Make A Difference Day: Largest Day of Volunteering Moves 3 Million to Action Brenda Turner - USA Weekend
go to original October 1, 2012

Quotes from President Obama, President Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Carter, and President George H.W. Bush inspiring volunteers across the country. (PointsOfLight)

In this season of bitter arguments about how to help America, Make A Difference Day again transcends politics.

The nation's largest day of volunteering - taking place on the fourth Saturday of every October, this year just 10 days before the presidential election - annually mobilizes an estimated 3 million people to do good deeds that improve the lives of 20 million others.

It started small. USA Weekend Magazine launched Make A Difference Day in 1992 with a simple idea: Put your own cares on hold for one day to care for someone else. It was a presidential election year then, too, and one hot issue was citizen responsibility. President George H.W. Bush had established the Points of Light Foundation a year earlier to engage more Americans in volunteering. Candidate Bill Clinton was campaigning to establish a national service program to engage young people (the now well-known AmeriCorps). The time seemed ripe for the idea of a national day of volunteering.

The magazine ran four small stories asking readers to do something good for someone else. The choice of activity was left up to the reader: What was most needed in their community? Readers were also asked to write to the magazine and explain what they had done and the good it accomplished. The letters poured in from project organizers representing 70,000 people. Each had a story to tell about how they reached out on to do a good deed and then were transformed by the experience.

These powerful examples of giving were turned into a magazine cover story that resulted in even more letters and emails. Hundreds wrote to express how much they enjoyed the stories and to applaud the magazine for adding good news to their newspapers.

So Make A Difference Day became an annual event. It grew as thousands, and then millions, responded to the request to set aside one specific day to make the world a better place.

In 1994, actor and philanthropist Paul Newman became involved and gave Make A Difference Day the added cache of the support of a beloved celebrity with millions of fans. His food company, Newman's Own, was founded in 1982 to donate all after-tax profits to charity. Newman felt that giving your time was one of the best forms of philanthropy and liked Make A Difference Day's grassroots activity for just that reason.

For nearly 20 years, Newman's Own has provided $10,000 donations to the charities of each of 10 outstanding Make A Difference Day participants. The company has continued its involvement since Newman's death in 2008. In 2011, support expanded to 13 awards of $10,000 and the funding of an annual awards event in Washington, D.C., each April.

Over the years, more than $2 million has been funneled into local charities through Make A Difference Day's various charitable awards.

Much good work begun on Make A Difference Day continues years later. Teens in Vernon Township, N.J., began their area's first soup kitchen for the hungry in 1997 with the help of this day; the program says it still serves 40 to 50 meals daily. Over more than a decade, an elderly woman in El Paso, Texas, has orchestrated the construction of dozens of compact, basic homes for impoverished families who had been living in tin shanties just across the Rio Grande in Mexico. In 2001, Nicholas Marriam was a 9-year-old cancer patient who heard about Make A Difference Day at oncology camp; he not only gathered goods for pediatric cancer patients that year, he now is a healthy adult with his own foundation that helps.

And whether volunteers choose to rebuild a playground in America's heartland, clean up trash along a protected seashore or simply carry a meal to a lonely neighbor, they prove a universal tenet to be true: It is better to give than to receive. Research shows that as volunteers help others, they also help themselves by bolstering their physical and mental health, polishing their skills and building greater sense of self-worth and trust.

On Saturday, Oct. 27, millions will again make a difference in their communities. For more information, visit makeadifferenceday.com.

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