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Baby Sun Zhi Yun |
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Baby Xuan |
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Healing Hearts Book Extract from Facebook Fairytales (Skyhorse Publishing)
Emily Liebert
When Amy Eldridge adopted a little girl from China in the year 2000, there was only one thing missing: She wasn't able to visit the orphanage where her daughter had been living, and it left her feeling disappointed, even a bit anxious.
Amy knew that she needed to see her sweet baby's former home, but since she'd been one of the first people to adopt from that particular orphanage, and a foreigner had yet to set foot inside, she wasn't permitted. For three years, Amy continued to pursue her goal, ultimately befriending an English-speaking Chinese college student whose mother volunteered at the orphanage and was able to facilitate a tour.
In the spring of 2003, Amy headed back to China to finally see with her own eyes the place where her daughter had lived. As she explored the space with the orphanage doctor and played with some of the kids, she couldn't help but notice a young boy in one of the beds who was – alarmingly – blue in the face.
"What's wrong with him?" Amy asked, motioning to the obviously ill child.
"He has severe heart disease," the doctor replied.
"When will his surgery be?" Amy knelt down to stroke the poor boy's arm.
"There isn't going to be one," the doctor disclosed, tilting his eyes downward despondently. "We don't have the money."
Amy shook her head at the injustice. She then met three other children, suffering the same affliction, who would not be able to have their heart maladies healed. One was a three-year-old girl who couldn't even walk across the room without stopping to kneel frequently, in order to catch her breath.
Back home in Oklahoma, Amy couldn't shake the images of the terminally ill children in the orphanage. As a mother of six, herself – five biological children in addition to her adopted daughter – and one of only a few people in the United States who knew these children even existed in such dire circumstances, she was determined to do something.
Amy's first step was to send an e-mail to friends and family, asking for people to help – which they did. Flooded with donations and letters of support, she was able to heal all four of the orphanage's children in need. I can't stop now, Amy thought. There are always going to be more children who require medical attention.
So, with her newfound connections in China, Amy, along with five of her friends – all adoptive parents – founded Love Without Boundaries in August of the same year. Their one and only goal was to help kids.
Initially conceived as a medical program, Love Without Boundaries rapidly expanded, spreading its wings into foster care and education, training teachers to work with children ranging in age from two to twenty, who weren't able to thrive in the public school system.
And in 2006, Amy adopted her second child from China – a little boy. Everything was running smoothly with Love Without Boundaries, and Amy couldn't have been prouder to add a seventh child to her ever-expanding brood.
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Unfortunately, on New Year's Eve of 2007, the Love Without Boundaries website was hacked, rendering it impossible for any donations to be received during the typically abundant holiday season. Amy and her colleagues were mortified, and their misfortune was laden with both technical and emotional distress. Love Without Boundaries existed and was funded entirely online, their rationale being that if volunteers worked remotely across the country, rather than spending money on an office and administrative fees, they could give all of their contributions to the children – the ones who needed it most.
As Amy wracked her brain to find a solution, she recalled an e-mail a friend had sent her about a Facebook Charity Challenge. She hadn't paid it much attention. After all, as a mother to seven, she hardly had time to kill on social networking sites. But faced with this alternate method of raising money, Amy decided to at least set up a Facebook page to replace their existing website until they could get it back up and running.
Still, the organization didn't jump into the Challenge, which was already under way. How could they compete with the substantially larger organizations like the American Cancer Society or the Red Cross, especially when they were entering the game at such a late stage?
"If we don't at least try, we'll never know what could have been," one of the volunteers in China reminded Amy. And Amy knew she was right. They had to throw their hat into the ring, even if it was the smallest cap in the bunch.
With their website still nonfunctioning, Amy and her volunteers rallied around their new objective with renewed vigor and a commitment to do everything they could to raise money for the orphans in China – even if they had no chance of winning the Facebook challenge.
In researching the Challenge, Amy realized that – in addition to the $50,000 grand prize – there was also $1,000 awarded daily to whichever charity brought in the most money on any given day. "Let's win some of those," Amy said, cheering on her troops. "If we can win just a couple, we could heal a child."
Before long, though, Amy realized that Love Without Boundaries was not only doing well, they were moving up in the contest rankings at lightning speed. So they decided to re-strategize, telling everyone they knew that since the grand prize was $50,000 and heart surgery costs about $5,000, a simple $10 donation (the minimum required) could help save ten lives. And, with that, "10 for 10" became their slogan, and they ended up winning their very first daily prize of $1,000!
With their confidence flying high, Amy and her volunteers began to devote every waking hour of every day to the Challenge, and quickly recruited college students to help out, keenly aware that their reach on Facebook would be much greater. Sororities at Ohio State and Rutgers University pounded the pavement, going door-to-door in dormitories to raise money. Even high school students were contacting their friends, who were voting and donating at least $10.
Amy and her brigade also sent e-mails to their list of 8,000 supporters with detailed instructions on how to donate. They blogged about the Challenge and asked others to blog as well. Yahoo! Groups focused toward adoptive parents helped spread the word. And nurses took their computers to the hospital to reach out to their extensive network of colleagues for support.
Everyone worked frenetically to get the job done, and with each passing day, Love Without Boundaries was winning more and more mini-challenges – ultimately walking away with thirteen of them, totaling $13,000 in prize money.
But, still, hearts were set on the $50,000 – both literally and figuratively. And as the Challenge neared completion, Love Without Boundaries was neck and neck with Free Tibet – a student-run group whose goal was to raise money so they could fly to Beijing and protest against China. The irony was profound, given that Love Without Boundaries was a humanitarian organization dedicated to supporting China in its own way.
Both groups, in a heated fight to the finish, pulled out all the stops. Only one organization, they knew, would be victorious in the end.
The Challenge was finally over in early February 2008, and all they could do was wait out the thirty-day period that Facebook needed to tally the votes fairly. In mid-March, Amy received the call she'd been so anxiously awaiting.
Love Without Boundaries had won the $50,000! And between that, the $13,000 in combined daily winnings, and the money raised in donations, the organization took home a whopping $125,000.
As promised in their "10 to 10" mantra, the $50,000 saved over ten children with heart defects, and the remainder of the money was divided between their five other programs, including Healing Homes, which offers otherwise destitute babies safe and warm environments to thrive in by providing trained nannies to feed the children and surgeries to correct their cleft lips at the first possible opportunity.
While winning the Facebook Challenge certainly had a direct fiscal impact, the victory also set in motion a viral effect, promising both immediate and long-term success for the organization. Not only had they attracted a wide range of new donors, but they'd also more than doubled their e-mail list.
Today, with nearly 150 volunteers in thirty-eight states and nine countries worldwide – but still no office and no noteworthy overhead costs – Love Without Boundaries is supporting more than 1,500 children in 100 orphanages across China, on an annual operating budget of $1.6 million. They're running five schools (and looking at opening up their sixth imminently), and have close to 300 children in their foster care programs in fourteen different orphanages, for whom they provide everything from cribs to warm clothing. Many of these children are now being adopted both domestically and abroad.
Love Without Boundaries has assigned one volunteer to be their official Facebook coordinator, responsible for dedicating one hour each day to updating their Facebook page with any new and important stories or information.
"Facebook changed the whole way that our foundation operates," says Amy, reflecting on their remarkable progress – the most recent of which was winning another $35,000 contest unrelated to the social networking site. "We are now using social media in a much bigger way; we understand its importance. The Facebook Challenge really showed us what we needed to do. Not to mention that it brought us over thirteen thousand new members, and we also now receive regular donations through Facebook."
Aside from the sixty to seventy hours a week Amy devotes to Love Without Boundaries – which only holds one face-to-face meeting a year – how does she think it's possible that such a small charity could slay the many philanthropic giants in its way?
"We do anything we can to raise money for the kids. People support us and vote for us because they believe in what we're doing. In today's economy, people want to know their hard-earned donations are honestly making a difference. We're changing the lives of kids each day. It's really that simple."
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