I know, you wish you could donate time by building shelters or something wonderful–like you’ve seen people doing in those commercials–but you’re not in the right town, or you don’t have the time, or maybe you just don’t know how to build shelters. That’s okay. We all wish we could afford to give lots of money to our favorite charities, but we’re not all wealthy. That’s okay, too.

Check this out! As an advocate, your goal is getting subscriptions to The Tunnel newsletter, even if it’s only for a few months. One way to do that is by taking a small amount of money owed to you in the form of a subscription. Anytime someone owes you money, that’s an opportunity to gain a subscriber. This way, you can lend your talents to your preferred initiatives while still doing the work you need to get done for your clients. There’s no need to take time away from your job, your family, or your personal time.

Here’s what I do: whatever you do to make money—food server, carpenter, mechanic, doctor, real estate developer, whatever you do—do it in the name of your preferred initiative. I’m a handyman. If I do a job, and my client owes me $100 for the work I’ve done, I’ll ask them to pay me $80 in cash or check, then ask them to sponsor me by agreeing to a four month subscription to The Tunnel newsletter. They owe the money anyway, and this way they only have to come out of pocket $80, giving them four months to pay off the remainder, and it goes to a great cause. I haven’t had anyone turn it down yet.  

If they agree to sponsor you, ask them, at the end of the four months, if they haven’t really felt that dollar and change per week on their bottom line, that they simply continue to support the initiative. Of course, the hope is that they’ll continue on with The Tunnel, and in that way, their sponsorship through your advocacy, can create years of support. 

If you sell something, maybe you can get a sponsor in that exchange. Of course, you may not want to ask the same person to subscribe ten times, but this is where your creativity and generosity come in. Do things for people. Babysit, house-sit, walk dogs, mow a lawn, shovel a sidewalk—do things for people in your neighborhood on your own time, and ask them to sponsor you by subscribing to The Tunnel for a few weeks. Tell them why. Again, ask them, if they don’t miss that dollar-plus a week, to continue the subscription. Set a goal to get two sponsors per week to subscribe to the The Tunnel.

I’ve also just asked people to sponsor me without doing work for them, and to become advocates themselves, seeking their own sponsors. Some people just have a knack for talking to other people, and it’s easy to get excited about the potential to actually make some real progress in some worthy causes.  

If you’ll join the effort by sponsoring one of the initiatives, it’ll make a difference. If you’ll help by becoming an advocate and asking others to sponsor you or your business or a family member, that’s where you make a huge difference. Combining your work with the work of other advocates, it won’t be long until you see that the light at the end of the tunnel really is you.

Simply, this is a way for you to help people who need it, deserve it, and most importantly, possess the faculties to succeed after receiving it. If you think of it in terms of a Venn diagram, you’ll see that there are many people who fall into these categories, but without all three, it’s likely a bad investment. Nobody wants to see hard-earned wages thrown away without making a dent in the causes we support, but we do it all the time. Don’t get me wrong, the world needs charities to address the causes which plague the world, but let’s face it, we’re not going to end hunger by feeding people on Thanksgiving. Despite our grandest efforts, world hunger still exists. Here, our goals are simpler, more focused, and deliberate. Our efforts to aid our fellow humans are different in one crucial way: they succeed.

Think of a “cause” as a forest fire burning thousands of acres of trees. We don’t have the means to simply douse the entire fire with enough material to extinguish it, so we do what we can to get ahead of it. Multiple crews are organized and dispatched to areas where they do their best to prevent the fire from spreading. We warn nearby residents so they don’t get caught in it. Of course, we also send in aircraft to slow the advance and douse the fire where it’s possible, along the leading edges. What would make no sense at all would be to pour only a few hundred gallons of water over the entire expanse of the fire, ultimately achieving nothing as it’s simply not enough.

What we all have in common is the desire to make a difference, and through the End of the Tunnel initiatives, we can. Here’s how it works:

Your subscription to The Tunnel is $1 a week. To make this work, we need your sponsorship as a subscriber, and even more importantly, we need your advocacy as you help us reach others through word of mouth. As a Tunnel Advocate, you can either choose a particular initiative and ask that others help by sponsoring it through you, or invite them to chose the initiative which they feel moved to support, through their subscriptions. Our goal is to use ninety-eight cents out of every dollar of those subscriptions for the benefit of those we champion through each initiative. Most people probably won’t feel it in their bottom line giving a dollar a week, but with enough subscriptions, those dollars will change lives.

The math is simple. If 1200 people give a dollar a week to 300 homeless people, each homeless person gets $4 a week, and like throwing a few gallons of water on a forest fire, the problem continues forever. There is no change. However, if 1200 people give sixteen homeless people a dollar a week, now you’re giving those people food, a home, medical, and the intangibles—confidence, dignity, encouragement. That’s real change. They can get jobs, save money, get back on their feet, reunite with family, and eventually support themselves. Then we do it again.

Now, that all sounds like great plan, but it doesn’t work if the wrong people are at the receiving end of the help that’s given. That’s where we come in. In fact, speaking at length with 300 homeless people, you’d be hard-pressed to find sixteen who are cognitively stable, not on drugs, not running from the law, and decent enough to warrant the opportunity to get off the street. Unfortunately, with inflation and rents rising so much recently, it’s getting easier to find people who have become homeless simply because they can no longer afford a home. Veterans tend to make up the majority of those who fit the qualifications, so, with an asterisk, the first initiative is focused on homeless vets and others like them.

To address the other initiatives, we assembled a team of very clever and caring people. We have connections in police departments and shelters, labor unions, foster systems, Child Protective Services, banking institutions, schools, and hospitals—each with tentacles reaching across the country, seeking out potentials whose circumstances have taken a turn for the worse—victims of domestic violence and violent crimes, teachers and first responders struggling to make ends meet, families facing foreclosure, young men and women emerging from foster care without families to guide and support them, and an interesting initiative regarding undocumented immigrants. By the way, something I’ve learned on the streets of border towns—the people who have crossed into America illegally don’t mind if you call them illegal immigrants. To find out more about this initiative, and the others, please find them in the menu and we truly hope you’ll choose one or more to support with your weekly subscription to The Tunnel.

In Hollywood, they say the hardest roles to play are those where you’re working with children. If that’s true, then people who work with children six hours a day, five days a week should be either very well paid or psychologically evaluated for their own safety. Teachers are such people. It’s a highly-gratifying, although disproportionately low-paying and underappreciated career, so when someone comes along who loves this job, as a society, we should make every effort to hold onto them.

Teachers are no strangers to difficult financial times. They often take part-time and summer jobs to make ends meet, and if circumstances arise which make them unable to work, even temporarily, things can get bad. This initiative is easily overwhelmed with opportunities to assist great people when struggling through rough patches. Grand, life-altering benefits can be made available, but smaller, “life-easing” benefits, in this case, are enough to make a big difference.

The same is true of law enforcement. These people are doing the kind of work only a hanful of people are capable of doing, and it’s a relatively low-paying, underappreciated job. If you think working with children is difficult, try working with criminals!

Really, first responders of all kinds are deserving of more than what they’re compensated. For this reason, we’re always on the lookout for people in these industries who are struggling to make ends meet. If we can ease their burdens during difficult times, that’s a sign of a compassionate society which values those who defend us, care for us, help us, and teach our children. What more noble professions are there? Of course, the vast majority of people in these professions have the benefit of labor unions to help them during hard times, and we’re not blind to that fact. Think of the gallons of water on the forest fire—sometimes it’s not enough. Your subscription and support for struggling teachers and first responders shows your dedication to the people who fill these vital roles, making sure they can continue to do so.

Unless you’re some kind of racist, you probably have a pretty fair definition of what you would like to see in an immigrant coming into the country. We used to welcome anyone who could sign their name on the dotted line, but now we’ve become a nation where we still let anyone come in, and they don’t even have to sign their name anymore. It’s become a huge problem, and because of that, the public’s general attitude toward immigration has changed, and rightfully so. We went from being the land of opportunity to being the land of government handouts. As shameful and dangerous as this is, as much as it attracts the wrong brand of people to add to our populace, there are still a lot of people who are exactly what we want in an immigrant—decent, friendly, hard-working people who just want to live a good life in a country where freedom is a way of life, not an escape plan. They love this country for the same reasons we do, and they teach their children to respect and treasure America’s liberites because they have a greater understanding the absence of freedom than most of us, who were born here, can truly appreciate.

It would be reckless and irresponsible to advocate for blanket amnesty for everyone, or even just anyone. The End of the Tunnel Immigration Initiative cannot buy permanent residency for quality residency seekers, but with enough liquidity backing the petition, we can confidently sign on the dotted line which grants the best people a pathway toward permanent residency, eliminating their fear of sudden deportation when the political climate switches to one which takes our nation’s sovereignty more seriously. There are a lot—potentially millions—of people here who really shouldn’t be here, and when it comes time to make some tough and necessary decisions, there won’t be time to sift through and cherry-pick the better people, who are actually benefitting our society, out of the millions who are just here for the free stuff. For a dollar a week, we can start doing the cherry-picking now, before it’s too late.

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None of your financial information is stored, or even seen, by us. We only need your name and email address to send the newsletter, and we will not ever share that information with anyone unaffiliated with the newsletter.

The short answer is… yes. There is a way to make a personal contribution if your heart is telling you to do that, and even if you don’t subscribe to the newsletter, there are ways you can give time instead of money. This page should give you all the answers.