To keep a promise. I turned 60 this year. I'm a living kidney donor. There is always something to prove. The teaching never stops. I like to walk. Those are some of the simple answers to the question.
More complicated answers address complexities of human psychology, what encourages people to listen or act, and how walking the walk--quite literally in this case--is required whenever one talks the talk. During my ten years with The Innovation Symposium and the Social Entrepreneurship Exploration, I have been asked often what my project would be if I were a student in the course. I have had dozens of ideas, some workable and some out there in dreamland, but I have always come back to the idea of getting people motivated to do a little to gain a lot. My original idea for 100 Miles for Change involved a logistical plan on a national scale, selecting charities and not-for-profits and schools in all 50 states to help their participants organize 100-mile fundraising walks in which participants covered that distance in any way they chose--20 people could do 5 miles each, 50 people could do 2 miles each, 200 people could do a half mile each--in whatever configuration worked best for them. They would translate their sweat equity into tangible monetary gains and also into those intangible but potentially more valuable community-building gains. I wanted to link the routes so that one group would hand an actual baton to the next, and we could track each group's progress on a website as we watched one group meet another, bringing the country together (I love it when metaphors have basis in reality) while highlighting excellent causes. A little crazy, but it's often good to have dreams without boundaries. Perhaps one day, some version of this mega-sized Innovation Symposium project will be how I invest my time.
Right now, though, I have a promise to keep. After my dear friend and kidney recipient Julian Ridlen passed away in October 2017, my dear friend and his beloved wife Sue said to me, "I hope all of this will come to some good purpose." I told her about my 100 Miles for Change idea, and I promised to do the walk to honor Julian.
She thinks I'm crazy. She is not alone. But I am a believer. People need just a bit of encouragement, and somebody has to go first. I hope that walking 100 miles is enough encouragement to get enough folks to collect their spare change for two weeks and then donate it to one of the three not-for-profits we're supporting--helping to meet the goal of $1000 in total donations (easy to do if only 250 people donate only $4 of spare change...a little adds up to a lot!). I also hope that walking 100 miles as a living kidney donor is enough encouragement to get at least 50 folks to register with the Indiana Donor Network (or with the donor networks in their own states) to become organ donors. At the very least, I hope that walking 100 miles will start the conversation within families about end-of-life decisions so that no one has to be standing at a bedside at the worst possible moment trying to figure out whether a loved one would have chosen to be an organ donor. And as I walk, I hope people will remember that Julian is still making the world a much better place for so many others. His significant contributions to improve the human condition go on. That's not crazy at all.
So come on--let's go for a walk!
