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Mon Jan 3 20:27:34 2011
Charitable Giving
2010 Summary and 2011 Plans

Giving green...
Image courtesy of Tom Harpel (wiki)

Last year I re-vamped My Charitable Giving, and in 2010 I intended to stick to the plan I came up with then.

However, I was somewhat worried about my finances earlier in the year, so I stopped giving for a while. Not great, but that's kind of the idea: you give to charity when you can, and don't when you can't. I think that's better than becoming a charity case myself!

But by November of 2010 it was pretty clear that I'd be fine, so I caught up with all of my charitable giving in one night. The Internet makes giving very easy! Although there was one problem: The United Way of Whatcom County had a broken giving link for a while, and I missed my 2010 donation window. So I'll catch up to them in 2011.

As I do every year, I bumped up the contribution amount over the previous year.

This was the breakdown by charity categories:

50% to Political Causes. I don't give to political parties, but these include causes like the ACLU, Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, and others.
33% to Charitable Causes. These included The United Way of King County, the American Red Cross, Mercy Corps (Haiti), National MS Society, Wikipedia, and others.
17% to Environmental Causes. This was split between Yellowstone to Yukon and the Conservation Fund.

Normally I give more to Charitable Causes, but like I said, the United Way of Whatcom County didn't accept website donations for a while so I missed them.

All of those are worthwhile causes, but these are my three favorite charities (in alphabetical order):

Reporters Without Borders: they focus on press and journalist freedoms around the world. They publish a yearly Press Freedoms Index, which is widely covered and shames both dictatorships and supposed free democracies. Did you know that blasphemy is still subject to a 25,000 EUR fine in Ireland?
Wikipedia: I don't give as much to wikipedia as other causes, but certainly this is an Internet phenomenon that needs to be supported for a while. I don't know how it will pay for itself long term (community hosting? ads?) but it remains a top destination on the Internet, which is pretty amazing for a free, community-driven site.
Yellowstone to Yukon: they have a very cool vision for assembling large contiguous regions of parks and corridors so that megafauna (bears, elk, etc.) can continue to roam across reasonable distances. Over time they have refined the Y2Y vision to focus on grizzly bears, birds, and fish. The thinking is that if they cover those three, they'll capture the needs of most animals.

For 2011 I'll continue along roughly the same lines of giving.

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