Raise your hand if you like to exercise regularly (yes, playing golf is considered exercising). Keep your hand raised if you think turning your next workout into meaningful and direct contributions to a social or environmental project is a good idea. Still with me? Great. Put your hand down and read on to learn more about our Driving the Green Recommendation of the Month: Health & Fitness Mobile App - Active Giving.

Last summer I was introduced to the mobile app Active Giving and since then, I’ve used it almost everyday while taking my dog Stella for a walk. Active Giving uses a GPS-enabled program to track and convert your outdoor physical activity into contributions to social and environmental projects. 

Active Giving is a for profit social enterprise that uses advertising revenues from its partner companies to fund the projects it supports. The founders of the app are athletes themselves and created Active Giving to build a community through sports to help mitigate the unparalleled challenge of climate change. 

 “We believe that by taking care of oneself through sport activities everyone can have a positive impact on our community and the health of the planet!” - Founders of Active Giving

To truly engender its mission to create impactful communities, Active Giving also has capabilities that enable users to build team challenges and competitions within their personal and professional communities. This means rival book clubs can have an ‘Audio Book 5K’ to see who can plant the most trees while listening to David Attenborough’s newest book, ‘A Life on Our Planet’. It also means that country clubs and golf courses can host weekly or monthly competitions among their membership to see who can plant the most trees in exchange for free lessons or other prizes. 

Downloading Active Giving is super simple and the only issue I’ve encountered while using the app is a personal one: I forget to turn it on. The GPS-enabled program tracks your outdoor movement in kilometers (1 km = 0.62 miles) and per their website, to plant 1 tree the user needs to run 5 kilometers, cycle or walk 10 kms, swim 1 km or burn 200 kilocalories.

If yoga, dance or indoor cycling is more your speed or if it’s just too cold to be outside, the app allows you to manually log your workout information, all you need to do is just select your activity and provide some information like the distance traveled or the length of your workout. The list of activities in both the GPS-enabled section and manual section is extensive so there really is no excuse why you shouldn’t start using it today.

Here is the list of social and environmental projects you can choose from on Active Giving:

1. Trees for the Future - Trees for the Future partners with farmers, up to 300 families at a time, to provide training, mentoring, seeds, and nursery supplies in exchange for land, labor, water and entrepreneurial spirit. TREES guides the farmers through the process of using trees to protect, diversify, and eventually optimize their crop land. Active Giving has financed 121,041 trees so far.

2. Eden Reforestation Projects - Eden Reforestation Projects mission is to provide fare wage employment to impoverished villagers as agents of global forest restoration. They hire the poorest of the poor to grow, plant and guard to maturity native species forests. Active Giving has financed 38,980 trees so far.

3. World Bicycle Relief - World Bicycle Relief is an international non-profit organization that builds and distributes rugged, specially designed, locally assembled, high quality bicycles to students, healthcare workers, and entrepreneurs in rural developing regions where walking is the primary mode of transportation. World Bicycle Relief envisions a world where distance is no longer a barrier to independence or livelihoods.

4. World Wildlife Fund - Around for nearly 60 years, WWF has worked in nearly 100 countries collaborating with people to develop and deliver innovative solutions that protect communities, wildlife, and the places in which they live.

5. WeForest - WeForest is an international non-profit that develops high quality forest restoration and conservation projects for companies committed to stopping global warming.

*Active Giving is not a sponsor of Driving the Green. This app is recommended to you because we use it and believe in its social and environmental mission.