February 11, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back
by Kevin Salwen and Hannah Salwen
Three years ago, an affluent family in Atlanta decided to sell its mansion, move into a house half its size, and give half of the money from the sale, about $800,000, to support development projects in 24 remote villages in Ghana.
Kevin Salwen, a former reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal, and his daughter Hannah came up with the idea when they saw a homeless man begging for food not far away from a Mercedes, and decided they needed to figure out how to help the needy.
They decided to reduce their expenses in half so they would have more money to give.
Mr. Salwen writes, “Why half? Because it’s measurable. Often when caring individuals see social problems, our gut reaction is ‘I ought to do more. But ‘more’ is too vague to be useful, and we usually end up not doing much of anything. By contrast, ‘half’ provides a metric to live with, a way to set a standard to push us to achieve.”
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10003; http://www.hmhbooks.com; 242 pages; $24.00; ISBN 978-0-547-24806-6.
