Stick Your Neck Out — A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond

"If you are not happy with the way things are in your life, in your organization, in your family, in your country or in the world, maybe you can be a catalyst for making things better. Here are practical suggestions on how you can use your talents and ideas to help create the changes you desire."

—Millard Fuller, Founder, Habitat for Humanity International

Filled with practical tips and inspiring examples of real people, this book provides the missing link between ideals and action.

Topics covered include choosing an issue, mapping out a plan, creating a vision of success, organizing a team, building trust, resolving conflicts, working with the media, moving through bureaucracies, setting legal strategies and more.

The book is anchored in three key ideas:

1. Courageous and compassionate people can solve any problems and meet any challenges in their communities and in the world.

2. The surest path to a meaningful life is service — acting for the common good.

3. The key to success on this path is balance — head and heart, trust and street-smarts, passion and professionalism, reflection and action.

We've heard from many quarters that one of the things kids need most now is hope. We looked at our Giraffe Heroes Project files, bulging with stories of "Giraffe Heroes"— people from an array of ages, locations and backgrounds who are plunging into every imaginable problem and getting positive results. Their lives are models for positive action and enormous sources of hope.

We've put forty of these stories into Voices of Hope, a unique middle/high school program that builds reading skills while it encourages kids to be active citizens in their communities. We know from many years' experience in classrooms how well the inspiring and exciting stories of Giraffe Heroes grab kids' attention—even kids who don't like to read. Used as a supplementary reader, Voices of Hope is a welcome addition to standard reading texts, many of which are notoriously dull.

THE GIRAFFE HEROES KIT gives you all you need to guide 8-to-14-year-olds through well-tested steps for ~

• learning about real heroes,
• finding real heroes in their own world and
• becoming heroes themselves as they create and carry out a community service project.

The contents and activities in this Kit are a distillation of the nationally recognized K-12 Giraffe Heroes Program created for classrooms, after-school programs, families who homeschool, and parents. It's everything we know about bringing out young people’s innate compassion, and fostering the courage they need to put that compassion to work in the world around them.

Whether you’re working with an afterschool group, in a summer camp, a classroom, or if you’re home-schooling, you can use the Kit to guide kids through hearing stories of real heroes, telling the stories of real heroes theyfind, and then being heroic themselves as they create and carry out a service project that addresses a problem they care about. I think you may be amazed and delighted by what happens to them as they go through these steps.

We’ve included plenty of hands-on activities in this Kit to help young people become inspired to serve with courage and compassion. In this Kit you'll find:

We have just a few of these sweatshirts left (all in small and medium sizes) and we’re not reprinting them..

The logo on them was designed for us by legendary graphic designer, Milton Glaser and if you don't know who he is, see http://www.miltonglaser.com/. He designed the shirts for us as a gift way back in the 90's.

$75 plus $10 shipping. These shirts are collectors' items.

Interested? Call us at 360 221 7989 or email graham@giraffe,org

These colorful peel-and-stick stickers end up on just about everything, from schoolbooks to bikes. They've all got that "Stick Your Neck Out" Giraffe motif, but the clever designers at Giraffe HQ also threw in a few with the phrase "Nobis Est." A couple of your bright kids will find out soon enough that's Latin for the Giraffe motto, "It's Up to Us". Have fun!

A sheet of 18 Giraffe Stickers $10

Kids absolutely love these buttons! And they are a great way to reward kids for completing a Giraffe program in class or for sticking their necks out to help solve a problem that concerns them in their school or beyond.

10 for $5 (sold in sets of ten)

These high-quality T-shirts are half cotton, half polyester and last forever. They come in a variety of sizes for both kids and adults. Kids love them because they're a symbol of working to become Giraffe Heroes—people who care about their school, their community and beyond. Buy them for the kids who complete a Giraffe service project or as a special way of honoring people who have"stuck their necks out" to help solve some pressing local problem in the community.

KIds sizes $15 Adults $18