December 2019, you have finally decided to start that non profit. “2020 is going to be your year”, you whisper to yourself, as you write down all your plans and resolutions. You have been procrastinating for two years, just trying to get all the details right. You want to be a multinational organization by your fifth year so the foundation of your startup has to be perfect.
Now, it’s almost June 2020, half way into the new year and you still haven’t started because of everything that has happened; aka the pandemic. You decide that maybe this is not the year, maybe this is a sign that your stars haven’t aligned yet so you should probably put it back on the shelf till next year.
Let me give this to you straight, if you don’t start now with what you have got in the current situation, you might never start because you have no idea what might happen in the future. Take this from a mega procrastinator who started a non profit project with GHC0.00 in her pocket. The conditions were not right. At all. I am not comparing those times to now but there was absolutely no reason to start when I did.
I was a broke national service personnel who was earning GHC350.00 a month and had to sort out transportation, food and save GHC100. Looking back, I think that maybe God was adding an extra GHC 200 in my pocket because I don’t know how I survived. All I had was an idea of what I wanted to achieve. An idea that has improved over the years and I thank God that my life is also much better.
I have learnt that the more that you wait to start, the more that you find excuses not to, with the first one being: what if I fail? Then, what will people say? Followed by what if I run out of funds? You begin to persuade yourself that maybe it’s not the right time or it’s a dumb idea. Before long you have tucked it onto your shelf of ideas, only to dust it down in December when you have to write your resolutions for the next year.
My main motivation for the first project was that I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to fail so much that I gave it everything that I had. I even fell sick. It was all that I could think about. I jumped right into it and I started moving my arms even though I didn’t know how to swim through all it yet. It could have easily gone south, nearly did, but I knew that even if it did, I could say that I gave it everything that I had and fought with every joule of energy to make sure that it succeeded.
People need help now more than ever. People have found themselves in situations that they couldn’t have predicted in January. You don’t have to start on a large scale. It can be the most skeletal form of your idea. You want to start a food bank? Try giving groceries to one or two people in your neighbourhood once a month till you can become bigger. You want to start a scholarship fund? Try giving an allowance to a child in need once a month or even buying stationery and a school bag. You want to start a charity for people in abusive relationships? Try sharing messages of hope or sharing links to organizations that have already been established to help them. It doesn’t matter how small the first step is, just take it.
There will always be great reasons to wait till everything is ‘normal’ again- whatever that means- but why wait when people will benefit from your idea now? Why wait when there is a lot to be done now? Why wait when waiting has never produced any good result? Your idea can literally make someone’s life better. Even if it fails, worst case scenario you bury it and never think about it again, best case scenario, you learn from it and then come up with idea 2.0
Today, I am just here to tell you to just start, I didn’t know that in 2016, we were going to have a small successful project and I definitely didn’t know that 5 years later we will still be doing it with a group of dedicated volunteers. It won’t be easy but just take a leap of faith because that idea came to you for a reason.