Feel Good Guru

I joined Twitter just over a year ago not knowing much about it but recognizing its enormous potential as a zeitgeist discovery tool. I immediately set out to find my tribe, and met some beautiful souls - beauty in 140 character spurts. I soon craved more “social” from my social media, so decided to reach beyond my monitor for some human-2-human contact with my followers and the first “Tweetuplift” - a tweetup with a positive purpose - was born.

I invited my followers from Twitter in the Los Angeles area on Christmas Day 2008 to bring leftovers down to the beach to give to homeless people. Michael Liskin called it “flash philanthropy” after ten people showed up in the pouring rain to give food and raincoats to some cold and hungry people. In my mind a higher purpose for Twitter was affirmed.

One of the people I met that day was Mark Horvath. He drove all the way down to Venice from Glendale, where he’d been working in a homeless shelter feeding people Christmas brunch, to deliver several boxes of raincoats.

Mark told me that he knows homelessness intimately from his own experience on the streets of Hollywood and that he was on the verge of losing everything again. I was deeply touched that someone who was so close to the cracks would show up with a lifeline for others who had fallen through.

I started tuning in more closely to his @hardlynormal Twitter stream and saw that he’d recently created InvisiblePeople.tv giving a face and a voice to homelessness. It’s powerful stuff - maybe even offensive - but Mark’s hope is that by putting up videos of homeless people and their personal stories, unedited and raw, we’ll get mad enough to do something.

This past summer, Mark took a road trip across America, not to have a vacation or see the tourist attractions, but to enter tent cities, skid rows, and cheap motels to give a forum for homeless people to tell their story. All over the country people were moved to take action, inspired by Mark’s mission to end homelessness.

On any given day in Mark’s Twitter stream, you’ll read about and watch videos of real people who have lost their job, lost their family, lost their home, and have ended up in Mark’s van being driven to Target for baby diapers or, on a really happy day, to Walmart for clothes and toys for a single mom and her 9-year-old boy when Mark’s Twitter followers have responded to a plea.

When I talked to Mark recently about what he does, he said, “Believe me, I’d rather be in Hawaii living a comfortable life with a wife and no worries, but when I walk by someone on the street with no socks on, I think ‘Who’s gonna do this if not me?’”

It’s this selfless commitment to “invisible people” I witness from Mark day after day, week after week, month after month that inspires me to name Mark Horvath my Twitter Hero of the Year.

My hope is that Mark’s story will inspire more of us to use social media for its highest purpose.

The next Tweetuplift will be in a private garden in Venice on Sunday, January 17 from 1-4 pm to raise funds for Mark to continue doing his amazing work. Can you make it?

Tweet This Post