Impacts: A ripple or a path?
Talking about social impact usually involves mentioning the ripple analogy: you being the rock that is thrown into still water, and the ripples being the effects you made on others by your presence. We can’t see these effects, but others feel them. This was especially true for me today as I was participating in the first day of TD’s Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.
After volunteering out at UBC REC’s Day of the Longboat clinics, I spent some time with my good friend Kimmie picking up trash and garbage from the shore of Acadia Beach. This beach doesn’t have the same foot traffic as say Kits Beach or English Bay, so I was amazed when I found things like towels, golf balls, hub caps, candy wrappers, and old cigarette packs. It was clear that many of these things had been brought in with the tide.
Thumbs up for clean beaches!
To think, an overboard item from a boat out in the bay or a wrapper blown into the water from another beach resurfaced miles away in an entirely different location. Unlike the rock, which has one opportunity to make ripples, this trash made its impact in more than one region – harming ecosystems as it traveled with the tide along its path to the shore.
Facts on the Shoreline Cleanup bag
It is clear that our presence and actions impacts the lives of others – both positively and negatively. That being said, we can choose to have our actions create ripples or we can choose to leave a path. This, too, can be both negative and positive. You can choose to briefly harm your team’s effectiveness or consistently let them down. You can chose to jump into an activity once to leave your mark or be continually involved to really influence that community.
Leaving your mark is great. That single act created ripples of change.
But imagine if your rock never sank and it just continued to skim along the surface.
Your ripples would change the water.
What would you rather be known for: making ripples or creating pathways?
A pathway creater...
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