Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Charitable & Meaningful Gift Ideas
Charitable Gifts. Have you heard of a charity that sounds cool but want to verify they're legit? Charity Navigator evaluates charities' financial health by assessing their organizational efficiency and capacity. The following charities all have 4 star ratings by Charity Navigator:
- Second Harvest Food Bank: Serving Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, Second Harvest helps end hunger in our community. You can donate food at various distribution sites or make a monetary donation.
- Family Giving Tree: This Milpitas-based organization gives holiday gifts to underprivileged children as well as backpacks for back to school.
- Family Violence Prevention Fund: This San Francisco-based organization works to end violence against women and children by building strong and healthy families and communities.
- RAFT (Resource Area for Teachers): This San Jose non-profit provides creative hands-on activities, educational resources, workshops and inexpensive materials to enrich pre K-12 education and community group programs. You can make a materials or a monetary donation.
- Modest Needs: After donating, you're able to allocate points to a specific grant applicant, a low income family who needs temporary financial assistance.
- Oxfam America: An international relief and development organization that creates lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice, your $75 donation will raise a crocodile, $30 will plant 50 trees, and $18 will give a can of worms to a farmer.
- World Wildlife Fund: Adopt an endangered species and help save them from extinction. You can adopt a polar bear, penguin, panda or choose from 90 other species for amounts ranging from $25 to $250.
- Gratitude Box: Oprah highlighted this gift idea on her pre-Thanksgiving show. Perfect for your family, each family member writes a note to another family member thanking them for something, telling them what they love about them, or describing their holiday wishes for them. Put all the notes in a lovely, decorative box and you have a lifetime keepsake.
- Family Cookbook: You can collect your favorite recipes from family members or write them down from memory, perhaps with a personalized memory of your own cooking with your Grandma or waking up to the smell of fresh blueberry muffins. Gather them in a book with a few pictures of family members cooking or of holiday gatherings, and you have a personalized, family history through recipes!
- Personalized Calendar: In addition to photos for each month, fill in every family member's birthday in the calendar so they'll have a reminder. If you use iphoto, you can even import birthdays from your address book!
- Time: You can give the gift of time to the busy people in your life with a Simplify gift certificate! Let Simplify take care of your friend's to-do list and household chores so they can spend that time on themselves, with their family and doing something they enjoy!
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1 comment:
Thanks for sharing the great gift ideas! I intern at DonorsChoose.org (also a 4 star charity), and figured I should do a quick, shameless plug. We offer really cool holiday gift cards: the giver makes a tax-deductible donation by purchasing the gift card, and the recipient chooses a specific classroom project to support.
S/he could choose a classroom in their hometown, or a project involving their favorite
hobby like knitting, technology, etc. There are over 14,000 projects
on the website, from every state and any topic you can imagine, so
it's a very personal gift.
The really fun, unique part of the gift card is that the recipient
then hears back from the classroom she supported!
Check them out at: http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/giftoptions.html
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