all I got here, but it's yours.
I'm sure it'll be put to good use. (for what it's worth
Salt Lake City
Utah
I am a complete n00b when it comes to organizing things like this, but I imagine the feeling of actually helping others to the extent you did, and the feeling of literally giving people a Christmas they didn't think was possible must be indescribable.
On a related note, is it hard to do stuff like this in the states? I too am a poor college student, but I am really interested in doing something in the same manner you did. I don't imagine I could walk into my local city council building and ask for a list of all the less fortunate people in the area...or could I?
Well, you cannot do that here in Finland. But what you can do is ask them if they can distribute letters to the families that are poor. I don't know if there's a social network in the states, but here in Finland they have pretty good overview of which families that are in need. So every year I give them (the social goverment) a bunch of letter which they distribute to the families and by that we are not getting any confidential information unless the families agree to it(by answering our letter).
Thanks for the elaboration!
Kentucky
Your story is truly inspiring and is the definition of the true Christmas Spirit. I wish I could be there in person to help as I miss those Christmases of volunteering, but a GG donation will have to do!
Merry Christmas