humming a song in my mind --

This past winter Jason Damato, a multi-talented musician and artist, was watching "Good Morning America" and saw a segment on the Warm Coats + Warm Hearts coat drive. Jason knew first-hand the importance of a warm coat, having been homeless for a time in Los Angeles.

When he reached out to us with the idea of writing a song about One Warm Coat we were very happy-- and when he offered to share the net proceeds with us, we were flabbergasted.


Here's the link to the iTunes listing. We hope you like the song, buy a copy and pass the word along. http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=309837359&s=143441


Jason was recently intereviewed by DoSomething for their "Celebrities Gone Good" section: http://www.dosomething.org/blog/celebsgonegood/Jason_Damato_Interview


BTW, my favorite song by Jason is "Life You Love" --

Is OWC a "leaderless organization"?

Last December I read "The Starfish and the Spider" (http://www.starfishandspider.com/) and it is still noodling around in my brain. The cover caught my eye with the sub-title "The unstoppable power of leaderless organizations" -- and that's EXACTLY how I feel about One Warm Coat!

While I have the "title" of National Coordinator (and sometimes I will add the organizational title of President) I believe the project has grown because it does NOT have a leader.

More than 2,000 individual coat drives were organized last year -- and EACH coat drive has a "leader" -- someone who said "I can do that!".

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, the Stanford MBAs who wrote this book, made many observations about differences between a starfish and a spider. Starfish = rely on power of relationships; there is no "head" just legs, if you cut off a leg, it will regrow this part. Spiders = rigid heirarcy and top-down leadership; cut off the head, and it will die.

As I said, I'm still absorbing some of their comments -- and I'll be back to share them with you.

Book marks -- the old fashioned kind --

I took the last month "off" from writing the blog -- used it to catch up on lots of reading, learning more about social causes, and warming up my golf game. I'll be writing some short "book reports" during April to share some of the ideas.

While cleaning out the office I came across this bookmark. Brownies from Troop 1979 put these bookmarks in the coats they collected. Very sweet words -- I hope they have given comfort to those who received one.