By Danilo P. Padua, PhD
From ice to rice bucket challenge. This is now the game in town.
Who ever thought of the ice bucket challenge could be a good advertising guru or even propagandist. He or she was able to create a huge impact in the social networking circles in so short a time, that it was described as a “social tsunami”. A check with the internet however does not pinpoint a definite originator of the idea. It was more of a gradual process starting with plunging in icy water until it metamorphosed into the easy-to-do ice bucket challenge.
This challenge was meant to educate people about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or the so-called Lou Gehrig’s disease, and campaign for research fund. Lou Gehrig was one of the most famous American professional baseball players who died from the disease within two years after being diagnosed with such illness. The campaign was a huge financial success as it accumulated more than US$100.0M in just three months from donations in many parts of the world. The collected amount was purportedly for research purposes about ALS.
We can learn from this endeavor when we do our own campaigns or advocacy of something. The challenge calls for someone to douse himself or herself with icy water and challenge about three other people to do the same within 24 hours. They tape the activity and send the video to the USA. In the process, the person involved donates US$100.00 to the ALS Association. Others donated instead to other charitable institutions of their choice. Others just did the challenge for the fun of it. It is said that more than 1.2M unique videotapes were received from around the world.
What made the challenge highly visible was the initial involvement of famous celebrities such as TV and movie personalities, sportsmen, politicians and others. Sometimes they do it live on television. Not all those who were challenged acceded to it though, some even criticized it which is an expected reaction. After sometime, the challenge became more of a fad and just fun, bereft of its original intention.
Honestly, I did not learn much about ALS. Maybe, I was not one of the intended clients of the campaign. It was more suited to the American and European publics than in countries like the Philippines. My feeling is that, we embraced it only because it was done first in America. You know what I mean.
When the challenge reached India, a cerebral Indian woman journalist thought that it was artificial and wasteful of water. Her place, Hyderabad city, gets very little amount of rainwater in a year. (I know that it is so because I stayed in that city for 5 months when I was in India). She thought it would be more meaningful if the challenge could immediately and directly affect the poor of her country, more than 30million of them. Thus, the rice bucket challenge came into being, last August 23, 2014.
This challenge simply asks that participants donate a bucket of rice to somebody in need. And they abound even in our midst. That means that this is more relevant to poorer countries like ours. There are about 3-4 billion people around the world that are dependent on rice for their energy sustenance. A local version of this challenge came about last September 12, 2014 in Manila. It was led by a businessman, Dr. Henry Lim Bon Liong. A lot of local personalities like Manny V. Pangilinan, have already donated or have pledged several sacks of rice for this campaign. Bless their souls.
If every participant will donate the equivalent of 100.00 dollars each, it would translate to feeding more than 1,500 people in one day. That is substantial.
There is a local group that is now actively campaigning for this challenge, suggesting that participants can directly give to the needy or just donate to the United Nations World Food Program at wfp.org. They are doing this to raise awareness of world hunger and feed those who are most in need.
Why not participate in this relevant and meaningful campaign? We can start by minimizing our wasteful rice eating habit so we can donate a bucket of rice to somebody in need. Let us take the plea of The Philippine Rice Research Institute to heart: “Be riceponsible”
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