SPEECH!!!

Hello, Internet! I come to you not from the cozy comfort of my bedroom this time, but from a plush Panera patio. I'm not going to make this post all fixed width, even though it really is an academic post, because I plan on making this a little more informal than usual.

Speech time has rolled around, and my topic is this: convince the audience to donate their MoleBucks at the charity of my choice. So now I have to choose the charity of my choice.

Thoughts:

• MoveOn.org
• Amnesty International
• Habitat for Humanity

I have a few other ideas, but I think that those are really the best ones.  Now I get to eliminate all but one.

First of all, MoveOn.org doesn't really actively work to make people's lives better. Not directly, at least. So lets strike that one off of the list.

Amnesty International, thanks to a quick Google search, doesn't actually have a local chapter. So it looks like I'm going to be working with Habitat for Humanity.

For those of you who don't know, Habitat for Humanity is an organization that builds cheap, inexpensive housing for those who have a steady source of income, but don't have a house and are not eligible for a housing loan. The family works with local volunteers to build the house, and over the period of the next twenty or thirty years, the family pays off the cost of building the house.

So that's my cause. Now I need to figure out my action.

As I see it, I'm going to have two (II) (2) main challenges. One, I need to really make people feel what it's like to be on the street with no money. Everyone that I'm presenting to will have read Nickel and Dimed by Barbera Ehrenreich, which explores life as a minimum wage hourly worker, so maybe I'll be able to play off of that. Also, many people have told me that I'm fairly good at telling narrative stories, so maybe I'll be able to create some sort of hypothetical situation in which the audience is the homeless family. Actually, you know what would be just awesometastic? I wonder if I could find an actual story of one of the families that moved into a habitat home. That would be great. I doubt that I'll be able to do that. I think I'll also try to stun the audience with an overload of data and statistics. People like numbers.

My second challenge will be trying to overcome some of the more… erm, stubborn members of the audience. There are a few people out there who will simply not want to listen to me. How am I going to be able to overcome that? I'm not sure yet. I think that is going to rely on my appeal to logos and ethos, not so much pathos. Emotions are easily disputable. 

I don't really know where this is going to go. I guess we'll all see.