Who We Are
Welcome
It may be easy to look around our world today and see the appearance of chaos, difficulty and strife. Yet, when we come from an open heart, we can also see our opportunity to love all things into balance, joy, harmony and peace. This planet does not need more visions of desperation, separation, fear, doubt, and hate - it requires an abundance of love, especially unconditional love, to heal and restore the beauty contained in every moment. This becomes the easier path once we take the first step and begin to share our love.
When we bring unconditional love back into our personal, professional, community and family lives, we begin the journey of restoring wholeness and happiness to our planetary adventure. Of course it takes determined effort on our part as the old, outmoded and limited ways of being are quick to return in our mind. However, this effort to love is rewarded with a new perspective on everything and all life benefits as a result.
Here at The Love Foundation, whether through Global Love Day each May 1st, our annual Art, Essay and Poetry Invitational, Love Ambassador designations, or our newer programs, Love Begins With Me film project and All Nations Love/America Loves, each of these opportunities are simply ways to keep the understanding of love fresh in our collective hearts and minds.
We started this nonprofit organization in 2000 as a way to inspire and remind people of the simple, practical power of loving unconditionally. In just these few years, we have witnessed a growing worldwide momentum embracing this opportunity to bring the awareness of unconditional love back into our daily lives. We look forward to expanding this dialogue and encourage you to walk this journey of unconditional love in your part of the world.
On behalf of our global family of volunteers - welcome!
Love, light and peace,
Harold W. Becker
Founder, The Love Foundation
20th Anniversary Letter from Founder Harold W. Becker (2020)
Celebrating 20 Amazing Years with The Love Foundation
What began two decades ago (wow that sounds surreal) as a simple idea to share the practical wisdom of unconditional love, continues blooming around the world in beautiful ways. Over these magical years, we became an internationally recognized nonprofit organization and the leading resource for "inspiring people to love unconditionally.”
From the very beginning in 2000, we knew we would be somewhat (well perhaps profoundly) different from the common nonprofit in many ways. Our desire was to be an all-volunteer network of individuals, we would approach our growth organically, we understood we were sharing a vision more than an activity, and we would focus on our vision rather than fundraising. To our delight and amazement, we are accomplishing all this and so much more. The talent, resources, ideas and finances always come as needed to fulfill our vision.
Fundamentally, we knew that a shift in consciousness towards love was our collective way forward to assist in healing and uniting our world. As you might imagine, in the initial days when we began sharing our vision of unconditional love, we were met with a great deal of skepticism, apprehension, and thankfully, some warm embraces - even we wondered at times how we were going to inspire others and implement our mission. Fortunately, all of the early supportive experiences from people around the globe encouraged us to continue to find ways to create programs around our message and theme of unconditional love.
I awoke one night in November of 2003 with the idea of Global Love Day for each May 1 and with the theme of "love begins with me." I approached our board two days later and everyone was in full agreement to launch our very first presentation on May 1, 2004. We were all excited that we finally had a specific interactive program that could help promote awareness for our vision and mission. Global Love Day as a “celebration of our humanity” was born.
We began spreading the awareness through simple emails of introduction to people around the world. The positive response was immediate. A couple of weeks later I had the additional idea to create an Art, Essay and Poetry Invitational designed as a complimentary program around the inspiration of Global Love Day and as a way to encourage the loving wisdom of our youth.
Many fantastic and unexpected things happened as this began to unfold. We were making wonderful connections in different nations and cultures and one day we had an inquiry from someone in Nairobi, Kenya wanting to know how she could be involved with us. Our Volunteer Country Coordinators came into being that day. Others coming to offer their time and talent representing their particular nation quickly followed this new friend from Nairobi.
Global Love Day is both an individual and a community type of event, so we sent out invitations to Governors, Mayors and Councils to consider acknowledging the day. Within a very short time, we had our first proclamation from the Mayor of Salt Lake City. The media enjoyed poking a bit of fun with the Mayor and our organization, yet in the end, they admitted that an idea like this could only help. By the time the first Global Love Day came, we had twelve proclamations, including our own hometown of Tampa at the time, three governors and several other prominent city Mayors and Councils from around the US. A great inauguration for our first year in 2004.
May 1st, 2004 arrived and we now had contact with individuals and organizations in 36 countries. Each came to us with their courage and support of our vision. Volunteers translated our main flyer into several languages and over 300 submissions came in from around the world for our Art, Essay and Poetry Invitational. We decided immediately to continue both programs the following year.
Our next significant program was the honorary designation of Love Ambassadors. We knew there are many inspiring and unconditionally loving people that are the silent heroes of our world. We thought it would help to acknowledge them and created this program in late 2004 with our first seven Love Ambassadors nominees.
Around this same time, we received an invitation to introduce basic meditation as a helpful life skill to a halfway home for women coming out of prison locally in Tampa, FL. We made it a point to focus on self-love and self-esteem. After that first night, they asked us to come back the following week to continue to share the wisdom of unconditional love. We went back that week and every week for the next two years. The experience touched every one of us to the core. Several of these amazing women are still in our lives.
Over the subsequent years, we continue to present Global Love Day each May 1 and are now coming to our seventeenth annual. We expanded our Art, Essay and Poetry Invitational to include everyone young at heart, received 40 translations of our flyer, and have over 700 proclamations from prominent government and official leaders acknowledging the day. There is even an entry in Wikipedia for Global Love Day.
We designated over 300 honorary Love Ambassadors, have over 44 Volunteer Country Coordinators from around the world and 16 State Coordinators throughout the US. We share a daily quote on our many social site pages along with a monthly inspirational message. We added countless pages to our main web site with information and resources related to unconditional love. We are in contact with individuals in 165 countries and that number keeps growing.
In 2008, we received a Google Grant award where they provide additional exposure in internet search at no cost to us. This grant continues today and brings us remarkable international exposure. That same year we started our YouTube nonprofit channel even though we did not know what kinds of videos we might eventually create. As miracles are, a beautiful volunteer came to us a few weeks later saying she could produce videos for us and since those early video creations, we currently have 265 inspiring videos on our channel with over 1.4 million views and 5000 subscribers. We since added TLF TV Presents with a series of interviews, meditations and inspirational short introductions to expand our vision.
One of our greatest surprises over the years has been the interest and support from people particularly in the African nations. We also enjoy a very large response from India and surrounding nations, the Middle East, Asia, Europe and of course the US, Canada, Australia and parts of Central and South America. Each day we welcome the new connections where people introduce themselves and lend their support to our mutual vision.
In keeping with the latest social and technology trends, we have a strong presence on numerous social sites including Facebook (nearly 600,000 fans), Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and our YouTube Channel, among others. In 2010, we hosted our first online event for Global Love Day in the virtual world of Second Life. We were thrilled with this unique experience and potential and joined the Nonprofit Commons where we maintain an online office along with over 120 fellow nonprofit organizations and have seven CNN iReport articles featuring our presence there. These social platforms provide marvelous opportunities to connect with existing friends around the world in real time along with making countless new friends with every passing day.
We continue developing projects and programs that inspire love in a variety of ways. We are working on our ongoing film documentary project, Love Begins with Me, where individuals can create and share their video presentations of what unconditional love means to them, as well as, over 60 interview videos we produced ourselves too. In 2011, we initiated All Nations Love as a heart-based social participation movement with the theme, "every nation has a heart, and it is time to let yours shine.” We are hosting America Loves as part of this overall program here in the US, encouraging individuals and groups to form their own efforts in local, state and national levels.
Loving Earth is our program for environmental inspiration and awareness while Inspiring Unconditional Love is our showcase for a variety of encouraging insights and poetic ideals of love. We even have our own free mobile app, Inspire Love, for love on the go. We created this simple app as another resource that gives you an instant and spontaneous loving quote each time you use it.
Perhaps our greatest accomplishment is our bringing unconditional love into the common vocabulary and awareness of a greater population, along with initiating the necessary discussion as to its meaning and potential in our personal and collective lives. Far from being a whimsical and unattainable ideal, this vision is now a practical, pragmatic and vital solution in individuals and their communities around the world.
Over the past twenty years, The Love Foundation became a global family of people who understand that love is both our heritage and our destiny. We are here because of you and are grateful every day for your support whether as direct volunteers, occasional admirers, or through your inspirational ideas and financial contributions. You honor us with your courage to be the example and inspire us to love unconditionally.
Thank you for sharing this vision of love with us all these years and Happy 20th Anniversary to The Love Foundation.
Love, light and peace,
Harold W. Becker
President and Founder
March 3, 2020
Visit our Vision and Mission page to find out more about who we are and how we "inspire people to love unconditionally"
