Charitable Gift Giving

Toms of Maine is a great company based in, well, Maine that makes toothpaste, deodorants, and other products from all-natural ingredients. I’ve used their products and know first-hand how great they are–they don’t have artificial colors, flavors, fragrances, nor preservatives, and they don’t even use any products derived from animals. And yet their products work just as well or better than anything you’ll find out there.

Admittedly, sometimes when I use them I miss my radioactive-glowing-blue-shade of Aim Toothpaste, but my mouth and body feel so much better knowing I’m using natural products.

Toms is not only great for the planet in their business model, they also do amazing charity work. Right now they have a program called 50 States for Good going on. From now until September 30, you can nominate a charity in your state to receive a $10,000 grant from Tom’s. Just visit their Web site and click “Nominate a Nonprofit” and your favorite grassroots charity can be in the running to receive one of 50 grants, given to one non-profit in each state. So if you’re in a smaller state that doesn’t have a lot of not-for-profit activity, your chances of getting it are even better.

There’s also a cool featured called “Be a Virtual Volunteer” where just by Facebooking or Tweeting you can help a local grassroots organization.

Be sure to support this great effort from a great company.

Feel like buying two $5 footlongs at Subway (okay, sorry for getting that song in your head). From now until September 15, pay with your Mastercard and you’ll not only get lunch out of it, Subway and Mastercard will donate to Stand Up to Cancer to accelerate innovative cancer research to get new therapies to patients quickly.

Since 2008, Stand Up To Cancer has raised more than $261 million, 3 of which (and counting) have been raised by this campaign. But hurry, you only have a few weeks left to help.

Over the years the world has come up with all kinds of words for children with special needs. They were “handicapped”, then “disabled”, then “physically challenged”, and now “special needs”.

But there’s one thing a lot of people don’t call these children that they should: kids. Despite whatever physical ailments they have, they are at the end of the day kids. They laugh, they play with toys, they want to run and jump and be silly, and they cry, sadly more than other kids.

I really love what Toys R Us has been doing for the last 20 years. They’ve released a guide called the Toys “R” Us Toy Guide for Differently-Abled Kids that should be required reading for any parent, family member, health care giver or friend of a family with a child with special needs. What’s great about this toy catalog is that it’s not just a list of toys placed in categories that is intended to sell more products, but it goes into the individual needs of each individual child, pointing out toys that reinforce skills such as Auditory, Language, Social Skills, Creativity, Fine Motor Skills, Gross Motor Skills, Self Esteem, Tactile, Thinking, and Visual Skills. They collaborated with the National Lekotek Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that provides an array of services to improve the lives of children with special needs.

You can view a copy of the guide here.

Here’s a message from the great Albert Pujols, himself a parent of a child with Downs Syndrome and one of the all-around good guys in baseball and in life, to talk more about it.

Toys R Us is a great supporter of multiple charities that benefit children with needs, including their own Toys R Us Children’s Fund, the American Society for Deaf Children, Autism Speaks, National Center for Learning Disabilities, National Down Syndrome Society, Spina Bifida Association, Hollyrod Foundation, MDA, National Federation for the Blind, the Special Olympics, and United Cerebral Palsy.

I’ve been a customer of Gardener’s Supply Company a lot lately, actually a lot more than I wish given that the main product I’m buying are to combat a nasty fungus gnat infestation.

One thing I didn’t realize about the company is that 8% of their profits are donated to charity.

This isn’t a one-time gimmick nor a donation with a maximum cap as other companies tend to do, but something the company has been doing since 1983! So the next time you need potting soil or garden supplies or (gasp) yellow sticky traps for gnats, think of them first!

It’s that time of year again–Kohls is featuring a new set of great products in their Kohl’s Cares collection that donate to kids’ health and education,. All are available for only $5.

As always, their product selection this year is fantastic. I especially love the stuffed animals they have, from Dumbo to Baloo (from The Jungle Book–the Bear Necessities guy) to an adorable stuffed bear.

And yes, you read that right–all of these are only $5.

There’s also a series of Little Critter books and plush toys, as well as books for grown-ups (a book on how to get out stains and a Mom 101 cookbook).

100% (yes, you read that right) of the net profits from these products will be donated to kids health and education initiatives nationwide. Since 2000 they’ve raised over $231 million.

February, appropriately enough, is National Heart Month, among other things. While we cover a lot of different causes on this site, heart disease is still the #1 killer in the United States, and as such it’s critically important to raise awareness.

I got an email from Razoo Giving Cards, a cool idea where you give a gift card to someone with funds (from $10-$500) that your recipient can donate to any cause he or she chooses. The balance on the card is good for a year, and the only fee is a 4.9% processing cost that pays for the expenses of the Razoo Foundation (which is itself a 501(c)(3) charity).

It’s a cool idea for a couple reasons. First, you get the tax deduction. Second, your recipient gets to choose a cause nearest and dearest to her or him.

Here are some of the heart-related charities that Razoo recommends this month:

• Hearts for Cart – A fundraiser for Camp Odayin, a camp for kids with heart disease.
• Global Heart Network Foundation – A contributive platform aimed at increasing access to cardiac care in low-middle income countries.
• Wendy’s Run for Project Valentine – Project Valentine’s mission is to make life a “little sweeter” for individuals undergoing cancer treatment in the Denver metro area with loving care packages delivered on or around Valentine’s Day.

But the cool thing is that your recipient can choose from over 1 million other charities.

Just a tip for the guys out there–while Razoo’s email to me suggested that I say “instead of flowers or chocolate”, trust me, you’re going to want to give this IN ADDITION to flowersAND chocolate. 🙂

Giving Cards are redeemable online for one year from purchase date.

Back in 2011 I first wrote about a great organization called GoneReading that was just starting up at the time.  The concept of GoneReading was (and is) a brilliant one: have an online store that sells high quality gifts specifically geared towards readers, and then take 100% of the after-tax profits to fund charities that are devoted to promoting reading and literacy.

It’s a model that has worked brilliantly; GoneReading’s founder Brad Wirz recently emailed me and shared the happy news that GoneReading recently funded its first new library in Ethiopia.

While there are a lot of charities that provide relief and aid to third world countries, there’s something particularly hopeful about the kind of help that GoneReading provides. It’s one thing to pay for a meal or a handout, but it’s a whole other thing to open up a world of knowledge that people in these countries can use to become educated and break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

As an online store, GoneReading has come a long way since I first posted about them two years ago. While they used to be mainly a shop that sold things like mugs and T-Shirts, today they’ve expanded to have a huge breadth of fantastic gifts for book lovers.

Some of my favorite gifts are actually some of the most affordable–they have a huge selection of high quality metal bookmarks with cute charms on the end (my sister is both a dog lover and a book lover, so this one will be perfect for her).

In addition, since I last wrote about them, they’ve added an amazing number of new items. One of my favorite are literary action figures of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Legend has it that Oscar Wilde once insulted Charles Dickens by saying about The Old Curiousity Shop, “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter”. If you buy these action figures, you can reenact what the inevitable deathmatch would have looked like.

There’s a huge number of other great gifts that are perfect for book lovers, from book ends to book holders to book lights to book journals to book plates. There’s even a bamboo bathtub caddy that lets you prop up a book in the bath

If you know any avid readers who like to show off their book knowledge (you know the type, the ones who will quote passages of Shakespeare or Jane Austen), they have a selection of games about books.

Speaking of Jane Austen, one of the coolest gifts (and affordable too) are “magnetic poetry kits”. These are clever sets of 200 magnets of words that you can arrange on the refrigerator. These have been around for a while, but GoneReading has the Edgar Allan Poe edition, the Jane Austin edition, and the Shakespeare edition.

I tried out the Jane Austen set and in no time I was writing like ol’ Jane herself.

GoneReading is a great example of three great American traditions: the entrepreneurial spirit, its generosity, and its love of books. If you love to read or know someone that does, there’s no better place on the Web to do your Christmas shopping.

Here’s a really neat idea from the folks at Pimsleur Language Programs.

As just about everyone knows by now, the Philippines was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan two weeks ago. As I mentioned in my last post, what tends to happen is that the news media will focus a lot of attention on the suffering for a short period of time, but after they’ve gotten what they need out of the disaster they’ll go to something else. In the meantime, those who are suffering are suffering no less because they’re not on TV anymore.

But even as the public starts to forget, there are some amazing charities and aid agencies that have hundreds of volunteers who are going to the Philippines to help.

From now until the end of the year, Pimsleur is offering 15 introductory lessons, or about 7.5 hours of lessons of Tagalog  (pronounced tuh-GUH-logh) for free. Tagalog is the most widely-spoken language out of 170 languages spoken in the Philippines.

Given that 30 lessons normally cost $120, this is at least a $60 value. Pimsleur did a similar thing with Japanese and Haitian Creole in 2010 and 2011 when disasters struck those countries.

If you know a volunteer organization, or individual volunteer who’s going to help out in the Philippines, this would be a great resource for them, even on the plane ride out. While they won’t be fluent in the language, it’ll help them learn the basics.

For more details and to download the 7.5 hours of lessons for free, visit here:

http://pages.pimsleur.com/philippines-relief