Favorite Charities?

[iris lily]

This is a small rant.

Today I had my check written and in an envelope ready to mail to my local NPR affiliate. I needed their address. You would not believe the number of places I had to look to find it:

Looked 2 places in phone book white pages
looked in the yellow pages

They are not listed in the phone book at all.

So, I went to their website, the donor page of their website. There is no address on their donor page, it's full of ways to donate except for the way I want to donate: send a check. You'd think they'd have a small box saying Send your Check to xxx address.

Finally I found their mailing address on their "contact us" page.

I remember having similar problems in finding Wampler's address on his old web site. I am a simple woman, I just want to mail a check. I don't want to fill out an online form, I don't want to choose premiums, I just want to put it in the mail.

Please do not make it so hard to send the money.

[rosarugosa]

Smile Train. They offer free cleft repair to millions of children in developing countries. My son was born with cleft lip/palate, and we are lucky that he has had the best of care from Seattle Children's Hospital. Many people around the world are not so lucky, and have to live as outcasts in their community because they haven't been able to get this simple, yet life altering surgery.

Anne, That's definitely one of my favorites too. My baby sister was born with a cleft palate (she is 48 now), and she had such a brilliant surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital, that I didn't really even get what the big deal was, until I met a young man about 15 years ago who did not have benefit of such a brilliant surgeon. They are running a lot of magazines ads these days, and those pictures get me right where I live. My employer matches us at 50% for human service related charitable contributions (with no upper limit I might add), so this organization is at the top of my list for my employer-sponsored charitable giving. My sister is a beautiful woman, and I shudder to think of what her fate might have been given a different set of circumstances.

[flowerseverywhere]

I was asked to give a donation today to a non profit that my neighbor works at. I decided to research it and found out that the CEO is making over $600,000 a year, and there are multiple officers making over $250,000. I declined and told the asker why. I have started to research charities and if this is the case I don't give. My top line is that anyone in the company can't make more than twice as much as DH and I did in our top earning years when we were both working overtime as professionals.

I have been buying extra groceries when I have good coupons and drop them off at the local volunteer food bank- I don't use many prepared foods but when the chips are down a nice can of ravioli or soup can be very helpful. so many people are out of work or underemployed I hope it helps someone get through a tough time. My favorite charity is my local library. I give money with the instructions it must be used for books or magazines. I don't care which ones.

[Bugeah]

My favorite charity is World Vision and I am a Child Ambassador for them. We sponsor three girls through WV (1 from Ethiopia, 1 from Zambia, and 1 from Guatemala). As a Child Ambassador I carry around child sponsorship folders and tell people about all the benefits of being a child sponsor. I absolutely love it. I can't afford to sponsor more than 3 kids at this time, so being a Child Ambassador allows me to help out more children without going broke. WV spent 85% of their income last year on the programs, only 5% went to management expenses. They also support other areas of need such as micro-financing, emergency aid relief, World Food Program, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, protection for trafficked children, and much more.

[Selah]

I also have just started contributing to Kiva.org, which is an amazing organization that facilitates donors lending very small amounts of money (in $25 increments) to people in developing nations to start businesses. You go on the website and search for profiles of people who want to establish or expand their small businesses. The entrepreneur posts how much of a loan they need (anywhere from $150 to $5,000) and donors from all over the world pitch in whatever they want towards the loan. When enough donors have contributed to the entrepreneur, a local microlending body issues the loan and the entrepreneur is then on the hook to invest the money in his/her business and pay the loan back over time. When the loan is repaid, you can choose to get your money back or simply loan it to another entrepreneur, or to the same entrepreneur again if he or she wishes to continue to expand the business.

I learned of this organization from a show broadcast on the Halogen network (on cable) called "Penny Revolution," which shows how a very small amount of money can make an incredible difference in the life of one person and their family/community. In my case, I contributed towards a loan of about $1500 to a woman in Azerbaijan who wanted to expand her retail shop to the point where she could sell things besides the tea sets she was limited to, due to a lack of money to invest in more diverse inventory. About twenty different people from all over the world contributed to her loan, and it felt SO great to get an update from Kiva when her loan had been funded! I can't wait to see further progress updates about her business...she was displaced in the '90s during the Nagorno-Karabakh (sp?) civil war, and has been struggling for some time to support her husband and children.

I find Kiva.org to be a great method of really helping people connect in real-life, real-time ways. Sometimes I can't grasp issues that are so massive, like world hunger, clean water, refugees, epidemics, and so on...they are so big they are almost paralyzing, and it is hard to feel one person can do anything at all. But with things like Kiva.org and child sponsorship, you develop a relationship with a person and know how your money is actually serving a purpose. And spending time in local volunteer capacities is also extremely rewarding...in those cases, you get to meet the people yourself!

[janharker]

Ditto on Kiva.

[dado potato]

I include Heifer International in my giving (generally once a year in December). I believe what they say about what they do with donations.
And Salvation Army... there but for fortune go you or I. "Blood and Fire!"