It’s all over, well, it is for us at least.

Luckily, we get to return to ‘normal’ lifestyles, to feed our bellies and return to our everyday ways. Hopefully we have gained from this experience a very tiny snapshot into what a person living on $2 a day experiences. Of course, this experience is limited by the fact that we still had many of the luxuries of our everyday lives (hot showers, transportation & heaters in this cold weather!). I don’t believe that we should never feel guilty for being blessed with opportunity. In fact, we are using this opportunity to help others who aren’t in the same position as us. So for that reason – a massive congratulations to everyone who made it through the week (even to those who had a few extra crackers here and there!). Because to attempt to do so is to acknowledge the 1.4 billion people out there who have no choice but to live in the hungry, desperate and despairing circumstances of poverty.

Furthermore – Generators should feel ecstatic about their fundraising efforts, and moreover, for adding fuel to the conversation about poverty. These are two key ways by which we can see extreme poverty ended in our lifetime – and together we have taken an impressive step towards realising that goal.

Tonight at Generate we had a group reflection about our experience of Live Below the Line. There were a variety of thoughts and opinions but a few that many of us shared. Firstly, a greater appreciation for food and a realisation of just how much food we actually waste (ie. gets left in the back of the fridge and forgotton about). I always seem to have left over food on my plate which goes into the bin (but now goes to my new chickens) – but during LBL I was scraping every last grain of rice and really treasuring each mealtime – and I must say appreciation was a valuable lesson to learn.

I was also struck by just how much your body and mind are affected by a lack of food. By the end of only the first day, I felt completely flat, depressed and lifeless. Imagine the feeling of hopelessness comes with being unable to lift yourself out of these circumstances! Being unable to send your children to school, unable to feed them and unable to treat them with medicine when they are sick would be a degrading and heartbreaking thing to live with every single day.

For this I have to commend Generators for their amazing efforts. I have seen many friends (and myself) massively progress through the fundraising. Most of us started off a bit daunted by the task of asking others for donations – and by our team goal of $20,000! However, at the moment we collectively are at approx $18,500 and I have no doubt by the end of the week we’ll have smashed our goal!

The fundraising process was also amazing for practising our pitching and communication skills, and for further honing our knowledge about LBL (some of us were asked pretty tricky questions about annual financial statements etc!!).

Generators everywhere should be extremely proud for being an inspiration to their friends, family and communities. This year looks like the most successful LBL so far – and that is due to the awesome efforts of everyone involved.

Congratulations on a fantastic year of LBL. I hope that the experience opened your eyes and hearts to the experiences of those living in extreme poverty. We can all look forward to seeing the good that our fundraising efforts will do in PNG.

There’s less than one week to go until LBL begins, and I can feel the anticipation growing in Generate as we go full swing into our fundraising efforts!

And for me, what better way to go into Live Below the Line, than knowing that through my fundraising efforts last week – I have won the opportunity to be the Official LBL blogger for Generate and share my experiences as a first time LBL-er with you guys!

That said, this wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for the encouragement of the Tasmanian Generate Team!

The story goes like this…

Two Saturday’s ago, while buried in assignments and desperately searching for useful textbooks at my local library (yes, studying on a Saturday afternoon…) I received my weekly Generate email. Our team manager had set a goal – for everyone to raise at least $100 by Monday’s meeting. However, in my frantic state of ‘assignment completing’ – I misread this amount as being $300!

I looked up my LBL dashboard, and, as expected, my rice bowl was TOTALLY empty. Amount raised so far = zero. I was at the very bottom of Generate Tas fundraisers – and not too proud to admit it!

My situation: I had to raise $300 in two days – and also had to write another 3,500 words for my assignments! This probably would be enough to make most people hit the panic button – but I decided to get cracking on my fundraising – right then and there in the library.

My first fundraising weapon of choice – like many other Generators – was to start with Facebook. I felt nervous about the idea of asking people for money, especially some people who I haven’t I spoken to in ages (and I was scared that they’d get offended or shut me down!). So I decided that if I really wanted to make people interested and feel like a part of the initiative – I’d have to make the messages as personal as I could (while still trying to send them out to as many people as possible). I created a short three-sentence blurb about the LBL with my link attached, and posted it in individual messages to hundreds of my contacts. While it may not seem like much, I added a “Hey (name of person) how are you?” to the start of each message.

Yes, after sending hundreds of these messages Facebook did suspect me of being a Spambot and asked me to verify my identity, but the overall response was great! Many people wrote back saying that they were willing to donate and were proud of me for doing LBL. Others said that they would willingly donate, but only because they were happy to see me suffer (I think they were joking – but hey, I don’t mind as long as the donation gets made!).

My donations skyrocketed to $187 by the end of the first night, $312 by the second night, and $678 by the end of that week!

So my tips for fundraising via Facebook would be
• Keep a conversation going between you and your Facebook friends, and send them friendly reminders if they don’t get back to you.
• Whenever somebody makes a donation, thank them in a private message and at the end of each day thank everybody who donated publically on your wall.

While individually messaging people is more time consuming – the results speak for themselves and you help people to feel more connected to the cause.

SO TO ALL GENERATORS OUT THERE:

The message to generators out there is to set your sights high! While my team goal was $100 by Monday’s meeting, by accidentally thinking it was $300 – I raised well over that amount! I’ve now had to raise my original goal amount from $300 to $1,000!

The deeper you make your rice bowls – the more you’ll raise!

Good luck!

G.

Amanda, Chris and Daniel  - or Team Rocket as they call themselves – are Generators from WA who are doing Live Below the Line for a whole month. Amanda writes about their experience so far:

So Chris decided that it be a great idea to do Live Below the Line for a month. I guess it took a while, but Daniel and I got on the band wagon and together we formed Team Rocket : I called Meowth, Chris called James, which left Daniel to be the oh-so-lovely Jesse. With very little planning, we did our first round of shopping. We made it through, we shopped again with almost just as little planning and here we are in Day 14!

Why we all wanted to do Live Below the Line

Amanda: I can’t imagine what my life would have been like had I not gone to school. I believe so strongly in the power of education. At the same time I want to look back and say I can’t imagine what my life would have been like had I not done Live Below the Line. My LBL journey could not only be an amazing turning point in my life; but I’m confident that it is a turning point and in the lives of those 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty.

Chris: Live Below the Line is amazing because it puts participants in the position of the people that it aims to help, people who live on less then $2 a day of which there are 1.4 billion of them. I believe that through this unique, challenging Live Below the Line experience an amazing passion will be stirred inside me and all the other participants throughout Australia. And with this passion will come great dedication towards committing our lives towards ending extreme poverty and becoming the generation of change.

Daniel: Live Below the Line is an incredible campaign and I’m so convinced of how incredible it is. It does two immensely important things in the fight towards ending extreme poverty: it raises awareness and it raises money. The Live Below the Line experience is like no other and it really portrays the conditions of extreme poverty in a meaningful way. The money raised is doing amazing things in Papua New Guinea, providing kids education which is what I see as the best way to break the poverty cycle. No matter what we do it for and how we do it, Live Below the Line connects young Australians all around the country to fight for this one unbelievable but totally achievable cause: ending extreme poverty.

What we’ve learned so far

When we sat down to talk about what we had learnt through our LBL experience so far, we decided to be honest.

Chris admitted that he founds his diet hadn’t changed much, which made him realize that maybe his poor uni student lifestyle isn’t the healthiest of life paths… but overall in terms of diet, we are all doing alright so far other then the occasional cravings. What we all agreed on was that through this experience we’ve had a limitation on what kind of choices we could make. When you’re trying to eat on $2 a day you can’t be eating whatever you want. Its no longer as simple as “let’s buy that $10 sandwich” – it becomes a matter of working out nutritional value, cost and how long each item can last for. We also have to be limiting when we eat and how much and even where we go, as we can’t be studying in cafes anymore if we’re just ordering cups of tap water. Chris and Daniel have also been walking about 10 minutes from their house to collect their drinking water from a tap and they’ve admitted it’s been a real inconvenience. Chris has even gone thirsty at home a few times because he found the trek for water such an annoyance.

Hard choices are a big aspect of living in extreme poverty. Your choices become limited when you’re trying to take care of all the important aspects of life – food, water, electricity, medicine – on $2 a day.

Even while we’re doing Live Below the Line, we’re still incredibly lucky. Unlike the 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty, we can still go out and get an education, we could still buy medicine or go see a doctor if we got sick, we can still take hot showers and sleep in our warm beds. Even thought it’s inconvenient and tough at times, we still have good access to safe and clean water and enough food for us to get by.

When something as basic as food becomes a thing that you need to think about carefully because there are so little options for you then I can’t imagine what life would be like if it wasn’t just food that had a $2 a day restriction on it.

What we’ve achieved

All of us collectively aim to raise $1555 and so far we have raised $585.

We’ve definitely bonded together as a group. I like referring to us as Team Rocket and I love that we’re our own little cohesive group. These past few weeks have made us into more passionate, dedicated people. Even though we haven’t reached that far in terms of money raised yet, we’re striving so hard towards that. I stay awake at night excited about all these ideas for fundraising. Chris and Daniel come up with amazing ideas to push our limits and drive us out of our comfort zones so we work closer towards understanding what it’s like to live in extreme poverty.

Live Below the Line has been a unique experience for us and we’re excited that the money we raise will go towards the best and most efficient ways to pull people out of extreme poverty.

It’s hard, but I know we’ll look back and be grateful that we went through the Live Below the Line experience. We’re going to be grateful for everything we learned and everyone we helped and everyone we meet and everyone we inspired. Talk to us on May 11th and ask us how it was. We’ll have amazing stories to tell.

My Generate experience began with a leap of faith into something that I really did not know that much about. All I knew is that I wanted to be a young person involved in ending extreme poverty. In March I turned up, bags packed and thinking cap on, to the Generate retreat and I can truthfully say that this has been a highlight of my year so far. The retreat introduced us to the key ideals and goals of the Generate program and The Oaktree Foundation and the activities and information sessions that were held empowered and inspired us to do bigger and better than before!

Not only did we get an information overload but we had so much fun, a little too much perhaps! Highlights included the scavenger hunt, having a group spoon with people I had only meet a few hours earlier, epic games of ninja destruction, turning a male facilitator into a drag queen with face paint and last but not least, meeting an amazing group of people. After attending the camp and four weekly sessions, it is clear just how well our group meshes. Not only do we work together cohesively but we are becoming a tight knit group of friends, held together by our amazing facilitators and manager that give us never-ending guidance, laughs and of course, snacks for energy.

Currently, we are all busily preparing for Live Below the Line and I think I speak for all of my fellow Generators when I say we are engrossed in the content in each session, which is not only informative but interactive and thought provoking.

I feel privileged to be involved in a program that allows like-minded young people to fulfil their goals of ending world poverty and helping other people who are so devastatingly disadvantaged compared to us. I look forward to second semester when we can put our skills and knowledge into practice and hold a mind blowing event!

The Tassie Generate team is not a force to be reckoned with, fuelled with passion and ninja destruction skills; we are going to fight our hardest to end world poverty!

Minto Felix is Oaktree’s Director of People & Culture. He’s also doing Live Below the Line this year. You can sponsor him here, or sign yourself up here.

Venkat was by far and away the hardest working boy in class and with the biggest dreams. When I visited him in 2010, he was in grade two but he had the maths brains of someone at a high school level and his language skills were absolutely incredible.

“I want to be a police officer when I grow up so that people here are safe and that everyone can live together peacefully.”

He spoke with such conviction about his aspirations to be a police officer and held really strong motivations behind why he wanted to take up this path, a lot of which was informed by things he had seen in his own community.

Some of the stories he told me were shocking – many of us couldn’t even imagine the challenges that this small community faced, especially by those experienced by girls and young women. And although a little perplexing that somebody as young as Venkat were positioned to face these issues or anyone for that matter, it was equally moving that he felt he could change this circumstance and make his village a safer, happier place.

Here was a young boy with so much potential to better the world.

But a question as to whether he’ll be provided with the opportunity and freedom to realise his dreams, is one that I find really difficult to answer and one that I often reflect upon when thinking about why we must work unfailingly to end extreme poverty.

Both of Venkat’s parents were labourers and had spent every rupee of their earnings to only just be able to provide Venkat and his younger brother with a set of school uniforms and textbooks. This is all they could literally afford. Venkat’s two older brothers and older sister couldn’t go to school but instead had to stay home and work to support their family so that they could survive day to day. The school that Venkat went to was government run which meant school fees were covered only up to grade five.

What would happen then for Venkat?

Where would his parents find money?

How would this community advance without the contributions of Venkat – someone who was motivated by justice and fairness, and in improving the quality of life for his fellow people?

There were many other barriers facing Venkat in receiving the support and opportunity that he so rightfully deserved in life – a situation that should not at all exist.

Eradicating poverty can often feel unattainable. When we see pictures of masses upon masses of people living in slums, or dire statistics about infant and child mortality, it all seems so much, and we can feel that the development efforts that are directed overseas make a tiny dent on what seems to be this enormous, impossible to address, mammoth level issue.

But I want to challenge this perception.

If we work together through collaboration and walk beside those who we support (rather than walking in front of them telling them what to do, how they need to do it), and realise that for example, providing educational opportunities for young children like Venkat not only improves his life but through the actions that he and others have, this can have sustained, positive change in the life experiences for a whole community, for a whole country, for our whole world.

And so, every dollar raised through Live Below the Line will have a very purposeful impact in improving the quality of life for those most disadvantaged within the Asia-Pacific region. By living on $2 a day for 5 days and experiencing for a brief moment the harsh nature of poverty – an unfortunate reality that experienced by 1.4 billion people around the world, we are working to create a life-transforming impact on the lives of individuals and communitiies.

I am no expert on poverty but I do know that it can be ended. I know that it can be ended because when I last spoke with Venkat, he told me that most of his classmates, including himself would be able to continue their schooling well past grade five and into a nearby high school with the educational scholarships that they had received.

He told me that while his circumstance is still challenging at times, many things have improved and he believes it can only continue to do so…

Generate, so far, has been both a challenging and rewarding experience. Having not being able to attend the Generate Camp at the end of March, I was a little uneasy about meeting 39 other people who already had the chance to get to know each other.  However, after the first Generate meeting those uneasy feelings turned into ones of sheer excitement. It is an unusual feeling to be surrounded by people who have the same goal and same agenda as you. Everyone is so accepting and welcoming of one another, there is no judgment or prejudice, just an open place for everyone to work together, share ideas and help one another; something that hardly happens out in the ‘real’ world.

The first week of Generate introduced us to a number of different things that would occur every week. YouTube Tuesday, which offers everyone at least one minute of pure hilarity and entertainment, and the Food for Thought presentations – presentations given by two people on topics that relate to aid and development, which are quite inspiring and emotional. We get to hear how what is happening in different parts of the world impacts us individually, and in which area of aid and development people’s interests lie.

The Live Below the Line campaign launched and everyone signed up to participate. It’s interesting to see how people are anticipating the experience of Living on $2 a day for food and drink for a week. And it is amazing to see that our Generate SA network has already raised over $1000. I am really looking forward to the week in May, and having already taken the Live Below the Line challenge twice I’m hoping to put what I have learnt in past years into practice for this year. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

What I’m looking forward to most as a part of Generate is getting to know everyone a little bit better, putting what we are learning into practice out in our own communities, and taking part in our event planning later on in the year.

Generate makes me love Tuesdays, my least favourite day beforehand.

It is a typical Tuesday, four families are sitting making life-changing decisions about what to do today.

One family, receiving an income of $200 a day, are trying to decide if they should teach their kids to swim.  It’s a quick and easy decision as they decide it is a useful skill that will only cost them $10 per person, an expense they can easily afford.

Another family are deciding if their kids can go to school today.  They are a family who highly value education but in reality, with a $10 income, they can’t afford it.  Their kids won’t be attending school today, nor any day in the foreseeable future. Instead the family resort to sending their kids to work for $5.

One family sits mourning the loss of their child. Just hours earlier their baby daughter had survived the game-of-chance that is child birth, only to be trampled to death in a political riot.  The family may have one less mouth to feed for tomorrow but dealing with a family member’s death is emotionally much more challenging.

The last family consists of a lone father.  He has recently watched his wife and children die around him. With his life at his lowest and no income coming in, he makes the decision to steal from the richest family he knows and fails.  They choose not to press charges – no gain, no loss… just another lonely day to get through.

For many people these are decisions they face every day – luckily for our Generators this was just a simulated learning experience known as the ‘Game of Strife’.  The game simulates the daily lives of people in developing countries. Each group took the role of a different family. The families differed between the groups in both income and number of members.  The aim was to highlight the many complexities people face in getting out of poverty. 

Generators Sophie and Lauren write of their experience of the game: 

“Playing ‘Game of Strife’ made it really clear to me how hard it is to run a family on a very limited amount of money. The richer groups had much more choice in what they spent their salary on, and their choices were based on whim rather than survival. Poorer groups had to decide between clean water and whether the family would eat that day. The element of chance demonstrated how easily most of the family could be wiped out. It’s an unfortunate truth that many of the ‘deaths’ in the game could have been avoided if only the family could have paid for medical care, clean water etc. This game showed the reality of extreme poverty, and how little choice people living in these conditions really have.” – Sophie-Jane Huchet.

“It might be cliché to say playing the Game of Strife was an eye-opener, but it really can’t be described any other way. I was in the poorest group, with only $10 a day to survive off. We were forced into making horrible decisions, like letting half our family starve since we couldn’t afford to feed everyone, and passing up education in favor of safe water. It was the realization that people with this little money have no choice and absolutely no opportunity for change that struck me the most after playing the game.” – Lauren Robinson.

Twenty-five nervous Generators arrived in the centre of Canberra. New faces and games awaited them before we headed off to our retreat destination in scenic Warrambui. Car games included vehicle dance parties with running around the car at red lights. One team even managed to lock themselves out of the car whilst achieving this amazing feat, and break back in just before the light turned green!

Things got a little more serious after this and the afternoon was filled with presentations about Oaktree and Generate. Many questions were answered and the Generators got to meet members from different sections of the ACT team.

The evening held numerous surprises as the Generators were divided up into groups for the global dinner. With some receiving beans and rice, and others tucking into lasagna there was a sense of frustration and confusion, which very quickly turned to compassion as participants comprehended the depth behind the activity.

To lift the mood the fun times began, and the deeply intriguing and almost scary competitive nature of our future Generators was revealed through a scavenger hunt type activity followed by trivia. Different stations included coming up with meal ideas for Live Below the Line, recreating the Millennium Development Goals using plastic cups and transferring M&Ms from one bowl to another using chopsticks.

One station required our Generators to come up with a creative way to portray Generate using a video camera/butchers paper etc. We now have a new acronym thanks to that activity: SACs – Secret Agents of Change

‘Young people who are very enthusiastic… going through very thorough training exercises that teach them the theoretical, the analytical, and physical, creative as well as, I guess, skills that will make them the perfect secret agents of change.’  – Generators Sean O’Hara, Yen Wei Wong and Tracey Tang.

Personal narrative led to general reflection with one Generator, Thai Ly, stating that the retreat “provides a very nurturing atmosphere for people to bond.” There was also some complex bracelet making with twine.

The next day we got teams engaged with various concepts of development through Pictionary and then asked them to present the history of development – the immensely creative bunch did this through artistic plays and interpretive dance. Perhaps the highlight of this was the new MDG dance… and we challenge the other States to top its AWESOMENESS!!!

ACT Generate Camp 2012 was absolutely fantastic, thanks to all the generators who have proven to be committed, creative, enthusiastic and such passionate individuals that they are well on their way to becoming dedicated and effective agents of change. They had lots of fun and the general atmosphere on Sunday afternoon can be summarized by Generator Natasha Chabbra who said “I don’t want to go home… I just want to stay here playing games forever.”