ZestLife Foundation

Project:
To create an ongoing annual project to assist children in dire personal need. A hands-on team project that allows us to fundraise, plan, implement and complete a specific targeted annual goal.

As a first project in 2008 we would like to help an orphanage for children affected by AIDS..

Plan:
Our plan is to create a Foundation with volunteer contributions. We need to organize the foundation and create a template for our future project criteria and fundraising efforts. Sponsors, donors, and fundraising events will create the funds for the foundation. Project identification
will be via informal inquiry and then by in-person contact and investigation.

People:
Diverse caring people who want to make a personal difference through service. We want to bring together a small group of committed action orientated volunteers for these projects. We require legal, office, accounting, logistics, medical, volunteer and fundraising help.

Goal:
The Goal is to create an opportunity for our project to serve children and families in dire health and life crisis. We plan to offer direct annual one-time project aid to Aboriginal, Asian or African children. Our goal is to improve the health, lifestyle and welfare of children affected by AIDS or other traumatic circumstances.

The project could involve direct infrastructure assistance or medication, immunization, clothing, toy or famine food assistance. Our hope is that as we assist aid organizations, individual Zest Life volunteers will choose to continue to assist past recipients of our assistance.

“Rather than be always striving for personal happiness, try to make others happy. In being of spiritual, mental and material service to others, you will find your own needs fulfilled. As you forget self in service to others, you will feel that, without seeking it, your own cup of happiness will be full.” -Paramahansa Yoganada, author of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’

Contact ZestLife: zlf@zestlife.ca

"Don't spend your precious time asking 'Why isn't the world a better place?' It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is 'How can I make it better?' To that there is an answer." -Dr. Leo F. Buscaglia

Mother Theresa once said that in order to practice service we should sweep our neighbor's walkway. She did much more of course but I think she was saying that we all have it within us to practice service.

Service is an act of love made manifest by our actions. Since love is without measure, we can say that in any act of service we reach out to the world in a loving way. It really makes no difference if your neighbor sweeps your sidewalk in return; your act has contributed more love to your world. The greatest acts of service come when the receiver cannot return your favor. Your gift comes without obligation or possible reciprocation.

One great story of service comes from Dr. Viktor Frankl. In his autobiographical book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ he describes his horrific years of imprisonment in a concentration camp.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing -the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.

How do we live in today’s world and not be affected by the pain and sorrow in the world? We have the opportunity to choose love even in the face of anger, fear, hatred and mistrust. Love is not meant to combat these negative emotions. Rather when loves meets a potentially immovable object such as hate, love surrounds this object. Love does not seek to change or even understand the hate.

Love can only conquer fear by surrounding the fear. If we try to change the fear with love then we create a situation where love is at odds with and is creating a resistance to the fear. Love would not be love if it was given in order to force change or to combat negative actions. In the face of fear, anger and mistrust, we must love unconditionally in order for change to occur.

Service Feels Good

Martin Seligman, author of ‘Authentic Happiness’ undertook a study to discover if happiness comes more readily from the exercise of kindness more readily than it does from having fun. The results, for him, were life changing.

“The afterglow of the “pleasurable” activity (hanging out with friends, or watching a movie, or eating a hot fudge sundae) paled in comparison with the effects of the kind action.”

He states that the exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separate stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self-consciousness. The old saying is true that we who give receive.

Fundraising:
Our fundraising efforts on this site are accomplished through donations and commissions from our sponsors and affiliates. Books and other products that we make available on the ZestLife website have our enthusiastic endorsement. Thank you for ordering your books and other products from our site. Our sponsors pay us a small commission if purchases are made when you link from our site.

Every purchase you make from the sponsors of this site helps us to begin the work of the ZestLife Foundation. All commissions obtained from our website sponsors and affiliates go directly to our Zest Life Foundation.

J.D. in Person:
J.D. Ramsay is available as a speaker on Zest Life Strategies for your club or group. Donations to the Zest LIfe Foundation are gratefully accepted. Contact J.D. at zlf@zestlife.ca