Philanthropy
Comments (1) A friend of mine recently posted about giving to charaties and I wanted to weigh in with my agreement. In the same way that calling/writing your elected officials is important (as, aside from ellections every few years, that’s the only way they’ll know what you think!) donating to organizations you value is also really important.
I donate to three organizations right now, in automatic giving plans of $10/month for each:
- Chicago Public Radio – I’ve become an NPR junkie, listening to little else in my car, and really value the work that they’re doing. This ranges from ‘entertainment’ like This American Life and Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me (both of which can also be educational) to their excellent news coverage. As a bonus, at the $10/month level, I got a member card that gives deals at certain restaurants and arts orgs, which is great. I haven’t used it a ton, but it’s been nice to have when I’ve been able to use it.
- ACLU – The American Civil Liberties Union is out their fighting for our rights! As someone who is very conscious of government encroachment of civil liberties, having an organization fighting for rights of free speech, privacy, and so on is really valuable. (Even if our current president isn’t quite as ridiculously horrible as our last one…) That said, I don’t really agree with their position on the Second Amendment, as “the people” is used everywhere else in the Constitution to mean just that…It seems somewhat of a cop-out to say having the word “militia” suddenly changes the use of a phrase which is pretty well established elsewhere in the same document.
- EFF – The Electronic Frontier Foundation is similar to the ACLU, in that it’s an advocacy group fighting for people’s rights. The difference is their focus is specifically on copyright and technology rights. If you’ve ever downloaded music or movies in violation of the wishes of their copyright holders, or think that ‘life of the author plus 70 years’ is an absurd copyright length, you should check out the EFF.
I also have some organizations I’m trying to donate to on a less-regular basis, and some I’d like to look at donating to in the future.
Themocracy