Will you leave the world a better place? This question confronts us throughout our lives, from choosing how to expend our time and energy while we are young to deciding where to allocate our financial resources after we’re gone. A Making a Difference Plan is an action plan to help you positively impact the people and causes you care most about by focusing your time, talents and resources in a particular direction or directions.
Actively working to make our world a better place helps us live a meaningful, enjoyable and vital life.
Consciously developing and sharing a Making a Difference Plan helps clarify what matters most to you and where you want to focus your generosity. By committing your intentions to writing, you create a road map for living a purposeful life, and your plans and actions will have the greatest potential to leave a lasting impact.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why write a Making a Difference Plan?
Actively working to make our world a better place helps us live a meaningful, enjoyable and vital life. Whether it involves helping your immediate circle of friends and family, or the broader community at home or abroad, each of us is enriched by giving. We aspire to this, but our intentions do not always become a reality. The immediate demands of jobs and family life can make it hard to get around to doing something “extra”, especially when those extra things are simply good intentions with no specific plan behind them.
In addition, we are confronted with many worthy causes and requests for donations of time or money. Without having thought through where our own passions and priorities lie, how do we decide where to devote our limited resources? We can easily fall into one of these traps:
- We simply respond to whatever organization is seeking our attention at any given moment.
- We scatter our resources among a myriad of different causes without ever feeling a real personal connection to any of them; or
- We feel overwhelmed by competing demands and end up avoiding the whole issue.
Consciously developing and sharing a Making a Difference Plan helps clarify what matters most to you and where you want to focus your generosity. By committing your intentions to writing, you create a road map for living a purposeful life, and your plans and actions will have the greatest potential to leave a lasting impact.
What’s in a Making a Difference Plan?
It usually contains these elements:
- An inspiring vision: A summary of how you will make a tangible difference during your lifetime and beyond.
- Motivating factors: The experiences that have led you to your passions
- Your focus: The organizations and causes where you will devote your time, energy and resources.
- Engaging your family: Figuring out how to involve your family in your Plan during your lifetime and when you are gone.
- Goals and actions: Identifying the specific goals you and your loved ones will follow and actions you will take.
- Closing statement: Words of love and inspiration from your heart to your family and future generations.
When would I write a Making a Difference Plan?
It can be helpful to write one at any stage of life. For example:
- As a young adult, looking forward to starting a career but wanting to balance job demands with meaningful volunteer work.
- As a single person at any stage of life, balancing work, social life and volunteering.
- When getting married, and working to prioritize what’s important to you as a couple.
- When you have young children and wish to instill in them the value of working for good in the world.
- At retirement, planning how you will spend your time in meaningful and fulfilling ways.
- Late in life, to pass your legacy of generosity on to your friends and community or children and grandchildren.
You might write a Plan that suits your abilities and aspirations while you are young, and later in life revise it as you shift your priorities and circumstances change.