The Smile Train They do cleft palate surgeries and every once in a while I send them $250 and that pays for one surgery for a child and that changes that child’s life forever. I like knowing that I have changed a whole person’s life.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital because they take care of kids, never turn anyone away and do good research.
I also donate to my local food bank. Most of the grocery stores in my area have a little food bank placard at the check out where you can pull a $1, $3 or $5 dollar ticket off and it has a barcode, they scan it along with the rest of your groceries and the money goes to the food bank. About 75% of the time I do at least $1. That, the $1, is not really going to make much of a difference, one way or the other for me, and it adds up over the year. And depending how flush I am, I try to do a $3 or $5 as often as I can.
Those are the regular donations I make. The rest of my “philanthropic” activity is kind of random.
And if anyone is interested charitywatch.org is a great site for evaluating charities and non-profits. You can find out how much, what percentage of the money they take in is actually spent on the cause they support, how much they spend on overhead, how much their executives are paid, etc.
What percentage of the money these organizations take in, that is actually spent on doing what these charities do is really important to me. I have a limited amount of money to donate and I want to know that as much as possible of the money I donate is actually going to provide services to people these charities serve.