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1. SpendingGive as you earn, give as you spend, give as you surf - there are loads of ways in which you can make donations to charity without it costing you a penny. GivingMake your charity donations go further Charities Aid Foundation has a bunch of services which make your donations help even more people. Or plants. Or whales. Or Wales. Or whatever. Their site lists various ways of costlessly increasing the value of your donations including
Ethical investing including pensions Still on the rather grand front, if you're wanting to invest ethically in the first place, this is becoming increasingly manageable to do. See www.eiris.org Charity accounts Perhaps the closest any of us will get to being, or feeling like, Bill Gates or one of the Sainsbury family is to set up our own charity fund. You can have an account with the Charities Aid Foundation and tax efficiently, and with a philanthropic flourish of your pen, write out cheques to the charities of your choice. There are also charity vouchers and a sort of credit card thing as alternative methods. Ethical banking Charity credit cards Brighten up a shop assistant's day, spread the word about a favoured charity AND trigger extra donations with a picturesque charity credit card. Pics of exhilarated kids, or mournful dogs or imperious tigers illustrate the beneficiaries of another afternoon at M&S or on Amazon. This website will take you to the charitable cause of your choice, including ones supporting health, environment, disability and kids. Click'n'give Clicking through to another website doesn't need to cost - it can instead give! There are sites sponsored by companies, so that each time someone visits, the companies make a donation. Although these haven't really taken off in the UK, there are some excellent American websites which generate masses of charitable funds. Simply by having these as your home page, or signing up to their occasional email service, you can take a few seconds to visit their website and generate an automatic donation by the website's company sponsors. For example, The Hungersite has generated funds for more than 300 million cups of staple food for people across the world.
ShoppingAt last. An excuse to buy things and feel goooood about it. Ethical buying: fairtrade etc. Boycotting South African produce and Barclays Bank in the days of apartheid; boycotting Nestles chocolates, cereals, coffee and everything else because of their promotion of baby milk products in developing countries; some American restaurants recently changing the name of French fries (chips) to freedom fries in protest at France's response to the Iraq war; avoiding anything with a global brand on it because - well, Naomi Klein writes so compellingly about the evils of brand imperialism. All are variations on the discerning, socially just, impactful consumer theme. And these buying patterns are generally combined with making positive choices for products which have a very kosher heritage, mainly because of healthy labour-force and environmental practices. The essential websites are: Ethical Consumer There There are a growing number of websites where a percentage of what you spend is given to charities. For example, GiveAsYouGet.net is a shopping portal which helps you compare prices from hundreds of shops and suppliers in the UK and then takes the advertising commissions and donates them to charity. Whether it's retro chic, grunge or a new wardrobe for under £100 you're after, it's a charity shop that you should be headed for. They're increasingly also a fantastic source of second-hand books. Find the ones nearest to you either by going for a stroll down your high street or electronically
GiftsGreat website, great gifts - presies for friends and family and contributions to charities, ranging from community toilets in Africa to holidays for people in need. Not just for weddings, The Alternative Wedding List is an inspired and well thought out online wedding list service. Instead of toasters and kettles "that you don't really need" that "sit around in your loft and you'd never use", couples sign-up to a ready-made list that contains gifts to a range of charities. How great is that for couples, guests and charities?? 'Chocolate with a conscience', 'Heavenly chocolate with a heart' - not that we need any extra incentives to eat and give chocolate, but how much more emotionally enriching to be able to do so and help make the world a fairer and sweeter place. You choose the chocolate gift and the lucky recipient gets not only the chocolate world globe or map of Africa (yes, really), but also gets to choose which hunger relief project will benefit from the donation you have made. You don't need to send off to Ireland to get some good-hearted chox. You'll find Divine chocolates in your local sweetshop. You can feel the triple joy of melted chocolate in the mouth, released endorphins racing round your brain and the warm glow encasing your heart as you know that each Dubble Bubble, Divine Delights and Darkly Divine brings a fair income to the cocoa growers in Ghana. Hampers with not only delicious fair-traded chocolate and other staple foods, but also handcrafted gifts made by local artisans in developing countries. Fair Trade Hampers Gift catalogues CharityGifts.com describes itself as a (actually it describes itself as the official) charity Christmas Card and Gifts shopping mall. It's a quick way of seeing the catalogues of different charities including special offers exclusive to online customers. They have a related service - Goodwill, where several different charities benefit from your purchase. The concept doesn't really need much more explaining, but there's a nice article from the Guardian which describes the pleasures and possibilities of online charity shopping. Charity Christmas cards
Whether you're making a statement (Parents Against Greed At Noel), a donation or an aesthetic choice, there will be what you need produced as a charity Christmas card. Including faith neutral Seasons Greetings cards. Companies, or highly organised individuals, don't have to hide their socially aware light under a Christmas bushel or other plant, and can get charity cards over-printed with their own details. (Name, logo, favourite recipe, news of the offsprings' achievements this year...) |
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