Another Kooky Idea of Mine

Are you one of those people that have wayyyyy too many ideas for the temporal reality we as humans exist within? Yeah… me too.

As I mentioned in my tenth resolution for 2008, it is my hope to find ways to be a champion for our youth. There are so many challenges facing them today, it’s hard to know where to begin. Do I try to focus on just one or two through fostering or adoption, find a way to help meet the needs of the youth of my community on a larger scale, or some mix, or… what?

One idea I had, spawned from a post and then comment I made on my Hacking Your Passions blog regarding the importance of storytelling as we humans grow and try to make sense of our world and the culture(s) we’re a part of, is to somehow begin an organization that focuses on arming parents with the tools they need (inspiration, encouragement, idea sparks, etc) so they can create wonderful tales to tell their children at bedtime. It’s really a simple idea, but if you could encourage more parents to not only tell stories to their children but have the children create stories of their own, it would create an invaluable tradition and real time spent interacting with kids.

Last year I went with some work mates to read to children as part of an event tied to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and it was amazing how eager those kids were to read books. Even more so, though, they were eager to talk about the books. They’d often look at the images and come up with their own version of what’s going on. I got so many lessons from that single one hour event, and for a year I forgot about them. Maybe it’s time to give that memory some more attention.