Monday, August 23, 2010

Purposefulness



My daughter has recently discovered a fantastic online space that I'd like to share with you.

My past blogs posts have had one of the virtues from The Adventures of Mali & Keela as their title, so to continue that theme I've chosen purposefulness for this post. Purposefulness is something that describes the sentiment behind MiniMonos. MiniMonos is a virtual world for children: a place of fun, beauty, discovery, generosity, sustainability and friendship.

The creators of this virtual world say they "created MiniMonos so that children could have a place of their own, a place that allows them to explore and grow without constant pressure to buy stuff. We also wanted them to have a place that embodied core values like sustainability and generosity, without turning those values into a boring lecture".

The concept of making core values fun, accessible and engaging for kids was the driver behind The Adventures of Mali & Keela also, so I loved reading the MiniMono team explain that "sustainability isn't "taught" on MiniMonos; it's normalised. Kids quickly realise that if they don't clean the lagoon, the fish don't come back. If they don't do their recycling, their treehouses get messy".

(Lagoon/Glow-worm Cave story; messy treehouse/The Horse Race story... those who have already read The Adventures of Mali & Keela will notice some neat coincidences between the above quote and content of the book!)

I love also the follow-through they have at MiniMonos; every new membership provides clean drinking water for children in India, and when they hit their first 50 Gold members, they'll adopted an orangutan baby for a year.

That's a company with purposefulness. Great to see.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you!! We love what you are doing too. The virtues project is a wonderful thing. We are going to check out the book!

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  2. Hi Melissa, thanks for your comments. It's my prediction that you'll have a copy in your hands by 2pm Thursday :-)

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