Jimmy Wong braces for rejection. His stance is wide and his smile is even wider as he says, “Hi, do you have a moment for the children?” He is outside the University Bookstore on University Way in Seattle. His identification badge swings as he hurries to meet the pace of complete strangers on the street. He tries to convince them to stop for a few minutes, look through his black binder full of information, and open their wallets.

“It’s important for me to stay positive, for the team’s sake,” says Wong. People dodge past him, moving as quickly as possible to avoid his friendly greeting.

It’s all in a day’s work for Wong. He is the leader of a group of three street fundraisers for Save the Children, a charity organization that works worldwide and in the United States to improve the lives of children in poverty. With four months of fundraising under his belt, Wong has enough seniority to show a new team member the ins and outs of asking people for money.

Wong and his team find people to sponsor children by donating a minimum of $20 a month. The money goes towards projects like providing shelter for the tens of thousands of displaced children in northern Pakistan who survived the recent deadly earthquake but might not now survive the frigid winter weather. Save the Children is setting up tent cities and makeshift hospitals there to help the youngest victims of this natural disaster. Closer to home, the organization is providing psychological relief to Gulf Coast children in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita with school and community programs that restore a sense of normalcy to children’s lives.

Through street fundraisers, sponsors contributed over $28 million worldwide to Save the Children’s operating revenue in 2004, according to the organization’s financial report. Dialogue Direct, a company that specializes in providing fundraising solutions to non-profit organizations worldwide, recruits and trains street fundraisers for Save the Children. According to Wong, the training includes education regarding the charitable organization’s work. Success at this job depends on having an outgoing personality, he says.

“You have to be charming to stop people,” he says, “The first day alone you don’t know who to stop, you don’t know who to talk to, and you get really discouraged. Now, I’ll see someone from far away and think to myself, like, she looks like a kind and caring person. There are certain people you can look at and be like, she’s gonna be cool, she’s gonna care.”

Wong shows he cares by donating over $100 a month to Save the Children. Giving that amount to the charity, he says, “is hard when my spending money is only twice that. If you really believe in the cause and you tell someone about it, they’ll start to believe in it too.” Wong grew up in the lap of luxury in Burien and graduated from Lakeside School in Seattle, the same private school Bill Gates attended. Wong spent eight years at Lakeside, where the cost of tuition and fees combined can exceed $25,000 at the high school level.

Wong said his community service work during a high school trip to China in the summer of 2004 opened his eyes to the suffering of impoverished people in other countries. When he graduated high school, he decided to move away from his parent’s Burien home to live on his own in Seattle.

“I learned a lot in China and saw things most people never get to see,” Wong explains. “It only took me one month in China to figure out that I’ve wasted so much time doing nothing. It really opened my eyes to the rest of the world.”

After returning from China, Wong was so moved by his experiences that he gave a speech to his fellow Lakeside students about the importance of paying attention to suffering and poverty in the world, and about donating time and money to help those less fortunate than themselves.

“Most kids don’t realize that while they’re driving around in their fancy cars, listening to their I-Pods, children around the world are starving and playing only with things they made themselves,” Wong says.

At this job, Wong can work both for himself and for the people he wants to help. The base pay is $8 an hour with performance bonuses. Wong says if three people a day sign up to donate to Save the Children, then he is paid about $10 an hour. Asking people for money, however, is not an easy task.

Wong is at work on the Ave with team members Bryan Krieger and Maggie Flaherty. “So,” Flaherty says, addressing a pedestrian, “I heard you want to be a hero, and I thought I’d meet you here to finalize the process!” The pedestrian puts his head down and walks past quickly. Flaherty shrugs it off and tries the same line on a girl in designer jeans and a college sweatshirt. The girl laughs and walks on. “I’m like a street performer, a professional greeter,” Flaherty says, her enthusiasm lowered just the slightest bit.

Some people smile, a few mutter “no thank you,” but most people just brush past Wong and his comrades. Still, each person gets the same friendly greeting from Wong, his voice ringing with enthusiasm and determination as he walks with them halfway down the block, begging for a moment of their time.

When someone politely stops, out comes the black binder. Wong flips through the pages, pointing out maps of the countries in which Save the Children works and big, bold printed statistics about starvation, illness and child soldiers. Wong’s binder includes a newspaper story of the Pakistan quake with a photo of a young, injured girl tied by ropes to a makeshift stretcher. Wong ripped the article out of last week’s Seattle Times and laminated it himself. Some people listen to Wong for five minutes or so, all the time looking around for an escape route. One girl literally runs past.

“It’s like they’re actually, mortally terrified!” says Wong, laughing.

But then, one young woman stops to listen. She seems interested and looks through the whole binder. She talks to Wong for five minutes, and then ten. She tells Wong she’s a sophomore at the University of Washington and doesn’t have much money.

Well, give up one cocktail every week,” suggests Wong. “Or let a guy buy you a drink and then take the money and give it to the children, instead.”
Wong hands her a registration form and she hands him a credit card. Wong thanks the woman five different times; she is the fourth pedestrian he has persuaded to sign up as a sponsor.

This is a good day for Wong.