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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Share Goodness making a difference

by

20120601

Al­though its goal is to make a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in the lives of the less for­tu­nate, Share Good­ness is a char­i­ta­ble or­gan­i­sa­tion with a dif­fer­ence. Its mem­bers don't as­pire to achieve their goal through rais­ing funds or do­nat­ing mon­ey. At least, not through their own ac­tiv­i­ties and events. In­stead, the very young mem­bers of the or­gan­i­sa­tion at­tempt to make good use of an all-im­por­tant re­source-hu­man re­source. The or­gan­i­sa­tion's man­date is to con­nect the peo­ple who want to help oth­ers with the peo­ple and or­gan­i­sa­tions who need the help. "We re­alised that in T&T there are a lot of char­i­ta­ble or­gan­i­sa­tions but peo­ple don't re­al­ly know about them," said Share Good­ness pres­i­dent Deep­ak Lall in an in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian. "Our goal is to make shar­ing a whole lot eas­i­er. Our fo­cus is mar­ket­ing. We aim to con­nect the haves with the have-nots" said Lall.

Lall, 24, in­sists there are a lot of peo­ple in T&T who want to help oth­ers, es­pe­cial­ly young peo­ple, but don't know how to mo­bilise them­selves to ac­tion. He says this is why Share Good­ness tar­gets peo­ple in the 17- to 30-year age group, and why its ten mem­bers are al­so in their mid-20s. Time, tal­ent and things are all the or­gan­i­sa­tion asks for from its mem­bers and from any­one will­ing to give, he says. "If we de­cide to paint a house for some­body all we'd ask for is the time to do it, the tal­ent and maybe a buck­et of paint," Lall said. The group be­came a reg­is­tered or­gan­i­sa­tion last June, and has al­ready had sev­er­al calls to ac­tion, among them blood dri­ves. "We dis­cov­ered that T&T has one-third less blood in re­serve than it should," said Lall. He said in the group's first dri­ve, they helped ac­quire 40 pints of blood, with 34 first-time donors. The sec­ond yield­ed 52 pints with 32 first-time donors.

The group had its third dri­ve in May. "We al­so vis­it­ed the pae­di­atric ward in the hos­pi­tal (Wendy Fitzwilliam Pae­di­atric Hos­pi­tal) just to play with the chil­dren there and cheer them up," Lall said. The group has al­so been do­nat­ing its time, tal­ent and things to a home for abused girls close to its Ch­agua­nas home base. "What we are do­ing is mod­ern and it's fun and we do get a lot of pos­i­tive feed­back from the peo­ple who in­volve them­selves with us," Lall said. He said the group has start­ed to go to dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try to build a net­work of peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in giv­ing back. The or­gan­i­sa­tion has al­so be­gun en­gag­ing stu­dents from sec­ondary schools in T&T to en­cour­age them to want to help oth­ers. "We want to have Share Good­ness reps in the schools and pro­mote aware­ness of our or­gan­i­sa­tion. It should get to the point that if there is some­thing need­ed to be done in Diego Mar­tin, we would have a group there ready to help out." So how did these young peo­ple con­nect to form Share Good­ness? Lall says he and his friends were just look­ing for some­thing else to do be­sides lim­ing and par­ty­ing. "It is on­ly so of­ten you could go to 51 (De­grees) and par­ty. T&T doesn't have that much to do in terms of en­ter­tain­ment," said Lall.


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