The YOU ARE ENOUGH billboard campaign is something I came up with one morning while I was dealing with depression and anxiety, feelings that I have had to fight with for most of my life.   That morning as I was feeling so hopeless  I thought to myself how no one should have to go through the darkness and loneliness that I was feeling. I wanted to find a way to give folks who were dealing with mental health challenges a way to feel seen and loved. So why not put a billboard up in my neighborhood with the words YOU ARE ENOUGH on it?! Lu Parker, a news anchor from KTLA, shared my story all across her social media outlets because she saw the importance of the campaign and how we all are enough. DEPRESSION IS REAL With depression being the number one disability in our country and with mental illness being something that is still taboo to a lot of people, I wanted to find a way to start a campaign that would bring us all together around feeling ENOUGH in our lives. Today we live in a scarcity society where we are bombarded by at least 30,000 messages a day coming at us telling us that we need to do more, be more, buy more, and have more to be enough. Many of us feel as though we are on a hamster wheel trying to do what we think we need to do to be enough to only feel depressed and anxious because we do not feel that we are ever going to do enough to feel enough.  BUILDING A FOLLOWING Over the past year while working on the campaign I  interviewed friends and strangers and asked them to share their thoughts on what being enough means to them. I started a Facebook page a podcast, bought wristbands that simply say, YOU ARE ENOUGH on them, and have been handing them out like hotcakes and have merchandise available such as yard signs, sweatshirts, t-shirts, and car decals.  Then when we were hit by Covid-19 I knew it was time to get a billboard up. People were losing a sense of hope and many felt lost and lacking a sense of purpose.  Our mental health situation in our country is fast becoming the new pandemic and I was sure that getting these billboards up would bring people some peace and hope.  The first billboard went up in Redondo Beach, CA on July 1 and since then I have gotten up three more boards in Redondo Beach.  I am running the donation-based campaign off of GoFundMe and am in the process of raising funds for billboard number five which...

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Patricia Arquette and Rosetta Getty founded GiveLove in 2010 in hopes of helping displaced families have shelter over their heads as soon as possible.  In the past five years the Cause has evolved with the needs of the country.     Eco sanitation, clean water, and access to toilets is what the group has been focussing on over the past few years with a lot of determination, heart, and hard work to get the funding needed to keep the largest eco sanitaton in the world running.   The Cause is now ready to help other countries and started a crowd funding campaign a few days ago.  The cool thing about this campaign is that a person who donates the minimum amount of $10 has the chance just like those who donate more to go abroad with Patricia and team to see how GiveLove works.   The Cause has worked with a lean team on a very tight budget over the years and continues to do its best to educate the world how dire the issue of poor sanitation is in our world.  As Patricia explains in the video below, “Poor sanitation and waterborne illnesses kill more kids than AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis combined.” HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP SUCH AN IMPORTANT CAUSE   ShareGiveLove Needs Your Help To Expand Worldwide   And here is how you can help donate to a Cause that is truly fighting a major epidemic that a lot of people do not seem to be able to wrap their heads around.   Imagine that 40% of the population does not have access to a toilet while 60% of the population has access to cell phones.   Something seems obviously wrong here.  ...

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Many of us know how people who run causes are very passionate about their work, their purpose, and how their efforts will change the way we live for the better.   What I continue to find as I work with causes/non profits is how hard it is for them to make it on the financial front.  To be honest, I am blown away.   While watching Patricia Arquette and her co workers work in Haiti on their eco sanitation projects I am saddened by the fact that they still are not able to get the funds they need.  They have a very small team (7) that are running the LARGEST ECO SANITATION program in the world.   Arquette is not a celebrity who expects people to donate to GiveLove because of who she is.  She wants people to understand the sanitation epidemic we have in our world and help us see that we all can play a huge role in making sure there is more clean water our there for the world to drink.  Currently only 40% of the world drinks/has access to clean water or has a toilet.   My question is, where is corporate America and why do the Fortune 100+ companies not help out more causes such as GiveLove that has a simple solution to solving our world’s sanitation issues? Here is a recent article that Patricia was featured in in the magazine Bizwomen.  It shows us  how Patricia is passionate about her work with the cause and how hard they have worked to maintain it.  They hope to expand it worldwide but still need to make it work in Haiti. Thank you to Patricia and her executive director, Alisa Puga Keesey, for the work you are doing for the people of Haiti and hopefully the world....

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An update from Harvey Lacey in a way only Harvey can talk. Hi Y’all, Life is pretty good for me right now.  I’ve got a paying client that can afford my creativity and I’m doing stuff most people third to half my age can only dream about.  I just had my annual VA physical, Agent Orange thing, and the tests come up with me being finer’n frog hair. Everyone knows you can’t get much finer’n that.  Well, there is the cholesterol thing, numbers, bad ones, creeping up a bit.  But we agreed that four to five range eggs a day might be the source for that.  So I’m now eating six eggs a day but I give back all the yokes to the chickens, they don’t live long enough to worry about the cholesterol thing.  I have. Then there’s this damn ubuntublox thing that grabbed me by the tenderest parts thirty seven months ago.  It won’t let go, saving the planet, educating kids and their parents about recycling, etc and so on. Two of the biggest hiccups in the get a long have been making it important local, we’re talking Dallas type places.  And making it where the block making process is easier and cheaper so we empower anyone with a hankering to make a difference in their own world can do it. I have the machine to make the blocks down to almost nothing to make and the materials for making the blocks to just pennies per block. Then tonight I woke up and I was working with President Sorrel and the students at Paul Quinn on designing and laying out community gardens in some of the neglected communities in the area.  It’s a thing I do, wake up working on what the semi-sleep thing has worked up/out. Dallas had an editorial the other day about a community garden project in west Dallas.  I went to the discussion area on the column and people were jumping all over the idea like it was the worst thing possible because of soil contamination, mostly the lead poisoning that we know is a real issue.  So I did a google search and found out something really interesting, we don’t have to remove fifteen inches of top soil before it is safe for use for gardening.  We can add a layer of clean top soil and build from there, composting and other good stuff project also. So here’s the deal, we can build two ubuntublox high walls sectioning off plots for planting the gardens.  The plots are filled with topsoil provided by the city from excavations and compost created by participants.  We can even build the compost bins and storage sheds with...

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