All things in perspective

11th March, 2011

Last week I spent a very enlightening two days at the Eden Project attending the Intersections 2011 conference. There were many highlights but one 5-minute talk was especially memorable and seemed to resonate with the audience that day.

Tom Henderson founded ShelterBox. Tom sat on one of the panels at Intersections and in his introduction he reminded us of the very simple objective of ShelterBox, to save lives. He stressed that the whole modus operandi for ShelterBox – and what should be the mantra for any of us aspiring to achieve something important – is “Keep it simple, do it now.”

Tom also reminded us that whilst they were currently sending ShelterBoxes all over the world, that as sure as eggs are eggs there would sometime be another disaster, somewhere.

And today I have (rightly) been distracted by the events unfolding in Japan and the absolute devastation of communities and lives by the earthquake and tsunami. I couldn’t believe what I was watching – so much destruction in such a short space of time – and wondering just how those communities are going to recover from an event such as this.

They will I’m sure, in time.

This evening I watched a BBC News interview with aforementioned Tom Henderson from the ShelterBox HQ at Helston, Cornwall. It was all hands to the pump down there as they put together ShelterBoxes that are destined for all corners of the world, that today includes Japan. In that short report we must have seen 3 new boxes get packed – that’s another 30 lives saved.

And then I clicked through to the ShelterBox web site and made my donation. Put simply, do it now.