Charity: Saving the World One Life at a Time
I've been thinking about two things this year. One is a news blurb I saw, that said that the most effective way to give money to families and communities is to give it to women. Apparently, women are far more likely to spend the money in ways that benefit their children and families in the long term than men are. Men, it seems, use the money to buy the community a round of beer, while women are more likely to buy a cow. Gender stereotype or not, it stuck with me.
The other thing that's stuck with me this year is a My Turn piece in "Newsweek" written by a young Haitian woman, who wrote about how difficult it is to be the child of a parent with AIDS in the developing world, how she became the only caretaker for her father, in a community in which AIDS was so stigmatized she couldn't say why her father was ill or why she couldn't go to school any longer. Since reading that article, I've been more aware of similar reports; there was a program on National Geographic (I think, but it could have been Discovery) about how very young children in Africa find themselves the heads of households full of younger siblings, following the death of their parents.
So, as I was thinking about what charities I wanted to give money to this year, I started looking for organizations that addressed those specific problems. And ran into a problem of my own: how can you tell if a charity that isn't well known is legitimate, or a scam? I've found three websites that evaluate charities based on how much of their money goes to the causes they address (instead of as administrator's salaries or toward fundraising expenses). I found CharityNavigator.org to be the most useful, but I also looked at the American Institute of Philanthropy and the BBB's Give.org site. If you haven't yet decided how to spend your charitable dollars, browsing any of their lists is sure to give you plenty of ideas.
This is where I decided to donate: Toys for Tots (of course; it's a USMC charity), Doctors Without Borders (a Nobel Peace Prize is credibility enough for me!), the Save the Children HIV/AIDS fund (which helps communities of children orphaned by AIDS and provides assistance to child-headed households), and Women For Women International (which provides micro-credit loans to women, job skills training, rights awareness programs, and helps women register to vote). The life that Ed and I have lead for the past fifteen years has maybe made us feel more like citizens of the world than many Americans feel, which is why most of our money is going to help people outside of the U.S. But I don't think it matters the nationality of the person you help, as long as you help someone. After all, we Americans are among the most fortunate people in the world. Every year, I find myself realizing how very lucky our family has been over the past year, to have good health, to have each other, to have all of the necessities of life, and of course to have the love of our friends and families.
Did you know that the average American this year will donate 2.2% of his or her income to charity, and that the average American living during the Depression donated 2.9%? I made a rough estimate of what 3% of our income would be, and was ashamed at how much more that was than what I'd donated. When I thought about how little 3% is of every month's pay, I realized that I could probably do more. So besides this holiday's donations, and the times during the year when we all sent money (for the hurricanes' victims, to important campaigns like Cure Autism Now), starting now I'm also sponsoring a woman who's been displaced by conflict, through Women For Women, and a child's community in Nepal (the choice of place was random, although I guess I could have specified) through Save the Children. Yeah, I only just started working again after a gap of seven months, but even so I know I spend that much a month on things I don't really need. This way, I can make a little headway on giving my 3% and know that I'm making a real, immediate, measurable difference in at least two people's lives. How cool is that? Something I do can absolutely, clearly make another human being's life better. It's an amazing ability.
I hope all of you have had an equally fortunate year this year, and are having an equally joyful and inspired holiday.
The other thing that's stuck with me this year is a My Turn piece in "Newsweek" written by a young Haitian woman, who wrote about how difficult it is to be the child of a parent with AIDS in the developing world, how she became the only caretaker for her father, in a community in which AIDS was so stigmatized she couldn't say why her father was ill or why she couldn't go to school any longer. Since reading that article, I've been more aware of similar reports; there was a program on National Geographic (I think, but it could have been Discovery) about how very young children in Africa find themselves the heads of households full of younger siblings, following the death of their parents.
So, as I was thinking about what charities I wanted to give money to this year, I started looking for organizations that addressed those specific problems. And ran into a problem of my own: how can you tell if a charity that isn't well known is legitimate, or a scam? I've found three websites that evaluate charities based on how much of their money goes to the causes they address (instead of as administrator's salaries or toward fundraising expenses). I found CharityNavigator.org to be the most useful, but I also looked at the American Institute of Philanthropy and the BBB's Give.org site. If you haven't yet decided how to spend your charitable dollars, browsing any of their lists is sure to give you plenty of ideas.
This is where I decided to donate: Toys for Tots (of course; it's a USMC charity), Doctors Without Borders (a Nobel Peace Prize is credibility enough for me!), the Save the Children HIV/AIDS fund (which helps communities of children orphaned by AIDS and provides assistance to child-headed households), and Women For Women International (which provides micro-credit loans to women, job skills training, rights awareness programs, and helps women register to vote). The life that Ed and I have lead for the past fifteen years has maybe made us feel more like citizens of the world than many Americans feel, which is why most of our money is going to help people outside of the U.S. But I don't think it matters the nationality of the person you help, as long as you help someone. After all, we Americans are among the most fortunate people in the world. Every year, I find myself realizing how very lucky our family has been over the past year, to have good health, to have each other, to have all of the necessities of life, and of course to have the love of our friends and families.
Did you know that the average American this year will donate 2.2% of his or her income to charity, and that the average American living during the Depression donated 2.9%? I made a rough estimate of what 3% of our income would be, and was ashamed at how much more that was than what I'd donated. When I thought about how little 3% is of every month's pay, I realized that I could probably do more. So besides this holiday's donations, and the times during the year when we all sent money (for the hurricanes' victims, to important campaigns like Cure Autism Now), starting now I'm also sponsoring a woman who's been displaced by conflict, through Women For Women, and a child's community in Nepal (the choice of place was random, although I guess I could have specified) through Save the Children. Yeah, I only just started working again after a gap of seven months, but even so I know I spend that much a month on things I don't really need. This way, I can make a little headway on giving my 3% and know that I'm making a real, immediate, measurable difference in at least two people's lives. How cool is that? Something I do can absolutely, clearly make another human being's life better. It's an amazing ability.
I hope all of you have had an equally fortunate year this year, and are having an equally joyful and inspired holiday.
posted by Torah Cottrill at
Sunday, December 18, 2005
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home