“The more intentional you are in your choices, the more every change makes room for more changes … I just love that there’s this endless potential.”
—DEE WILLIAMS
In 2003, Dee Williams was a classic slacktivist. She says so herself. Yes, she was passionate about social justice and environmental issues, but she spent most of her free time driving back and forth to Lowe’s and Home Depot for materials to remodel her three-bedroom house in Portland, Oregon. “I would feel like a grand national champion because I’d found a great parking space, or gotten a really great deal on a piece of plywood.”
Then events conspired to deal out a dose of humility.
She went to Guatemala and helped build a school, a friend’s emails from Uganda brought news of malaria and hungry children, and a very dear friend got cancer. It made her remodeling concerns seem trivial.
“He was getting sicker and sicker, and I didn’t have the time or the money to really throw myself into helping him. I was spending a lot of time and money on my house. So the house was the easiest thing to try to get rid of.”
