Usually I associate Mother's Day with flowers and chocolate, but this year I'm getting my wonderful mother (I have the best mom in the world) something different. While on a late night on-line chess binge yesterday I came across a link to Global Giving.
This amazing website connects donors with great projects all around the globe, ranging from environmental change to hunger relief to education. One cool feature is that it tells you exactly what your money will do. For $20 this project will provide clean drinking water to one Bangladeshi child for a year. Give $250 to the same project and you will contruct latrines for five families (I thank God for our sewer system every day).
Right now they have a Mother's Day giving campaign relating to women. So instead of flowers I made a donation in my mom's name to free one Nepalese girl from being shipped off by her family to work in the city. In Nepal, poor rural families will sell their daughters as young as 7 into servitude for $40 or so. As you can imagine, there is a lot of abuse.
The group I gave to uses donations to pay for the girl's education, and provides the family with a pig as compensation for the lost money. Everybody wins. Girl gets to stay home and gets an education. Family gets a pig. Mom gets a card that I personalized from Global Giving telling her that I loved her enough to free a child in her name!
When I woke up this morning did I think I'd being freeing a Nepalese girl from bonded labor? No. That's Global Giving's genius. It allows anyone with the internet and a credit card to make a difference anywhere in the world. And you don't have to give a lot to do something amazing.
Make mom happy and see what you can do today.
1 comment:
Post a Comment