Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World
Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action. Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organisations, and by individuals, to solve problems and save lives both ‘down the street and around the world’.
Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, ‘regardless of income, available time, age, and skills’, can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams.
Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money.
From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organised and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving.
Clinton writes about men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfilment they now experience through giving. He writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent working conditions around the world. He shows us how one of the most important ways of giving can be an effort to change, improve, or protect a government policy.
He outlines what we as individuals can do, the steps we can take, how much we should consider giving, and why our giving is so important.
Bill Clinton’s own actions in his post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, “he has become an international spokesperson and model for the power of giving”.
Reviews
This is a good book in the literal sense that, if everyone who read it took the author’s advice, the world would almost certainly be a better place
Guardian
As an inspirational primer for giving, as opposed to getting, his book should be in every school, every office and every library
The Times
Bill Clinton’s call to linked arms silences most doubters with its weight of detail
Observer
