Big Help Mob- Dune'ing Good

It's amazing what some people will do for a pretty face....


I really didn’t want to spend my Sunday on a beach weeding stupid plants out of a stupid sand dune, but I knew it would be a good thing to do since my boyfriend spends so much time with these “Big Help Mobbers”. He seemed pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing and even though he never ‘forced’ me to sign up, I knew I’d be a pretty bad bloke if I didn’t. So I did. But that certainly didn’t mean I was going willingly or graciously.

To preface, Big Help Mob in their own words are “on a mission to make volunteering as mainstream as cheeseburgers and breathing.” If I may be so bold as to paraphrase, they encourage young people who probably don’t volunteer normally to volunteer by making volunteering seem not so much a chore but a cool, fun thing to do. When I first heard about it through the aforementioned boyfriend I thought it sounded kinda lame. A big call I know but at least I can be honest right? So how then did I find myself bright and early on a Sunday morning lining up for a bus to Brighton Beach surrounded by a number of hollering and hooting Big Help Mobbers to join in in a day’s work of weeding? It’s funny what some people will do for a pretty face.


The day itself went pretty well from what I could gage. We weeded heaps, everyone seemed to have a smile on their face the whole day and the group we were working with, North Stirling Coast Care, seemed really pleased with the work we’d done at the end of the day. There were about 50 young volunteers on the dunes and it was quite a sight to watch everyone scrambling around trying to pull out as many weeds as they could without getting too sunburnt/dehydrated/tempted by the irritatingly beautiful beach a mere 50 metres away.

I’m the exact type of person Big Help Mob try to attract. I’m semi socially-aware, I care about my community to a certain extent but I’ve never actually tried to volunteer in any way that didn’t benefit me personally, firstly because I never knew how/where etc to do so, and secondly because I’m full-on lazy. I’m not too proud to admit I signed up for a reason that did benefit me personally though- Brownie points (boyfriend was pleased).

What surprised me was as the day wore on and I found myself (shock) actually enjoying the work, proving I was an OK bloke meant less to me than actually doing what I was there for. It wasn’t a life-changing “I’m now altruist and I will live my life by this mantra” moment, but it did feel good to actually partake in something concrete that is helping someone who’s not me or someone I really care about. And I think that’s the difficulty in attracting people in my age bracket to do work like this. It’s not life-changing or earth-shattering, but it’s highly beneficial for the people you’re helping.


I think (and I’m speaking in HUGE generalisations so forgive me) my generation (yeahhh iGen) has a huge degree of cynicism about volunteering and donating to charity etc because it’s so intangible. Yeah sure I could give you some of my money but I have no idea where it’s ACTUALLY going do I? Big Help Mob have managed to find a way to give people who would actually like to do something meaningful with their time an opportunity to do so with something tangible. At the end of the day we could actually see the piles of weeds and we had a concrete figure on how much work we’d done (we’d pulled out as many weeds as Stirling North Coast Care would’ve done in a month). As I’ve mentioned, it wasn’t earth-shattering but it helped. And I sort of feel that’s the whole of point of stuff like this- you might not be able to change the entire world but you can help at least someone else and that counts.

See Big Help Mob's Website or Facebook for their next event.

Pics c/o Kristen Barker

KONY 2012: A Reaction

I didn’t watch it at first. I hit play on Youtube when it was posted to me through a Facebook chat, but it was late and I was tired. I said I’d watch it the next day, thinking it was a small enough lie to tell. 29 minutes to dedicate to Youtube....not even Kanye got that amount of Youtube time from me.


The next day I woke up and 2 people had already shared it when I flicked through Facebook on my phone before getting out of bed. When I looked at Facebook again at the coffee shop before work another 4 had shared it. By the afternoon my stream was awash. But I was at work and I still didn’t have time to look at it. We discussed it briefly during my shift. One girl said she’d watched it and was really impressed. When I got home my housemate told me I had to watch it. My other housemate said he didn’t want to. When my housemate explained who this man was I started to remember some of the things I had learnt in a class I took last year. I started to realise why he seemed so familiar. I was one of those people who had heard about Kony and the ICC and forgotten about him.

The next day I woke up and a lot more than 2 people had shared it when I flicked through Facebook on my phone before getting out of bed. It was on news websites now, it was on the radio as well and it was filling up my Twitter feed. But I was still at work. And I still couldn’t be bothered.

So at 7.50pm 2 days after I had first encountered the video I thought “fuck it”, I’ve got some time to kill. I hit ‘X’ on iTunes playing my favourite podcast, pulled a pillow up behind me and searched for “Kony 2012” on YouTube.

I wasn’t as emotionally moved as I thought I would be. Usually I’m a sucker for hyper-emotional propaganda. But this wasn’t making me cry. It was making me interested though. I wasn’t as cynically distant as I thought I would be either. In the 2 days before I watched the video I already decided I wouldn’t like it or I wouldn’t “respond well” to it as so often is my catch-cry. I still don’t know that I responded well, but I definitely responded.

Straight away I bought into the cool of the video. The guy who made it seemed so cool. He has a cool son, the young people being active in the video are cool. They’re doing cool stuff like putting up posters and wearing cool bracelets. I want to be like those people. I want to wear a cool t-shirt with a cool slogan that is more meaningful than “That Sh#t Cray” and I want to be like Shepard Fairey and do cool meaningful things. I didn’t 40 minutes ago, but I do now. And it’s beautifully easy.

For a long time I’ve been anti “getting-involved” because I saw it as a commitment to something that you could be caught out on if you don’t truly believe in the cause. But this video makes an excellent point; committing to this cause is easy. It’s as easy as sharing a video, or saying someone’s name, or wearing a bracelet. You literally don’t even have to move to be involved in this.

What’s struck me most about this video is how I can finally identify how important social networking is going to be as a part of global politics. In my years of fretting over the impact social media and social networking is going to have on my own life, I lost sight of the impact it will have on everyone else on the planet’s life as well.

If the video upset me about anything, it was the fact that it was highly America-centric and I don’t live in America, so why would I try to reach out to American politicians. But it made a point. A point that knowledge and awareness are one thing, but sometimes we lazy human beings need a kick up the ass to remember those horrific things that are too easy to ignore.

Am I going to monetarily buy into Kony 2012? I don’t know yet. Is it bad that I am still just a little bit cynical about the whole thing? Maybe. But should I just let the considerations and analysis go for a little while and maybe just let myself get involved in something that does really only involve trying to help other people? Yeah, I guess I should.