Welcome all, and thank you for visiting Dare Us to Move!
Visiting what now?Dare Us to Move is an experiment--an interactive travel log combined with community fundraising. The premise is simple:
1) Think of something that would be really cool to do--riding a wave off the coast of Hawaii, striking a pose in front of a medieval castle, composing a haiku on top of Mt. Fuji, shoveling the driveway of an elderly neighbor...
2) Post your challenge here, along with a pledge: a monetary amount you are willing to donate to charity upon completion of your challenge. Please include your email (if you don't want to share it in comments, simply email us at dareustomoveproject@gmail.com--this way, we can notify you when your dare is completed!).
3) A DUtM participant will take up your challenge and record the experience in pictures, and maybe a written journal. The challenge-taker will post the story here so you can see your challenge in action, and then your donation will go toward helping us fulfill our goal!
That sounds crazy.It most definitely does.
We're banking on the idea that as fun as it is to hear about the cool places your family has been to and the cool things that your friends have done, it's even more fun to get to participate in those things yourself. We want to make our adventures a collaborative effort, and then turn that energy toward supporting a good cause.
Alright--how do I get involved?DUtM consists of two vital parts: challenge-givers, and challenge-takers. We need both to make this work, and fortunately, both jobs are buckets of fun.
To become a challenge-giver, all you have to do is come up with a challenge (see our guidelines below) and post it on this blog. If you'd like, you can challenge a specific challenge-taker by posting your challenge as a comment to their introduction post. Additionally, you can email your challenges to dareustomoveproject@gmail.com. Don't forget to include with your challenge your pledge: it can be whatever amount you think the challenge merits, down to a minimum donation of $10. (See the next post for our current fundraising goal.)
To become a challenge-taker, contact us at dareustomoveproject@gmail.com to let us know you'd like to join. You'll need a Blogger account so we can add you as a blog author, so include your contact information. Then, write an introduction post telling a little bit about yourself, why you're getting involved with DUtM, and where you're located. If you'd like, you can also provide some guidelines about the sorts of challenges you can or can't take--but remember, this is about collaborative adventure. Don't be afraid to stretch yourself!
But I don't travel very often...can I still help?Of course! You'd be amazed at the cool things to be done right at home, no matter where you are. The only requirement is a willingness to join in and make a difference.
The Rules:1) Challenges must not be illegal2) Challenges must not be hazardous or infeasible3) Challenges may be modified at the discretion of the challenge-takerRule 1 should hopefully be rather self-explanatory; as great as it is to go crazy and help a good cause, we would rather not get deported for it.
Rule 2 should likewise have an obvious motivation in that donations are supposed to go toward charity, not toward hospital bills. Really crazy challenges ("Have brunch with President Obama") have the potential for much awesomeness, but please try to gauge your donation according to the amount of time and effort that completing the challenge will require, and please be understanding if extremely involved challenges go unanswered.
This rule also touches on a deeper theme that I want to mention: we would prefer challenges to be more "Bucket List" than "Animal House." While "dress in drag and do the hula while singing B-52 lyrics in the middle of a faculty dinner" makes a great frat-party dare when everyone is too drunk to care, the motivation behind DUtM challenges should be to inspire people to go and do cool things in cool places, not to humiliate themselves in public.
And lastly, Rule 3 gives players the ability to tweak challenges that need tweaking--either to abide by the other rules, or to accommodate the situation. Our purpose isn't to alienate people, so we may modify challenges to avoid offending locals. Also, changing circumstances may prevent us from performing the challenge exactly as written, so we'll do our best to improvise while still adhering to the spirit of the challenge.
So what does a good challenge look like?Here's some examples of the sort of thing we're looking for. Feel free to pledge these if you like!
- Hug a sheep in the Scottish countryside- Practice taichi with locals in Beijing- Eat a local delicacy- Tilt at a windmill in Spain- Discuss true happiness with a total strangerThank you again for paying us a visit! We hope you'll take a moment to check out our current cause, and to take a look at the challenge-takers who have thrown their hats into the ring. Thank you for your support!
