Charities

As anyone following the news knows the economic situation is less than optimal. As I was thinking about this I was reminded of something that happened a few years ago. I was sitting around with some friends. The topic of conversation was economics and one person mentioned micro-finance and how well some of the micro-finance projects were doing in helping the poor particularly poor women. This lead to a general discussion of various charities and several individuals in the group mentioned charities; some of which the others had never heard of. These charities were not "ideological" that is they were not associated with a religion or political movement; they were just charities to help others.

What was interesting to me is the everyone in the group had known everyone else for at least two years and in some cases over 15 years but the idea of mentioning charitable donations had not come up before. We just had never thought about each other donating to a charity. So remembering that conversation lead me to think that making a post about charities might be a good idea since charities tend to have declining revenues during economic downturns.

There are many charities and there are also rating agencies which rate how much of the donations go to the intended cause. So you can find plenty of worthy non-ideological groups who are not pushing religion or politics but who are helping people. I like to think both locally and globally so I will mention ones that I support and I think do a good job. Local to me is Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. Globally there is Smile Train which provides surgery to fix cleft lip and palate defects in poor children.

So if you can afford to make a donation now would be a good time to find a charity that you can help support. Thanks.