Robb Schiller

In a mess of word and thought I would like to try and unload the progress of cog­ni­tion my brain has been under­tak­ing over the past ~2 years, lead­ing to the cre­ation of a word I think will help define it all.

If your dar­ing enough to embark through this story, I hope that you find it min­i­mally enter­tain­ing.  If you find your­self able to make it all the way through, Thank you. I truly believe by defin­ing new things and claim­ing ter­ri­tory of what before was unbound thought helps in the devel­op­ment of human­ity and helps push for­ward run­ning the race marked out for us. So, this is the cre­ation of the Uncause.

It has been by ask­ing ques­tions that the cre­ation and devel­op­ment of a new entity has taken place. It started with a rather sim­ple ques­tion that evoked a rather sim­ple response, and the ques­tion came about in a rather sim­ple way. Jour­nal­ing one morn­ing, I wrote out the phrase, while pro­cess­ing my roles in the Franklin-Covy time man­age­ment sys­tem “my roles as being human” before I had even writ­ten out the third role I rec­og­nized I was stuck. Being human is just the noun Human Being flipped around, reversed and its this verb call­ing for action all of a sud­den.  Out of the stale, dry placed giant of Human Being was a verb, call­ing for action, delib­er­ate in its intent. Being Human. Like there were things to it, way’s in which it were to be done, inten­tions from the start. So, pon­der­ing this sim­ple exchange of words It nat­u­rally seemed to evoke the question.

What does it mean to be Human?

Instantly rec­og­niz­ing the dif­fi­culty of answer­ing I was sure this would take a while. I passed it along to friends and we talked about this ques­tion for months, cre­ated the beta ver­sion of Being Human Project’s web plat­form to respond to the ques­tion and invited friends and their friends into the con­ver­sa­tion. With much dia­logue and strug­gle it seemed as though the best response we could com­pre­hend was…

To restore what’s been lost.

This response had so many lev­els of depth we really couldn’t get our minds around it. In every level, on every con­ti­nent, in every social class — being human is beck­on­ing for restora­tion. For the hurt, pain and strug­gle to be set right with truth, jus­tice and com­pas­sion. That lit­er­ally, there are things that every human being is yearn­ing for hav­ing set right inside them.

After spend­ing a good amount of time think­ing about restor­ing what’s been lost aspect of an involved engaged human­ity, we rec­og­nized that mov­ing the ques­tion out­ward, and mov­ing the response out­ward was lit­er­ally a call into becom­ing the act of self­less­ness in the lives of another. There is a con­nec­tion between respond­ing to the ques­tion “what does it mean to be Human?” and the action it evokes. That what it means to be human is not just a response, it is an action.

We began brain­storm­ing how to con­tinue to inspire, encour­age and push each other into action, see­ing as well. We didn’t want to cre­ate another focused, mis­sional char­ity orga­ni­za­tion. With so many incred­i­ble peo­ple doing so many incred­i­bly cre­ative things around the work of phil­an­thropy, we set out to cre­ate what we first described as a con­nec­tor. A net­work­ing plat­form for Indi­vid­u­als to con­nect with the true, first-hand, real life sto­ries of being human in the life of another.

The idea of a Story-Telling plat­form evolved out of this con­ver­sa­tion. That who-ever, where-ever, when-ever can share the story of change. Evok­ing a new inspired gen­er­a­tion to be involved in work­ing for jus­tice, com­pas­sion and self­less­ness. We cre­ated a log-in sys­tem on the beta ver­sion of the web­site and asked our friends to do some­thing sim­ple. Use a brown paper bag to meet the need of some­one else and share the story.

With a extremely dif­fi­cult to use web-platform, the story shar­ing went incred­i­bly well. The vision was cement­ing and what seemed an intan­gi­ble, far-off ques­tion became a more defin­able type of entity. The phrase that set the ball spin­ning in the right direc­tion was Micro-Philanthropy Net­work.  As we began to study and learn about orga­ni­za­tions involved in cre­at­ing this type of net­work we saw they were few and far between and were just begin­ning to take shape. And almost none that were start­ing to exist were truly focused on plac­ing the indi­vid­ual at the high­est level.

I Heart Move­ment

Char­ter for Com­pas­sion

If We Ran The World

Good Magazine

Cause­cast

We are truly hop­ing to add the open-story telling ele­ment into this mix, that a dif­fi­cult to cre­ate method of cura­tion so that any indi­vid­ual can tell the story of change and slowly becom­ing a plat­form that we call­ing the Uncause.

Uncause
1. the idea of a heart engaged in the depth of the mat­ter of self­less­ness.
2. a shift away from hav­ing a por­tion of your­self tied into sup­port­ing cause’s and rec­og­niz­ing the need for change in your­self by say­ing “I am part of the solu­tion” in mat­ters of jus­tice, com­pas­sion, self­less­ness and love.
3. An orga­ni­za­tion with pur­pose of inspir­ing and empow­er­ing the indi­vid­ual as the base unit of change in the world.

So, what is Being Human Project?

Being Human Project is a devel­op­ing micro-philanthropy net­work (uncause) intent on inspir­ing and empow­er­ing the indi­vid­ual as the base unit of sus­tain­able change in the world. Launch­ing spring 2010 ask­ing the ques­tion “what does it mean to be Human?”

It is not a sin­gle project, it is a con­tin­ual, ongo­ing move­ment to truly live out what it means to be human.

It is not just a ques­tion, it is a call and a response — a beck­on­ing to self­less action.

It seeks to inspire, to equip and to trans­form by leak­ing the truth.

It is the Human heart­beat of selflessness.

It is a micro-philanthropy network.

It is the Uncause.