It’s deadly, dangerous, and downright depressing. That’s right, we’re still talking poverty here. But before you flip to some other page looking for something a bit more uplifting, stop! I’ve got some great news.
You’re about to find out all the cool things you can do with money to turn the world around. For just a few cents a day (as they like to say on TV), you can do your part to clean up your local river, send another kid to camp, give cancer a run for its money, and even feed a family of four this year. True, you might not have mega bucks to throw around and get your name engraved on the wall at a museum, yet there’s plenty you can do to still have an impact and make your money count.
Kids just like you have been known to collect new shoes to give to other children who have never had a new pair in their lives. Others donate DVDs to hospitals, dish out Thanksgiving turkey in soup kitchens, or snuggle abandoned animals at the local animal shelter every week.
Fundraising. Volunteering. Charity. Stick them all together and you can make the world a happier place for everybody.
Guess what? While I was researching this page for this book, news broke out that nearly 40—count ’em, 40—American billionaires pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes to charity someday.
Star Wars creator George Lucas is on the list. So is Jeff Skoll, the past president of eBay. It happened because Microsoft head honcho Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, a famous investor, simply asked them to do it. (“Come on, you can spare a couple billion. Everybody’s doing it…”) By signing the “Giving Pledge,” the ultra-wealthy promise to donate most of their wealth in their lifetimes or after they die.
If all the 400-plus American billionaires make the same vow, people around the world will feel the force—to the tune of $600 billion.
Okay, we can’t all be billionaires. But you and I can use our personal power to do good in the world, too. You can:
Who wants to volunteer and raise money alone? Join or start a Giving Circle and do good with good friends. A Giving Circle is basically a group of people who get together to pool their time and money in order to have a bigger impact on the causes they want to get involved in.
Say you and your friends decide to support your local animal shelter. You can work together selling doggy treats for charity or meet up after school and do volunteer dog walking together.
Not only do Giving Circles tend to raise more money than a bunch of individual people donating separately, but they’re also fun! To start one:
Curious as to how far the money you raise could go? Remember how in Chapter 9 we were talking about the importance of education in wiping out poverty? This is kind of ambitious, but just for argument’s sake: Imagine if you and your Giving Circle got together and raised enough money to build a school for rural kids in, say, the West African country of Sierra Leone. Let’s take a peek…
Raise money through bake sales, car washes, dance-a-thons, and selling fair-trade chocolate bars. Stay focused, eyes on the prize, and over $10,000 later…
A crew of grown-ups and teens from your country work with local builders to build a new school. Your money also pays for desks, a blackboard, paper, and pencils.
Local kids finally have a chance to go to a free school!
The cocoa farmers still need workers, so unemployed parents and relatives take over the jobs at the cocoa plantations from those kids and bring in money for their families.
Meanwhile, kids are learning to read, write, and do math. Now that they have an education, a whole world opens up to them. UNICEF, a global children’s charity and arm of the United Nations, claims that for every year of schooling a child gets, the amount of money she could earn goes up 10 percent.
Once these kids grow up and make a decent salary, their own children won’t have to work either.
While there’s no doubt that this is a grand dream, it goes to show that if planned out properly, a charitable mission can really pay off. Theoretically, all that bake sale money would have an impact on other kids, not just today, but way into the future, too. What a sweet deal!
Take it from Marni across the page, starting a charity is a lot of hard work. Fortunately her mom and dad were able to help. But if you’ve got a great idea that can help the planet, and no one else has thought of it yet, building your own charity might make sense. Just remember:
If you don’t feel like jumping through so many hoops, consider volunteering at a similar organization that already exists. Then you can bring your great idea to them and maybe they’ll run with it.
Lexi, Romi, Marni, and Berni Marta,
Kid Flicks, United States
A private tour of Air Force One? That’s what Marni and Berni Marta received in 2008 when the sisters won that year’s President’s Volunteer Service Award.
“My dad said, ‘In my 50 years, I’ve never reached a point in my career when I’ve done something like this,’” says Marni now. “It just shows that you don’t have to be a certain age to do something good.”
That “something good” is Kid Flicks, a charitable organization that donates thousands of new and used movies on DVDs to children’s hospitals across the U.S. and South Africa. Marni was just 11 years old when she and her three young sisters launched the project in 2002.
Not that they had any idea what they were getting themselves into. What started out as just a little spring cleaning at their home in California has since turned into a nationwide effort. Kid Flicks has donated over 56,600 DVDs for children and teens to over 566 hospitals and has helped thousands of kids pass the time while sick or recovering from surgery.
“I know when I’m in a bad mood I like to watch movies. I can only imagine how kids in the hospital are feeling,” says Marni.
At first the sisters and their parents would drive from hospital to hospital to drop off the flicks, but after one grueling five-hour journey, they realized it was time to apply for grants and turn Kid Flicks into an official not-for-profit organization. Their dad, a lawyer, helped fill out the paperwork.
Even though the sisters are now scattered in cities across the country and are working or going to university, hardly a week goes by that they haven’t received movie donations from kids, families, schools, churches, temples, groups, and even movie studios.
Some kids in other states even organize movie drives and collect DVDs for Kid Flicks.
“I think it’s really empowering to see that age doesn’t have to be an obstacle when it comes to doing something important
for other people,” Marni says.
Let’s say you want to raise cash with friends to save the much-maligned giant moray eel. (The nine-foot sea monsters are kind of cute…if you squint and turn your head just so.) So you hop online and do your research. Soon you’re reading about the Society of Eel Enthusiasts, a charity that researches all things Gymnothorax javanicus and helps preserve their natural habitat. Score.
Ring, ring! “Hello, would you like to donate money to the Blind Bat Firefighters’ Foundation? We could really use your help.” It seems like every night your family gets calls like this one, asking you to give, give, and give some more. But before your family donates a cent, ask yourself if the call makes sense.
But is this charitable organization worthy of your hard-earned money? After all, even though most charities and non-profits do good work, not all of them use their donors’ money wisely. And some so-called charities are nothing but big, fat scammers ready to rake in a percentage of the billions of dollars nice people like you donate each year.
For instance, back in 2007, newspapers reported that the Wish Kids Foundation, which said it gave dying children their final wish, never actually helped anyone. Instead, the people who ran the fraudulent charity were really just trying to buy themselves an airplane!
So how can you tell the difference between legit charities and bogus ones?
First off, you’ll want to do your homework. Governments and other organizations in the United States, Canada, and many other countries around the world offer lists of genuine charities online. You can also take a look at the charity’s website. Many are required to tell people how their money is being spent. Some of it will go to fundraising, rent, staff wages, and bills. But most of it should go to its cause.
If you’re having a tough time figuring out what the organization’s annual report is telling you, ask your mom, dad, or a teacher to help you.
And don’t feel bad about being nosy. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of printing fundraising cookbooks or selling chocolates for a worthy cause with your friends, you need to know if your money is going to go to the right people and for the right reasons.
That’s a really good question, and it’s one only you can answer. Maybe your little sister has hydrocephalus (too much fluid around the brain), so you decide you want to give your allowance to a charity that helps kids with the condition. Or do you feel passionate about putting the brakes on global warming? There are many environmental organizations that do good work. Or maybe you really believe in the power of microlending and giving people a way to start their own business. Giving is partly an emotional process—and that’s okay.
But here’s something to think about. A few years ago something called the Copenhagen Consensus—a panel of eight super-smart economists (including three Nobel Prize winners)—figured out which causes would offer givers the most bang for their bucks.
So you’ve finally grown out of that mint-green sweater your grandma made you two birthdays ago (about time!) and you’re ready to clean out the closet. Why not donate it to your local charity? The sweater will surely go to someone who really needs it (or at least has a penchant for mint-green cardigans), right?
Not so fast. A few years ago, ABC News in the U.S. decided to look a little closer at what happens to the many billions of pounds of clothing Americans donate to charity each year. What did the reporter discover? Your used clothes are usually sold rather than given away.
So let’s say you decide to contribute the sweater to a good cause. What happens to it? Where does it go?
1. Usually, a small number of the best-quality castoffs get sold at a charity’s thrift shop.
2. But if Gram’s knitting doesn’t make the grade, the sweater might join an estimated 90 percent of all clothing donations that get sold to textile-recycling firms. This doesn’t sound too bad. The charity makes money by selling the clothes and the for-profit company does, too.
3. Even better, the recycler takes some of the unsellable clothes and turns them into cleaning cloths that people like mechanics use to wipe down car parts. Clothes, say good-bye to the dump.
4. But that sweater wasn’t quite right for that purpose, so it gets loaded into a large crate and put on ships headed for developing countries.
5. Once in, say, Zambia, the clothing is unloaded and sold on the street at markets where people can buy cheap-quality clothes for a few bucks. Seems like a win-win? At this point a lot of people disagree about whether dumping cheap clothes on a community is a good or bad idea. What do you think?
Knowing all the angles, what’s a kid to do with all that too-small attire collecting dust in the closet? Do your homework. Ask the charity that you plan to donate your garments to what it does with them, how much money it will actually make, and how it plans to spend it. Big name, well-known thrift stores are generally safe bets and will indeed use the majority of the money to help your community.
Although this list can give us an idea of what we need to focus on to help people live healthy, full lives, it is just a list. With your snazzy brainpower and drive to make a difference, don’t be afraid to donate your time and money to causes that you believe in. It’s your money, honey.
And you get to decide how it should be spent to make the world a better place.
Who in their right mind would go to all the trouble of hosting a charity drive, collecting 2,000 pounds of clothes and canned food, and shipping it on planes to a country that has just been hit by an earthquake, hurricane, or flood, only to watch the donations molder and rust in crates for six months? But this story plays out more often than you’d think.
Surprised? Me, too. But it turns out there are some really good reasons why governments and relief agencies don’t necessarily want your old jeans, shoes, and baked goods sent to ripped-to-shreds regions. Those donations just clog up the air and seaports and can actually make it harder to help the people who need it. Relief workers might lose valuable time sorting through boxes of goods when they could be out on the ground doing good. And sometimes clothes, food, and other things people send are not appropriate for the climate or culture they’re being shipped to. It can be more cost effective to buy locally than to airlift goods from a faraway place.
But what if you still want to donate? One word of advice: Send money. Cash donations are quick, efficient, and can adapt to any culture, at any time. (In other words, they can’t use your old snowsuit in Ghana, so give it to your little brother instead.)
