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we’re Helping people help people.
The Giving Spirit was founded as a platform for learning through the immersive learning experience of direct outreach and engagement with our unhoused neighbors. We are dedicated to replacing stereotypes, misinformation and fear with fact-based learning, impactful lived experience storytelling and direct engagement to allow the truth to drive long-term change. #hopeinhumanity.
Learning Experiences
We curate several forms of Giving Spirit Learning Experiences. From immersive, in-the-field outreach to live curated moderated dialogues to produced video learning modules to the launch of our first digital course on “Youth Homelessness” we strive to provide multiple access points to drive learning.
Learning Experiences are opportunities to build an accurate understanding of the complex realities of homelessness in Los Angeles- why people become homeless, why homelessness is difficult to escape, how current policy is flawed, and how people can start to make a difference- not just to reduce homelessness, but to end it. By making homelessness relatable it is empathetic gateway to action.
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Direct Outreach – Immersive Learning
Our direct outreach to our unhoused neighbors is where magic happens. Volunteers after training and coaching are guided and led by Giving Spirit leadership to neighborhoods, encampments and to agency partners. It is a unique opportunity to learn by serving a widely diverse universe of the poor with our signature survival kits. Lives, souls, hearts change, stereotypes fade with the truth as the one degree of separation between us clears the pathway to powerful understanding . . . for the volunteer AND for the recipient.
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Live Curated Panels
Let us host a curated panel at your workplace, school, place of worship and/or community center. We will empanel formerly unhoused “lived experience” policy and agency experts and academics to provide a 360 holistic look at a relevant issue that your families, teams, constituents, congregants or classmates have expressed the need to learn more. These powerful dialogues inspire thoughtful, perspective shifting interactions to catalyze empathy, understanding and action.
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The Giving Spirit Speakers Bureau (actually II.A)
Our 25 years of work has blessed us with access to some of the most powerful voices in our space. Lived experience storytellers across every impact program pillar, agency, academic and policy experts and elected officials grace our portfolio of experts to deliver to any size audience a 360 moderated interactive dialogue that will powerfully move minds, hearts, arms and legs.
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Our Stories
Powerful stories from resilient humans who beat insurmountable odds to emerge from homelessness and live to share their journeys are the diamonds of our Learning Experiences.
See these fantastic videos now! CLICK HERE
A Hosted Curated Event
We co-host customized events for small and large groups all over Greater LA. These private sponsored events are perfect for team building, holiday events, celebration events, community activism and high access, material impact and learning experiences.
Each Giving Spirit curated experience will directly impact one of our four core programs. Options:
- Curated Learning Experience
- Curated Team Building Kit Assembly + Curated Learning Experience
- Curated Team Building Kit Assembly + Curated Learning Experience + Direct Street Outreach
- Curated Team Building Kit Assembly + Curated Learning Experience + Agency Visit
Sponsorship donation will depend your budget, the size of your group, potential venue, which of our four impact programs, allocated time, number of learning experiences and outreach component(s)if applicable.
In the 25 years of executing these events we have been told by our hosts and their constituents that these curated experiences were thought-provoking, powerful and memorable. And a rich return on their donation.
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December Outreach Week
Our signature annual event. A week of community building, multiple assembly options and Learning Experiences across all four impact pillars. AND the biggest and most powerful direct street and agency Outreach weekend in LA.
December Outreach is our one public event and sparked our mission in 1999.
Sponsorships are vital for us to serve as many unhoused babies, children, men, women, families and animals when at the holidays is when both the need is the most and the weather is the most.
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To Sponsor
To Volunteer
To Donate
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A New Way of Learning – Our Digital Curriculum and Engagement Learning Platform, BeSocialChange.us
In the Fall of 2024 The Giving Spirit will launch its first course of our innovative curriculum on poverty and homelessness – “Youth Homelessness”.
Three years of research, design, testing and development has us very excited to introduce this powerful new tiered Learning Experience. Designed upon our 25-year model of teaching through immersive engagement, storytelling and fact-based learning our first course is a provocative, validated by data and real-life stories compelling new pathway of learning. We use the cross-generationally popular graphic novel format to insert the learner in the shoes of a vulnerable youth – facing constantly compromising, often tragic decisions that will change the course of their lives.
As Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government, Professor Monique Burns-Thompson, who has been a volunteer advisor since seeing an initial blueprint of our first course in ’22, continues to say, “If (The Giving Spirit) gets (the learning model) right, you will change the way people learn”.
This digital curriculum can and will inspire collective learning and engagement outside of Giving Spirit live events thereby exponentially scaling our impact and reach.
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A Destination for Social Impact – BeSocialChange.Us
Our coursework will live on our innovative new platform – BeSocialChange.Us The new platform will be curated as a communal hub for social impact learning and engagement – a “marketplace for Good”.
Users will come to BeSocialChange.Us to use our proprietary model to learn, engage and make measurable impact in their neighborhood – eventually everywhere. It is positioned to welcome impact verticals in climate change, animal welfare, human trafficking, environmental, income and educational inequalities and bullying. The community’s initial focus will be on homelessness and childhood education. Our first new collaborator? Pope Francis’s secular youth engagement platform Scholas Occurrentes.
Users and partners will share data, engagement opportunities and outcomes – all using our proprietary coursework pathway, on a Giving Spirit communal platform. This not only scales our collective impact and builds the first marketplace for impact learning across all sectors but BeSocialChange.us will fundamentally change the way we learn and inspire activism.
Lesson Plans
As our coursework testing moves from Alpha to Beta this Fall and is testing in classrooms our Educational Team will work to design curated lesson plans to adapt to specific use cases in our partner scholastic classrooms.
Here are lesson plans that we created at St. Paul’s the Apostle school in our Companion Animal Program
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Relevant Data and Studies Archive
We will consistently update this section to reflect relevant, impactful data, annual correspondences and newsletters and foundational studies.
Relevant Data on Homelessness <CS>
Important Studies <CS>
The Giving News Newsletters and 2024 Correspondences <CS>
– Blogs (cloaked) – Tom and Lane to discuss for Phase II
o TGS Blog
o YC Blog
Helping Others Helps You!
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