Social Media at its Very Best

At last months's SMCPhx meeting, a friend named Bob Hubbard who runs a swim school for kids brought a couple of blind children, the father of one, and their neighbor to talk about an ambitious project to take blind children up Mt Kilimanjaro. They were trying to raise money.

The kids wore t-shirts that said "See Kili Our Way."  The Club made many suggestions about how to use social media to help the cause. And Andy Finkle was there.  He had just moved to Phoenix from New York, and I invited him to come to the meeting to meet the community. Honestly, I had no idea what would happen, but Bob wanted me to get involved with the kids, and I just didn't have the bandwidth, so I offered up SMC

Andy volunteered to meet with Bob and the involved kids offline, and I bowed out.  Tonight I was copied on this email:

OK — I am gonna tell you a story — Kathy and  i got involved a few
weeks ago in helping Max Ashton and his family in their efforts to
raise money for a group of 8 blind people (2 kids under the age of 18
— one of whom is Max — the rest are in their early 20's) — they
are gonna climb Mt Kilimanjaro in June —- 19,000 feet

so through another friend Francine Hardaway — i went to a meeting
of Francine's Social Media group — at the presentation we met Andy
— he is a social networking (twitter, facebook) type of consultant
— lives on camelback mountain — just moved here with his wife and
two teenagers — soooo this morning I met with Andy, Max's mom Lisa
and one of our other former moms, Pam (who along with her family is
helping to guide the group) — so we have coffee and talk about
twitter and facebook and Max and the climb

Andy gets going after the meeting — not sure if the full string
of correspondence will follow this but essentially he is getting Max
resourses so he can twitter and email with voice recognition software
and then he comes up with this guy, Doug, who not only works to make
media accessiible to visually impaired BUT got engaged on top of Mt
Kilimanjaro five (5) years ago

Now Doug is connected and working to help the Kili Team —-
amazing — if you do not understand the social media — you need to
do so — it is uniting the world iin ways we can only begin to imagine

if you want to know more about the climb — go to my blog — swimschoolbob.com — there is a link there to the web pages for Max and other climbers as well as the work of the Foundation for Blind children

To me, this outcome represents not only the power of social media, but the power of community. Thanks, Andy, and welcome to Phoenix.  You have made quite an entrance.