Michael Colletto

Nov 30

The SOLD Project is in the final 8 hours of The Girl Effect Challenge and we need your help! To win, we need as many people as possible to give just $10 before Midnight tonight to secure our place as a Finalist (right now we’re in 1st!). Your simple $10 gift helps SOLD secure a potential grant worth more than $30,000 to help educate at-risk children in Thailand and prevent child prostitution.

Click here to give $10: http://goto.gg/6718.

Please spread the word and get everyone else you can involved, too. We can’t do this without you, so THANK YOU for helping out!

Nov 14

For the past two years, photographer Lisa Kristine has traveled the world in partnership with Free The Slaves to document the harsh realities of modern-day slavery. She presented her experience in a truly stunning overview of the issue at TEDxMaui in January 2012.

If, after watching this, you find yourself wanting to do something to help, I’d start with prevention. $10 can help prevent child exploitation in Thailand. Learn more at thesoldproject.com. #westartthegirleffect

Nov 9

“A lack of education keeps people entrenched in poverty. If we want to combat poverty—or we hope to see long-term, sustainable development improving the lives of those in need—then we must note the lack of education in our world.”

Mike and Danae Yankoski, adapted from Zealous Love.
Make a difference: Start the Girl Effect >

Oct 5

There it is in bold: the sex industry in Thailand brings in $35 billion each year—despite the fact that prostitution is technically illegal there. That’s 10% of their current national GDP. Many of those exploited are children. And that’s why The SOLD Project works in prevention. Learn more.

May 1

The SOLD Project didn’t win the grant from GOOD Maker, but they’re not giving up on their idea. They need at least 24 people willing to give $16 a month to join their Stand 4 Freedom campaign this week to make their Trafficking Awareness Program a reality this summer. Click here to give.

The best part is, this week only, for every person who joins the Stand 4 Freedom campaign, an anonymous donor will match your pledge with a $50 one-time donation. Just like that, your $16 gift becomes nearly $70! This opportunity ends Monday, May 7 at Midnight PT, so spread the word.

Hundreds and hundreds of you voted; now, if just a fraction of you can give just a small amount each month, your long-term impact will be incredible. Thank you for investing in the lives of these children.

Apr 6

The SOLD Project has a chance to win a $2,500 grant to fund their human trafficking awareness programs in Thailand, and all they need is your vote!

Since 2007, The SOLD Project has been preventing human trafficking and child sexual exploitation in Thailand through education and community development. Part of that prevention work has involved hosting well-received and very impactful human trafficking awareness classes for at-risk Thai nationals.

For this summer’s biannual Parent Meeting, SOLD has a brilliant idea: Hire a local partner organization to train the older girls in their program to lead the awareness courses themselves! If they win this $2,500 grant from GOOD Maker, The SOLD Project will be able to host trafficking awareness events for the entire community, purchase costumes and sound equipment, and train their students to take a peer-to-peer trafficking awareness course on the road to 2 – 5 local Thai schools, reaching hundreds of at-risk children with a message that could change the course of their lives.

Want to do something about human trafficking and child exploitation? This is a great place to start.

Click here to vote.

Dec 6

Creative Microphilanthropy

via GOOD:

“Pop quiz: when you hear the word philanthropist, who comes to mind?

“For most of us, it’s someone like Bill Gates, striding through an African village, smiling at cute kids. Or maybe Bill Clinton sitting on a stage, flanked by a couple of much-celebrated social entrepreneurs.

“In fact, according to a study by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, the Americans who give away the biggest proportion of their own income are women who make $23,509 or less a year, not ridiculously wealthy white dudes named Bill. Philanthropy isn’t just multimillion-dollar checks and large-scale public health interventions. It’s also small acts of care, creativity, and a dollar donation equivalent to forgoing a fancy lunch.

“Which brings us to the The GOOD Challenge for December: ‘creative microphilanthropy.’ We’re asking each member of the GOOD community to give away $30 (total for the month, not every single day) in the most creative and inspiring way you can think of. The GOOD staff is all participating, and we invite you to do the same. Try the label of philanthropist on for size. Make giving more creative and personal. It doesn’t have to be $30. It could just be $10. Or even a single dollar. It’s the act of giving–and giving creatively—that counts.”

If this idea inspires you, I’d encourage you to check out Philanthroper.com—they featured The SOLD Project earlier this year and continue to do great work.

Speaking of SOLD, we’re still looking for 150 people to give $4/week to our child prostitution prevention programs in Thailand. Click here to learn more or give.

Aug 4

Philanthroper.com featured my organization, The SOLD Project, on their homepage today, sharing our story and inviting people to participate by simply giving $1 (or up to $10). Why? Because “a little helps a lot.” (I interviewed for the piece.)

If you’re familiar with SOLD, you know $1 does help a lot. One dollar is the cost of one day of public schooling for an at-risk child in Thailand. $1/day changes the whole story for these kids—instead of dropping out of school, they’re receiving an education; instead of falling into exploitation, they’re rising from poverty and pursuing their dreams.

All that to say, it’s been thrilling to watch the donations come in today—as of this moment, 197 donors have given $509 to keep at-risk children in school. So, yeah. It’s been a good day. And there’s still 14 hours left to give.

Feb 4

Insurance

Insurance companies make easy targets for human frustration, generally with good reason. In his book, What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis observes that the insurance industry is “built on getting us to take a sucker bet—a bet even we want to lose.”

Nobody wants a reason to collect collision, fire, flood, health, or certainly life insurance. Worse than Vegas, we know that insurance companies stack the deck against us; that is the foundation of their business. If we don’t collect, we are losers (we’ve lost our money). If we do collect, we’re still losers (something bad happened)…We can’t win. The industry has to suspect that we are liars, making us prove our misfortune and reluctantly giving us back the money we put in the pool. They make the economics overcomplicated so we don’t know just what suckers we are and so we keep making safe bets—safe for the insurance company. Our relationship with insurance is, therefore, necessarily adversarial and built on mutual mistrust.

If you’ve been following the adventures of Michael & Heather Colletto in Thailand, you’ll know that Heather blew the living daylights out of her L5-S1 disc at the end of September and, after two weeks of total immobility, pain meds, and waiting for the insurance company to “pre-certify” the necessary care while the risk of permanent spine and nerve damage increased, we finally said “forget you,” took our doctors’ advice, and rode an overnight ambulance to Bangkok for emergency spine surgery. You’ll also know that our global insurance company, International Medical Group (IMG), has been everything but helpful (don’t get me started), and that we had to pay for everything with our credit card. Thankfully, we had a credit card with an obscenely high limit, and thankfully top-notch medical care in Thailand is shockingly cheap by American standards; however, as full-time volunteer NGO workers living on support, the bill was more than our combined annual salary. Plus 18.24% interest. Gulp.

Needless to say, we’re broke as a joke. Which, in a way, is puzzling to me. I’ve always been responsible. I’ve had a savings account since I was 10, I took a personal finance course in college, never carried a credit card balance a day in my life. Financially, I’ve made nothing but smart choices. (Well, except for that time I quite my job at QVC to move to the mission field in Eastern Europe…and then a year later when we sold nearly all our stuff and moved to Thailand. But, those crazy moves where God’s idea, not mine. Who am I to question His judgement?)

In light of recent events, something I read earlier this year came back to me with new potency: “In the West you have so much,” observes Chinese pastor Brother Yun in his book, The Heavenly Man. “You have insurance for everything. In a way, you don’t need God.”

Heather and I continue to adjust to a strange new normal back in the States: living as guests in our niece’s pink bedroom; our stuff and our cat stranded indefinitely several States away; Heather working part-time for SOLD while looking for additional paying work with health benefits. At times we think to ourselves that, surely—surely—by this point we’ve learned that God has a plan that’s better than ours, that we have and are nothing without Him, that we’re completely dependent and that we can and should fully trust Him with our present and future. And then in that same moment we realize how desperately hard we’re trying to regain control of our lives.

We have no insurance. Sure, we have a little plastic card with IMG’s logo on it and we dutifully pay them their premiums every month, but they’re not going to help us; they’ve proven their uselessness. We have no financial cushion. We have no assets to sell. And all of that is scary. Because we have to trust God. Without insurance—with the walls of our proverbial city all crumbled around us—we absolutely need God. There’s no denying it.

Over and over again the Bible says it is better to trust in God than in “mere humans,” even if those humans are mighty warriors or powerful politicians. It goes as far as to say that those who put their trust in other people—even friends and family—are cursed because their hearts have turned from the Lord. Proverbs says that those who trust in their riches will fall, and that he who trusts in himself is a fool. Trust in the Lord, and the Lord only, the Bible says again and again. ”Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding…” I know this stuff. My head even believes it’s all true. But my wicked, proud little heart just won’t let go. And I need to. Apparently, that’s harder to do than it sounds.

God is my insurance. And, really, I should trust no other. God won’t necessarily keep us from harm or fill our bank account with money in the event of disaster—He’s not that kind of insurance, and that should be obvious by now. But He’s good. His glory matters more than my physical or financial wellbeing. And at the end of the day—and the end of my life—my hope rests in Him alone.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. —Romans 15:13

Oct 6

Not Intended for Commercial Use

I’ve got some good news and some more good news: we just sold out of our “Children: Not Intended for Commercial Use” t-shirts…so we’ve ordered more. And they’re even better than before. We’re switching from American Apparel because, well, we realized it was kind of ironic to campaign against sexual exploitation on shirts made by a brand with such a dubious reputation. The new shirts are Alternative Apparel’s Eco-Heather crew (color: eco-brown), which are made of organic cotton, recycled polyester, and naturally occurring rayon. They’re pre-washed, pre-shrunk, and super soft. Our logo on the shirt has been printed in just one color to heighten contrast, and, by request, we’ve ordered a few XL’s this time.

“Children: Not Intended for Commercial Use” T-shirt

Of course, higher quality (and a clean conscience) comes at slightly higher price than before, but they’re still just $25. And, to help keep these shirts affordable, we’re going to continue throwing in free shipping for all domestic orders.

Pre-order your shirt today! As always, 100 percent of the profits go towards our work with The SOLD Project. Thank you all for supporting our work! You look great doing it. : )