Good morning, John!
So there is a way in which this is, y'know, not maybe the best time to have a charity livestream. It's a messy world, and we all want to know what's happening, what happened, what it all means, I mean this is- I guess this is somewhat every day, we feel like this.

And as always, lots of people have opinions and sometimes they're so strong that they present them as facts, but here's the situation: no-one knows what the future holds. And I think that can make it difficult to focus on anything in particular.

But there are also ways in which this is a really good time to have a livestream. John, it's been years now since you have started to say to me a thing that is definitely true and that I believe, which is that, like, it's very easy to focus on the thing that is happening right now while ignoring more long-term crises. And so those long-term things that are really big deals don't feel like big deals because they're always there. And so those problems get solved more slowly than otherwise maybe they could.

But Katherine said something else to me this morning, that I had never heard, while we were walking around our neighborhood and talking about how, y'know, I was talking about particularly how powerless I felt in the moment - y'know, a common feeling, I think. And she said this amazing thing: that there aren't really any problems that aren't connected to the other problems!

So when you're working on something, you're kinda working on everything, especially because, like, ultimately there is one thing that we're all trying to do. Like, just one big thing, it's to make the world better. So as long as the thing you're working on makes the world better, you are doing the thing that we're trying to do. Which is to make the world better. Not perfect: better!

During the first half of the Project for Awesome, we're raising money for Partners in Health and Save the Children. These are two organisations that have proven themselves to be quite good at looking at long-term crises and staying focused on them so that the world can get better.

Partners in Health employs over 17.000 doctors operating in 11 countries focused on everything from cancer treatment to preventing malnutrition, and Save the Children has been operating for over 100 years, providing emergency response, education programs, health programs and advocacy. In 2020, they supported nearly 200 million children and helped 12 million children gain access to quality education. This is a big world with big problems and these are two organisations that have proven strategies to help make things better.

And when you go to projectforawesome.com/donate, you can get so many different amazing things in exchange for your donations. And all of it is only available during the Project for Awesome.

Also, this is the 15th Project for Awesome, it's also the 15th year of Vlogbrothers, so a Nerdfighter named Jim is making a bunch of these laser-cut wall plaques, the ones that you will get will say "15 years of Vlogbrothers" here, so I'm looking forward to donations for these so we can send some of these out to people!

In my opinion, we have one of the best slates of P4A perks ever this year, the designs are just really good and make me very happy. So many things: our challenge coin, the socks, the poster, the stickers... A really beautiful deck of cards, and for the first time ever, the Project for Awesome puzzle, which looks amazing! I love puzzles, this looks like a fun one.

We've also, of course, got lots of digital perks that are all lumped together into the digital download bundle, and that, this year, includes both all of my TikTok drafts over the last year, and also all of John's, including the ones that John posted for a little while and then immediately took down. This is, I am not kidding, over 200 total TikToks if you get both, and you do get both if you get the digital download bundle.

We also have matching donors right now, which means that every dollar you donate gets doubled, so you can go to projectforawesome.com/donate right now. We're also going to have matching donors during the second half of the Project for Awesome and we're gonna be organising money for organisations that are voted on by this community at projectforawesome.com.

And, of course, during this whole thing we're gonna be having a lovely little livestream here at youtube.com/vlogbrothers, which you can also find at projectforawesome.com/live.

All of the relevant links are in the description - John, I'll see you today.