Charity Donations Volunteering and Fundraising @ ZsoltBalla.com

Miami traffic crippled by “lost shoes” - charity helps

Zsolt Balla — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:51:54 +0000

US Charity Soles4Souls, involved in providing footwear for those in need, said it would collect the several thousands of shoes that mysteriously “appeared” on a Miami highway on Friday morning, causing a severe traffic chaos. The charity will transport the shoes to Haiti and give them to the needy.

Soles4Souls charity donates footwear to Haiti

The shoes were dumped on the Palmetto highway, and they were reported to the local police shortly before 8am, during rush hour. According to the Florida Highway Petrol, they include several work boots, bath slippers, tennis sneakers, beach sandals, even inline skates. All of them appear to be used, and most of the shoes are tied together in pairs. The traffic had to be disrupted for hours due to the surprising hindrance, and although the police managed to clear one lane relatively quickly, delays serious delays were reported throughout the day until all of the shoes were removed from the location.

Lt. Pat Santangelo of the Florida Highway Petrol said it was unclear where the shoes had come from. No signs of a crash were found, and no stopping truck was reported.
Soles4Souls Charity contacted the Florida Police offering immediate action, after Lt. Pat Santangelo told journalists they were looking for a charity to give the shoes to. “These shoes are abandoned property and we’re happy that Soles4Souls can make good use out them,” Santangelo was quoted as saying.
Soles4Souls CEO Wayne Elsey dubbed the sight of the several thousand shoes a a stark reminder of how many shoes wasted across the US. “Too many perfectly good shoes are thrown away each year, and it’s a shame,” he said, adding that “Soles4Souls is dedicated to keeping usable footwear out of our landfills and putting them on the feet of needy people around the world.”
Soles4Souls was founded by Wayne Elsey after the 2004 tsunami hit Southeast Asia. According to the founder the idea of providing new or gently used shoes for the needy was triggered by a footage of the tsunami’s aftermath, showing a single pair of shoes washing the shores of the ocean. After a few calls to industry top-hats, Soles4Souls managed to donate a quarter of a million shoes to victims in the devastated countries.
It has, since then, distributed some 3.9 million pairs of shoes worldwide, with the help of shoe companies, retailers and individuals. Elsey estimates that over 300 Million people around the world don’t own a pair of shoes.
His charity’s motto is: Changing the World One Pair at a Time.

Volunteer opportunities for Christmas

Zsolt Balla — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:38:04 +0000

If anything, Christmas, or more generally speaking, the winter holidays are all about giving. It’s not a religious thing, rather basic, human tradition that, at this time of the year, we all tend to turn towards each other. While under “normal” circumstances, this would mean family, people who are left without their families for whatever reason (orphans, homeless or elderly people) are especially needy for human company. Volunteering opportunities in some cases can mean as little as providing your company, a couple of words or a human touch, or donating your time for those who are in the need.

A few days before Christmas we collected a couple of volunteer opportunities for the holidays.

Volunteer for Christmas with the Red Cross

The American Red Cross of Northeast Indiana said on Monday (Dec 21) that volunteers are needed at its shelters, “possibly through the weekend.”

Those who can volunteer are asked to call 484-9336 for more information and to sign up. On Sunday night, Red Cross shelters housed more than 300 people, and the organization said that its shelters will remain open until services are no longer needed by residents. The American Red Cross also accepts donations for its Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
Donate blood for Christmas
Organizations, such as the Miller Keystone Blood Center as you to donate blood for Christmas. According to them, while 60% of the population is eligible to donate blood, only some 5% of people will actually do so. You can book an appointment or show up at one of the following dates. Also, you can search for local opportunities or contact the American Red Cross.

Volunteer wrapping donated Christmas presents
Christmas is around the corner, and a whole array of charity organizations have collected Christmas presents for children (and possibly for adults) in the need. You can help them wrapping those Christmas presents or transporting them by donating your time or your driving skills.

Do you know of other volunteer opportunities for this Christmas? Please let us (and our readers) know among the comments.

9 Ways to adopt pets without having to walk or feed them

Zsolt Balla — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:17:13 +0000

Everybody loves pets. And it has always been an ongoing argument among dog aficionados, whether to pay a fortune for a pure-bred dog, or to adopt one homeless pet from a local shelter or directly from the street. The main reason why most people are reluctant to adopt pets, (despite being exactly as cute and clever as their full-blood peers), is that every home and every person’s life has a limited room for them. Not only the room in physical sense, but also the responsibility, the costs and the never ending tasks that belong to pets, that make people reject helping troubled animals.

But what if you could adopt an animal, make its life better, without actually taking it home? Without spending more time with it than you want, without having extra responsibilities and difficulties. Very few people would say no, when a helping hand can be so easy to offer.

Fortunately, there is a whole array of charities offering precisely this: helping pets (not only dogs, but many more species), with giving only what you are really ready to give. Furthermore, most of these are actually quite cheap. Today I have collected 9 different species you can adopt (either for yourself, or as an ideal Christmas present for one of your loved ones) this easy way.

1. Adopt a pet.com

Adopt a pet.com is the new name of an old website 1-800-SAVE-A-PET. The site offers a wide range of shelters (from the United States) offering dogs and cats for adoption, and it also has breed-specific subsites as well. Beside adopting a pet “the classical way”, you can also choose “virtual” adoption, and donate a minor (or bigger) sum to the organization. They accept occasional donations, while their Life Saving Club requires a monthly $7 donation (less than 0.25 cents a day). “Donations from caring people like you are our only means of support. Your automatic monthly gift truly helps ensure that we’ll be able to continue helping homeless pets find homes,” they write. Your donation is tax-deductible.

2. Adopt an endangered animal with WWF

You can adopt endangered animals with the help of the World Wildlife Fund. Adopting an endangered animal is one of the best ways to protect it, and the whole species. You’ll be providing help to an animal in great danger of extinction, and making a connection that lasts. Your donation (that can be as low as £3 a month) will grant you an adoption package consisting of a booklet, a plush toy animal, a print of your adopted animal, a greeting card and three issues of WWF’s Insight magazine. Species that can be adopted include polar bears, giant pandas, bengal tigers, orang-utans, asian elephants or black rhinos. Your 5 pounds donation to a Giant Panda, for example, could buy one fuel-efficient stove in the Minshan Mountains in China. These stoves can reduce firewood consumption by 30% and therefore help protect woodland and panda habitat. You can check how your donation could help other animals by browsing through the WWF Adoption website.

3. Adopt a Dolphin

Adopt a Dolphin website run by WDCS focuses on virtually adopting various species of dolphins. Your donations can help dolphin research, conservation and campaigning against bloody whaling.

4. Orca research

Well, Orca is another type of dolphin, but there is a website, focusing solely on Orca research and adoption. The Australian branch of WDCS runs this site. You can adopt an orca for yourself, or as a gift, and help protect whales and dolphins all over the world. You can have a special link with these orca who live along the coast of New Zealand. Your adoption will help WDCS protect these amazing animals.
Through a special link with an individual animal in the wild you will be helping to build a safer future for all whales and dolphins. The value of the adoption starts from $10 and it ranges up to $90.

With this program you choose a particular animal, and you can get regular updates on his or her activities. You can pick the animal by name on the Adopt an Orca website.

5. Adopt an acre of rainforest

Okay, this might not be as personal as having an Orca on your own (if only somewhere in the wild seas), but it is definitely at least as romantic as that one: you can adopt an acre (or more) rainforest at different parts of the world at this website. Territories include Costa Rica, Brazil, Australia, Africa or Palau. The program is run by he Nature Conservancy — the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. Not only can you adopt an acre of rainforest, but you can also pick different natural reserve areas, such as the Appalachians, the Californias or the Rockies as well.

Contributions start as low as $50 per acre in Africa, for example.With your $50 donation per acre to the Adopt an Acre® program, you will receive:

Personalized certificate with signature photo of Africa’s Grasslands and Savannas commemorating your generosity
Colorful fact sheet about Africa’s Grasslands and Savannas
Adopt an Acre® Africa magnet set
Adopt an Acre® world map
Four issues of Nature Conservancy magazine to keep you informed all year about the many places the Conservancy is working to protect. (Plus, we’ll rush the current magazine issue along with your personalized certificate!)
An invitation to create a personalized nature homepage on nature.org
Great Places E-Newsletter subscription to our monthly e-communication with local conservation updates, enviro-tips you can use and stunning nature photography downloads.

6. Adopt a microbe

If you have already done great things adopting everything we have suggested so far, you can give yourself a break and adopt a microbe. Drawn by 23-year-old Emma Lurine, Adopt a Microbe is a funny looking blog focused on different types of viruses (the analogue ones). While the pictures are fun to look at, the site remains serious and informative.

7. Adopt a penguin

Back to business. If you prefer colder waters, you can adopt a penguin, too. You can choose your own penguin, give it a name and you’ll get pictures and reports of your penguin’s life. You will also receive a digital copy of Mike Bingham’s book “Penguins of South America”. The adoption fee pays for the monitoring of your adopted penguin, so that you (and the researchers) can learn how penguins live, and help protect them. You will see from other pages on this web site that the penguin research is internationally acclaimed, and that your money will be put to good use. Adopting a penguin costs $50, that you can pay with credit card or through PayPal.

8. Adopt a sea turtle

Similarly to the other species mentioned before, you can adopt a sea turtle here. Run by Watamu Turtle Watch, a Kenyan marine conservation organisation committed to the protection of sea turtles and the marine environment, through hands-on conservation, research, education, campaigning and community development the site offers information and adoption of these animals. The involvement of local communities is an essential part of the project with the aim of making it sustainable for the future. Applied Research & Conservation Ltd. in Leeds, United Kingdom, handles adoptions requested through their website. You can choose between nest adoption and release adoption, both for $25.

9. Adopt a Christmas tree

Okay, not exactly a pet, but you can adopt a Christmas tree with the help of The Adopt-A-Christmas Tree Crew. In the name of tradition, many people still chose to desecrate the Earth and chop down a live tree for a mere two weeks of display, then throw the decomposing tree in the garbage which is destructive, wasteful, and highly unfriendly to the environment because they are such a profound source of organic waste. Have you ever stopped to think about the environmental impact of the estimated 32 million Christmas trees sold in America each year? Dying trees release greenhouse gasses when they decompose and overcrowd our landfills. Most of California’s cut trees are trucked in from Oregon or Washington which also wastes fuel and emits CO2.Adopt a Christmas Tree sells locally grown trees (in the San Diego area), that you can plant after Christmas. It is both nice and eco-friendly. At their website an 5-6-feet tall Christmas tree (Deodar Cedar) sells for $159, a 3-4 feet tall Aleppo Pine costs $89, and you can add sexy elf-delivery to your purchase for an additional $45. (This last one is, albeit eco-friendly, not a charity organization. It’s a for-profit company with an environmental friendly business model).

Do you have other ideas of adopting (or supporting) a pet without taking it home? Share it in the comments section. And if you liked this article, pleas use a social media site, such as Facebook or Digg, to share it with your friends. Or simply drop them an email with the url. Thanks!

SOS Children’s Villages USA gets creative for donations

Zsolt Balla — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:41:02 +0000

When the financial crisis has hit the economy worldwide, along with the dwindle in share prices, charity organizations have seen a substantial drop in the number and in the amount of the donations they receive. Some have said these were difficult times and said they would have to face an even more difficult situation from now on.

Others, like the US branch of SOS Villages, a charity that runs villages for orphaned and abandoned children in the United States and 169 other countries worldwide (the world’s largest orphan charity), got creative.

Back in the early days of this September, SOS Villages launched a video contest to see, who could produce the best video advertisement for their cause. They have set up a YouTube channel for the contest, offered a few prices, and asked video artists to build short clips around SOS Children’s Villages’ message.

They also asked readers, and the viewers of the videos to use the blessings of the social networking sites to spread the word: “Forward this video page to a friend or embed a video on your web site, your Facebook page, your MySpace page or wherever you post information about causes you believe in,” they wrote on their YouTube page.

The contest - and the videos - got viral, and the impact of the campaign proved to be amazing. Traffic on their Web site tripled and donations doubled in just a couple of weeks. SOS even increased the number of subscribers to its electronic newsletter by 10 percent. Out of the eighteen submitted two-minute clips, the winner was chosen by the visitors of the channel. The award went to Dr. Ernest Brown from Washington, D.C. - aka DoctorEBrown, a physician working for Unity Health Care who makes house calls for under-served patients in the southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C.

Furthermore, according to SOS Children’s Villages blog, he usually takes part in medical missions to other countries as well. He recently participated in medical missions in Belize and Cuba and has upcoming missions scheduled for Tanzania and Senegal where he hopes to provide medical services to children at nearby SOS Villages.

His video (shown above) features his own, six-year-old son, who talks about the importance of his parents, and asks for the help of the viewers. The part, when he stumbles saying the word “contribute” is both funny and moving. DoctorEBrown’s video has been viewed (to date) 2,820 times on YouTube.

According to SOS Children’s Villages, every 2.2 seconds, a child loses a parent due to war, natural disaster, poverty, disease and other causes. Today, there are 133 million children who have lost one or both of their parents, and 15 million are orphaned due to AIDS. SOS Children’s Villages is the world’s largest non-governmental organization dedicated to help these children.

The video contest organized by SOS Children’s Villages USA was an integral part of World Orphan Week, an annual fund-raising initial of the NGO. Wow was also supported by a whole bunch of celebrities, including ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ actress Georgie Henley; TV presenters Phil Spencer, George Alagiah and Louise Minchin; fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and rising star Jordan Parkinson.

The next World Orphan Week is to take place between 9-15 February, 2009. You can register for your free fundraising package here.

5 Charity tips to choose a wise Christmas present

Zsolt Balla — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:51:34 +0000

It’s a pure coincidence that I’m launching my charity and donations blog right before Christmas, but since it happened this way, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to have a first post up on the subject of Christmas presents and on how they can do good beside making your loved one happy.

It’s a pretty frightening phenomenon that, at this time of the year, people are spending huge amounts of money (probably billions of dollars altogether) on unwanted presents. The necessity of picking a present to everybody (even to those whom you don’t know enough to pick an appropriate gift) forces people spend money on things that they don’t want to buy. Surprisingly, it turns out, those who receive it, don’t want to do so.

Choosing a wise Christmas present, therefore, is a great way to do good to charity organizations, but more importantly to do good to those, whom you want to present with these gifts.

As my first post on this charity and donations blog, I’ve collected a bunch of ideas for Christmas presents. If I missed something, or you have additional ideas, feel free to leave a comment!

1. Unicef
Unicef is the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, that is involved in an infinite number of projects, from orphanages to child protection from education to combating child labor or poverty. This, I’m sure you already knew. What you may have not known is that they produce and sell brilliant gifts (Christmas and other), and with buying these items, you’ll support their work for the benefit of all.

Unicef Christmas gifts

Unicef items (postcards, toys, mugs, notebooks, calendars etc) come with a unique design, usually in a very charming manner. I personally have numerous of these items: a 1000 piece puzzle, several mugs in different shapes and sizes, and a couple of notebooks (the paper-based ones). I always love to receive and to give Unicef presents, because they are very good to use, because they look very good, and because they support an undoubtedly positive cause.
Furthermore, there is a high probability that Unicef has an office or a shop not too far away from where you live, as they maintain offices in every major town and city. Although, I might be mistaken on that one, depending on where you live. If so, use their webshop. You can find the US version here.

2. Operation Smile holiday gifts
Operation Smile is a worldwide children’s medical charity headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia. Launched in 1982, Operation Smile is currently present in 51 countries. For this holiday season, they’ve selected meaningful gifts (toys, “smile bags”, blankets, but even medicines and supplies), that you can give in the names of your family, friends and colleagues. If you choose Operation Smile, you will receive a customized gift card after every purchase. You can give these cards to your loved ones. If you purchase anything over $240, you are honored with a free t-shirt.

Operation smile

3. Charity-Gifts.org
Charity Gifts is a website where you can browse among different charity organizations, and see what they can offer you as a Christmas present, in return for a donation or your support. There are some 25 gift providers, you can choose from. Available presents range from a one-year WWF-membership to UK cancer research. With Charity-Gifts.org’s sister site, Donation4charity.org, you can even have your own Charity Credit card. Charity Credit Cards are a great way to help the charity of your choice whilst benefiting from low rates. Some Charity Credit Cards make donations every time you make a purchase, an upfront payment when you sign up, and / or a yearly loyalty payment to your charity.

4. Gift of sight
The Sightsavers‘ gift list gives you a great opportunity to buy your friends and loved ones a present which, on the other hand, has a huge impact on someone else’s life in the developing world. With your purchases (that are rewarded with a unique certificate card), you support eye treatments of people living in the developing world. You can chip in for as low as $30, that would fully pay for a trichiasis operation for someone on the other end of the world (Trichiasis is a condition caused by an infection of micro-organisms where the eyelid turns inwards and the eyelashes rub on the eyeball, causing scarring, constant irritation, terrible pain and eventually blindness). Other donations are more costly, of course, but at the end of the day you can give (or give back) someone’s eyesight by this present. What could be more enlightening than that?

5. International Medical Corps.
By supporting International Medical Corps, you can do even more than giving someone back his or her eyesight. You can save lives. International Medical Corps (IMC), established in 1984, is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training and relief and development programs.

The gifts they offer may seem pretty basic, such as food to malnourished children (hunger kills more people worldwide than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined), clean water for families, emergency supplies for disaster survivors or malaria treatments for children in need. IMC also rewards your help with personalized honor cards, while using your purchase directly where it’s needed.

Do you have other ideas? Do you work or volunteer for a different charity that also offers Christmas gift ideas? Please leave a comment!

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