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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quartz" data-source="post: 6368307" data-attributes="member: 40552">For me, it's the combination of interest, awareness, opportunity, and convenience.I've got to be sufficiently interested to care about it. Simple enough.I need to be aware of the possibility and convinced of the need for action. If I don't know about something, I can't do anything. I also like to be recently informed. I'll try to read up on a subject before committing myself. And I try to not act blind: it might happen that after reading about the subject I decide that I agree with the other side!I must have the opportunity to act. It's no good telling me of a protest march or a park clean-up or whatever the day before. It's also no good asking me to do something I can't do. I'm in IT but that doesn't mean I can create you a website; I can, however, go through the content and correct it. Opportunity can be flexible: searching woodland for a missing child would cause me to put other things on hold. Ask something of me that I can do and have the time or can make the time to do and you're on a winner.And it must be convenient. Attending a protest march in London, 450 miles away, requires days and considerable expense and is simply not possible. Writing to my MP takes perhaps half an hour of my time (I try to not just dash off a note). Putting money in the charity bucket a few seconds. Helping the local church takes a few hours now and then. Cleaning a beach of litter takes half a day. Physical effort is another side of this. I'm fat and unfit, so it's no good coming to me if you need a group of athletes, though I'll happily act as chauffeur, hand out water bottles, make tea, assist the cook, and the like. This all sounds very selfish, but really, it's that I'm aware of my limitations.</blockquote>

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