Week 7 Coming to a Close!
Have to get this out of the way. Reminder that the biggest change to the Pay It Forward Curation Contest is that we have moved the cut off for submissions to Saturday night 11:59pm CDT (CST with Daylight Saving time). This gives you about 23 hours from now to get your submissions in for Week 7.
Random Thoughts
Going to try something little different here and just give you some of my thoughts. It will be a little random and unfiltered as I'm not going to edit this multiple times to try and make it perfect, but let's see how this goes. Please tell me if you like it or hate it in the comments...I'm good with either.
Want to talk about the Pay It Forward Contest for a minute and all of the amazing people who are taking time out of their lives to try and help others. Those of your who have entered in the contest so far this week, 
| The efforts of those entering and judging the contest truly leaves me humbled. |
|---|
I see posts mentioning my name (thanks @GINAbot) like the one 
Source: Original Photo Taken by
Each day I become more addicted to steemit even with it's flaws. The key is there are people putting up a fight against those who abuse the system, those who steal content, those who post 10+ times a day taking massive amounts of the reward pool, those abusing voting bots to earn rewards on complete and total garbage posts. You see if nobody took a stand against this abuse then I wouldn't be so excited about steemit. It's the fact that people do take notice and fight against the abusers that make me hopeful that in time some of these issues will be resolved and we can keep working to make steemit a great place to invest our time and money.
I feel there is a light at the end of this tunnel and as we move closer towards that light we all can profit. Part of that light is the new talent that comes onto steemit each and every day. The talent that we need to curate and help reward so they stick around long enough to help mold steemit into a powerhouse content generation machine that it can be.
Those that have helped feature 600+ posts now over the last 7 weeks are part of what makes me hopeful and excited about the future of steemit. Those that have the Pay It Forward mentality are here for more then just the profits you can earn and understand that you can enrich the lives of others with a simple gesture you are part of that light shinning at the end of the tunnel!
Thank you all for your effort and continued support!
Speaking of Support - New Sponsorship!
Know that many of you don't curate and enter the contest for the rewards and while I love that fact it is important to me to reward those of you that take the time to #payitforward. There are plenty of you that spend hours to find your bloggers and then create your curation post and this effort deserves rewards.
While I wish I was independently wealthy and could finance this venture out of pocket....I can't. My steem account is here to help my kids have choices in their futures and as much as I love all of you and your efforts my girls come first. So this contest can't be a financial burden to my family on top of the hours I spend.
Sure many of you realize this already, but this contest takes time and a lot of it. I'd say on an average week I am investing no less then 20 hours reading posts checking for plagiarism and verifying the entries are valid to the rule. Also making sure that the featured posts aren't past or really close to payout (please watch this!!). Then we add in the time for writing posts, updating the post with all the entries, and time on discord coordinating with Judges and answering questions from contestants and it's pretty close a full time unpaid job. Most nights see me staying up until 1-2am working on the contest to then be up at 6am. My time is my investment into this contest.
Now I say this not to complain as honestly I love it! The raw talent that is put before me each week is amazing. Steemit is full of talented bloggers from around the world and each week the posts I get to read makes the far reaches of the world seem a whole lot closer.
So when someone with a huge heart 💓 comes along and offers to help sponsor the contest like 
Next week I'm hoping to arrange time with both our sponsor's to do an interview and share their thoughts on steemit, why they felt it was important to donate their money to help support the Pay It Forward Contest, and more. Now to get these very generous people to agree to the interviews 🙄
That turned into a much longer post then I expected. If you read it all I'm sorry I took so much of your time...lol.