At our charity project, Write the World notebooks, we make our donations to The Life You Can Save on a quarterly basis, with the end of May marking the end of our third quarter of fundraising. Every quarter The Life You Can Save then directs that quarter’s donation to an agreed effective charity tackling global poverty. I think, my friends, it’s worth reflecting on just what your purchases of $10 notebooks have achieved so far. In our first quarter we raised $7,150 which was donated to the Fred Hollows Foundation. With this amount of money the foundation could: fund 20,100 antibiotic distribut ..read more

WARNING – SOME READERS MAY FIND THIS CONTENT DISTURBING At the Effective Altruism conference in Sydney last year I had a conversation with a new friend about our ‘favourite effective charities’. Her favourite was the Fistula Foundation. Her reason was because for a set amount of money you could be 100 per cent confident you could restore quality of life to a woman who would otherwise suffer enormously and endlessly. Honestly, I have to admit that although I’d vaguely heard of the Fistula Foundation, I didn’t really know what they did. I nodded along politely as my new friend talked about the g ..read more

With the launch of Write the World notebooks in September last year, all our family’s monthly donations since then have been directed towards the production of notebooks. Our vision is to ensure that our customers know that every single dollar they spend on notebooks is donated to effective charities tackling global poverty, as recommended by The Life You Can Save. Not just the profit, the full purchase price. But you know what? I really miss our own family conversations around where our monthly donation will go. For me, it is a massively rewarding part of the process and I think it’s a really ..read more

In 2015 our family embarked on a ‘big red road trip’ from Darwin in the north of Australia, down to Alice Springs in the centre of Australia. It was 1,500 kilometres with just me, my husband, our two kids… and Stephen Fry. And when I say Stephen Fry, I mean we listened to a Harry Potter audio book narrated by Stephen Fry. Sadly, he wasn’t in the car with us. Though even if he wanted to come there wouldn’t have been room, what with the tents and the eskies and the lilos and the sleeping bags and every other essential you need on a getting back to nature road trip. Hour after hour, kilometre aft ..read more

Around four weeks ago we launched Write the World notebooks. In that time we’ve raised more than $3,000 for The Life You Can Save to donate to effective charities. In that time I’ve also learnt a heap of things I didn’t expect to. It could almost become a book, but for the moment, here’s just four of them… Social media is ok: it’s a sign of my age I know, and the fact that I mostly approach social media through a very wary parental lens, but up until the last few months I was pretty negative towards online networking. I knew I would have to embrace it for this project, but I was skeptical. Wou ..read more

Earlier this year I had an idea. In the shower. Which is often where the best ideas happen, I reckon. It was a little niggly idea at first. But it grew and grew, until before I knew it the idea was a project. Which is now happening. The idea in a nutshell: Write the World notebooks, unique notebooks designed to make the world a better place. Our point of difference: 100% of the $10 purchase price of every single Write the World notebook sold goes to The Life You Can Save to direct towards effective charities. That’s right, 100%. I jokingly call it the love project. It’s such an apt name for it ..read more

Nothing like a bit of an incident when you’re travelling in a remote area to provide a sharp reminder of how lucky we are to have the health care we do in Australia. And how many people in other places are going without that level of medical support and resources. We recently got back from a ten-day family holiday in Indonesia. Highlights included meeting lovely people, relaxing overlooking gorgeous tropical views, and escaping Melbourne’s freezing winter for a while. As with any travel to less developed countries there was also a healthy dose of guilt involved: environmental damage via our fl ..read more

I had an idea for an app last week. I needed potatoes for dinner and rather than walk around the shop I was definitely in the market for an app that would let me press a few buttons and potatoes would magically appear out of my iPhone. I’m going to call it ‘Spudmeister’. My other idea for an app is ‘RipenMyAvocadoRightNow’ where you wave your iPhone and the app over the rock hard avocado you have earmarked for lunch and it magically turns ripe and soft. You heard it here first. One app that is a little closer to reality comes from The Life You Can Save, and is now in beta testing. We trialled ..read more

It seemed only fitting that as our kids have decided the last two months’ charities, it was time for Dave to have a turn. Despite a ridiculous schedule of full time work, volunteer soccer coaching which takes more time than the full time paid work, and a dash of overseas travel sprinkled on top, he managed to find time to research a great charity for April. Over to him to explain… charity:water gives 100% of donations to clean water projects around the world. In April it was my task to choose our charity donation for the month. As ever the task was to find a charity that did the most good with ..read more

Our kids both recognised International Women’s Day in March, participating in events at their local high school. Given the decision-making baton for this month’s donation the events were obviously on the mind of my son who researched a suitable charity to fit the theme. Over to him… This month, the Tapping Family has decided to donate to the Ibba Girls School in South Sudan. We have picked this charity because of the recent IWD celebrations, and for equality in an underprivileged part of the world. Our donation will feed one girl for two and a bit years, allowing her to study better, and beco ..read more