Making A Difference- One Question At A Time

The other day I was looking up Activist projects on the Internet to write about. I came across one that I am determined to stay involved with. I thought it was so easy to help and can be done on the Internet instead of wasting my time on Facebook. The project is called Free Rice and is “a sister site of Poverty.com. Our partners are the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the United Nations World Food Program. Free Rice has two goals, provide education to everyone for free and help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free” (FreeRice). It is really quite simple to get involved, you just simply answer trivia question (grammar, language, French, geography and many more) and for every question you get right, Free Rice donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food program.

It is so simple and easy to accumulate a large amount of grains in a short period of time. Imagine if you sent this site to five friends and they participate and then they gave it to five friends, the cycle would never end. Who knows if this could solve world hungry but at least you contributed in some way. I know everyone has at least ten minutes out of the day in which there time could be better spent. I am a University student and it is hard to find time to complete everything but then I think of all the time I spend on Facebook. I liked this project because my time is not wasted and in ten minutes, I know I have made a small difference. In High School I attended a me to we conference about Free the Children. It was a huge televised conference that was dedicated to making a difference, no matter how small it is. I helped out with the Ecuador committee at my school by putting together candy bags and selling post cards; a small task but helped to make a difference. Free Rice is my opportunity to make a difference again.

Stauber and Rampton explain, “One of the most cherished freedoms in a democracy is the right to freely participate in the marketplace of ideas.” Without the Internet and Net Neutrality, this website probably wouldn’t exist. We should appreciate the fact that we can make a difference in such a simple way. People wouldn’t be able to help for free if we didn’t have the freedoms that we do.

Since the site opened in October 2007, they have donated 52,005,662,910 grains of rice in just one year; imagine how much that would be ten years from now! Pass on the site and see what kind of difference you can make.

Works Cited

FreeRice. About FreeRice.com 24 Nov 2008. http://www.freerice.com/about.html

Stauber, John, and Rampton, Sheldon. Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lie and the Public Relations Industry. 1st ed. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995. .