Tips for choosing an end of the year charity

The clock is ticking on 2013, but there is still time to make an end of the year donation. Consider giving both goods and cash.

Here’s some quick considerations:

Pack it up and cart it out.

Find a charity close to home and deliver a donation. The Salvation Army, Goodwill or a local ministry are good choices where your gently used goods can have a second life. In my neighborhood there is Divine Consign, Habitat for Humanity Restores, and Second Hands Thrift Shop to name a few that top the 360 Convos list.

In Portland, Oreg., one of our favorite haunts is the Community Warehouse. They have mastered the art of making the most of everything that crosses their doorstep and write some very entertaining blog posts promoting their finest and oddest donations.

But the all time favorite organization for 360 Convos is Open House Ministries. There are many reasons, including administration that labors in love with very little pay, but mostly because they are open 24 hours.

Someone is always at the front desk, so when you are done sorting and cleaning you can drop all items in the car, dash downtown, deliver and be done.

Give cash where it makes sense.

Find a charity far away from home and make a cash donation where your dollars both go far and truly go far. If you don't know where to look consider Dining for Women. They investigate their featured organizations thoroughly and monitor the results. 360 Convos featured two articles on Dining for Women:

• Can a good dinner change the world?
• Educate a girl, change the world.

Consider the pay of the charity’s CEO. Would reasonable people consider the administrator’s pay reasonable? The Columbian Newspaper researched nonprofit’s in SW Washington noted the top earners in an article called, Digging into Clark County nonprofits’ top earners. While the database at the end of the article is cumbersome to use, reading the article offers insight.

Consider the charity’s reputation. Have they been plagued by scandal or praised in the media?

Consider the charity’s work. Does the work align with your values? It’s pretty simple, if it makes sense to you, it makes sense to support them.

And while your thinking of donating, go to the Red Cross or SW Washington Blood Bank and make a very personal donation.

Who knows, before the year starts you may have saved up to three lives.

What other tips we can add to this list?

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NEW disruptive technology: rest and reflect

In honor of Columbus Day, I took Monday off from blogging, and (going backwards) Sunday, Saturday, Friday and Thursday. Illness, albeit brief, kept me from any thoughtful musings on that fateful non-blogging Thursday, and then in the scramble to catch up, it wasn't until last night that I counted the missed days.

Blogging is useful as a goal process – there is much to be said about deciding to do something and then actually doing it – and for a writer, the practice of writing everyday creates a groove in the brain that propels continuous ideas.

The challenge is to keep writing, no matter what.

At the first of the year when I changed jobs, I noticed that writing on my fiction manuscript slowed. When the new job morphed into more management responsibilities (I got a promotion) my fiction writing slowed to a trickle. Then stopped.

I filled the fiction writing void with blogging. I weighed in on several topics: non-profits helped by Dining for Women, the cool things that Umpqua Bank is doing, how the Internet disrupts family relationships, the psychology of negotiating, struggling with email and what gets in the way of accomplishing our goals.

I wrote about the results of blogging everyday. For seven weeks I blogged about the analytics that resulted of consistent blogging. I served up my favorite quotes from things I read or heard.

And I mulled over why I had stopped writing fiction.

The manuscript, that is currently in the works, is inching close to a part that is emotionally powerful, potentially explosive and crafting it well can define who I am as a writer. I've taken classes by Bill Johnson who wrote, A Story is a Promise. He would pose the theory that halting writing at this critical juncture would intimate that I'm afraid of the emotions the manuscript unveils.

I don't think I'm afraid at all.

But what if I am?

The only thing that cures fear is to face it. This week I plan to open the WORD doc of my manuscript and re-read it. The consecutive blogging is disrupted. The manuscript has rested long enough. I've had some well days to reflect.

I'm curious to know what will happen next.

If it's not too scary, I'll let you know.

How blogging for 30 days in a row leads to international acclaim

360 Convos rocketed into the international scene with a featured
post on Renbor Sales Solutions' blog, a Toronto, Canada Corp.

When I embarked on my 30 Days of Consecutive Blog Posts I had no idea where I would end up. The disciplined effort to blog everyday led to local, national, and even international attention. One of the places I landed was Toronto, Canada as a featured contributor on The Pipeline, the blog of Renbor Sales Solutions, Inc.

Thank you Tibor Shanto.

People south of Canada tuned in, too. In the last two weeks alone, I received pageviews from 33 of the 50 United States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, New York.

Do it. Figure out which ones are missing :-)

During that same time, 360 Convos also pulled in viewers from around the world including: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Lebanon, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Some of the posts took on a life of their own and appeared in other places . . .

Dining for Women, a national giving circle empowering women in the developing world, featured the blog post: Can a good dinner change the world?

The City of Gresham picked up a post on customer service for their intranet site, which gave me the opportunity to create the post: City shares good ideas (mine).

The Customer Collective, an “editorially independent, moderated blogging community for elite sales and marketing executives,” featured four posts:

1. Interupted Internet Access Causes Depression
2. Confessions of a Social Media Strategist [A LinkedIn Nightmare?]
3. The Genius of Google +1 vs Retweeting: Casting Your Online Vote
4. Google Analytics Confirm Declines in Website Visits

Porter Anderson, a former CNN journalist, shared his laptop power with me at a Writers Conference, tweeted and emailed a link to 800 other attendees of  Words Motivate.

BlogHer.com, which boasts a following of 23 million women, featured a post I wrote on a visit to the Clark County Fair, Families Disrupted by Technology.

Canadian Sales Trainer Tibor Shanto, a favorite Twitter friend @Renbor, featured one of my posts on his blog: When the customer can't be consoled...

TOP 25. The lovely Paula G, career editor for BlogHer, promoted 360 Convos as one of the 25 Career and Business Women Bloggers Worth Reading.

Today, marks the 38th consecutive post. Don't ask me if I'll keep going. I'm still deciding.

In the meantime, I'd like to quote another Twitter friend, Jeremiah Owyang. He summed up a mutual experience on his blog when he wrote, “Even the smallest thing will lead to something bigger.”

Blogging creates its own form of energy and sends you places you hadn't imagined.

Where has your blog taken you??

38 CONSECUTIVE POST

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If you'd like to read the other posts in the blogging series, try these:

1.

What I learned from Jeremiah Owyang
that allowed me to take down Google*
*Almost

2.

Tips for blogging everyday

3.

Great is the enemy of good and other
things I learned from blogging

4.

How blogging is like throwing stones

5.

How blogging for 30 days in a row
leads to international acclaim

Educate a girl, change the world

At last night’s Dining for Women event the table topic printed on narrow slips of green paper read:

“How would your life be different if you hadn’t been allowed to attend school?”

Education is such an ingrained part of our lives it was difficult to have any meaningful exchange on the ‘what if’ premise. What proved more tangible was the $7,000 the eclectic group of Vancouver, WASH. women have donated to various organizations across the globe during the past seven months

Most Dining for Women chapters meet in women’s homes, but this group is a powder keg of female enthusiasm, filling a large meeting hall and taking on the world’s ailments one fundraising dinner at a time.

They’re fun women, working women, retired women, kayaking women, artists, photographers, gardeners, golfers. They play ice hockey, weave baskets and create software for Fortune 500 companies. They're running women and women running for political office.

They love to:

• Bake
• Bike
• Cook
• Dance
• Eat
• Read
• Swim
• Travel
• Walk
• Write

They believe in giving.

They believe in education.

They believe in accountability and scrutinize finances and management of the organizations asking for support. You’d be surprised how far a Dining for Women dollar goes. There’s no fat, fluff, or golden fleece awards. The $7000 the Vancouver women have donated in the past seven months is part of a $1.15 million kitty that is changing the future of women around the globe.

They believe in standing up. And each month, one woman stands up and shares. She tells us what it would be like if we didn’t have an education, if we didn't have a safe place to live, if we didn't have enough to eat or basic choices that make us human beings.

The Vancouver women cry and laugh and celebrate how lucky they are to have the opportunity to write a check, donate online, or throw cash in the basket that makes it from their corner of the world to another.

Then in that corner, on the other side of the world, women "laugh and dance and sing" because of a handkerchief size fragment of hope that life will be better because someone shares.

Will educating women somewhere else change us?

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Prior post on Dining for Women: Can a good dinner change the world?

The August dinner raised money for Nurturing Minds in Africa, as shown in the video above. Nurturing Minds offers access to quality education in Tanzania with a particular emphasis on girls who are poor, marginalized, and at-risk of becoming involved in exploitative forms of child labor.

Dining For Women website.
Dining For Women Facebook

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Can a good dinner change the world?

The path of our lives and our successes may be based more on the place where we are born then on our talent or skills. Dining for Women is organized around the concept that those of us born in places of opportunity can change the world when we share with those with no opportunity.

Once a month, women around the United States gather at tables and create a potluck of pre-packaged  or homemade dishes. The beverages run the gamut: water, coffee, herbal tea, wine. The table conversation isn't focused on jobs and careers so much, as shared experiences of family, friendships and neighborhoods.

The people the potluck invests in are the people most likely to change the course of their own family life, most likely to support their neighbors, and ultimately change their country.

Dining for Women invests in other women.

I attended a local chapter of Dining for Women last night. My entrance fee was an easy potluck dish: spinach salad with mandarin oranges, hydroponic tomatoes, and candied walnuts. The money I would have spent, had the dinner occurred in a nice restaurant, was instead donated to fund another woman's future.

In addition to the local Dining for Women gatherings, trips to these faraway places are organized to open our eyes in a hands-on way to the needs of others. Women who take these journeys return as project champions, bringing home the message that this concept is working. Keep dining. Keep donating.

A woman who sat at my table, Josie, took one of those journeys. She shared her experience traveling to Peru to learn about INMED, a program that rescues children. Another woman, Tina, took us on a virtual trip to Sri Lanka where we 'toured' the shelters of Emerge Global and learned how creating jewelry changes lives of abused girls.

Emerge Global supports Sri Lankan girls, ages 10–18, who have been removed from their homes due to abuse. To date, Emerge Global has transformed the lives of more than 170 girls who, despite tremendous obstacles, are now building houses, running businesses, and supporting other young women with the skills and resources they developed through Emerge. www.emergeglobal.org

The jewelry is sold around the world and can be viewed on etsy.

It's not welfare.

It's learning a trade. It's using what you have – hands and time, to create your own therapy while you wait to testify in court against your abuser.

Girls emerge when they stand up with courage to confront the family and communities who have physically or sexually abused them. Girls emerge when they embrace business practices by learning budgeting and banking skills, and learn how to save for education or a house. Girls emerge when they allow their creative spirit to awaken and spark their confidence, and discover they can change their world.

Sri Lankan girls have the right to believe in their own power. The woman who champions this message, is the founder of Emerge Global, Alia Whitney Johnson.

“Ultimately though, it’s about a girl. Just one. One human being." wrote Alia Whitney Johnson to Tina, last night's program presenter. "I took her hand when she cried and she took mine when I thought I’d break. And our story is far from over. But with a dedicated team, an ever improving curriculum, and more kilos of beads than I had ever imagined, we are slowly building a reality where she, and many others, can truly emerge into her own,” 

In six months, the local Dining for Women group has raised $6000. That money is dispersed to the far corners for good.

Yes, a potluck can change the world.

And just like the girls in Sri Lanka, you and I have a right to believe in our power.

Are you ready to emerge and change your circumstances, help your neighbors, and change your country?

What would it take for you to step out in courage, right now?

UPDATE on Vancouver, WASH. Dining for Women: Educate a girl, change the world.

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Connect with Emerge Global

• Follow on Twitter: @EmergeGlobal
• Join their Facebook Group
• View recently created jewelry: Flickr photostream

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Article from OregonianLive HERE.

Article from Columbian HERE.