Charitable Gift Giving

Imagine if in your neighborhood, you heard that the little baby girl of your neighbor next door was dying of dehydration because she had diarrhea but her parents didn’t have any clean water in the house for her to drink.  Or, that the little baby boy of the neighbor across the street was suffering from pneumonia, but his parents couldn’t afford to drive him to see a doctor for antibiotics.

Let’s say you just bought $10 of bottled water. Or that you filled the car with $10 of gas. And let’s say that was the difference between life and death for these childred. Would you hesitate to give that water away, or to drive that sick child to the hospital?

If you’re reading this, chances are you don’t have to deal with situations like this. Thank God, we, and our neighbors, and our neighbors’ kids are all quite healthy. We don’t have to worry about dying after a bout of diarrhea, or that the cold we catch will become fatal. And yet every day, 24,000 children in the developing world die because of diseases which in our part of the world are easily treatable. That’s 24 thousand a day.

Not all of us can hop on a plane and fly to a country like Bangladesh, Guatemala, Indonesia, Mali, or Malawi and do relief work. And even if we could, most of us  wouldn’t have the proper healthcare training nor language skills to be of very much help.

But what we can do is give of our abundance. And a little bit will go a long way. Whatever you send can go towards training new healthcare workers, providing vaccinations, giving diarrhea medicine,  setting up nets and medicine to prevent malaria, providing antibiotics for pneumonia, and providing packages for newborn care. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Even if you just text “GOODGOES” to 20222, you’ll be giving $10 for a package of newborn care so a baby can have a healthy start in the world.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Save the Children to join with many other bloggers in spreading the word about a new site of theirs called GoodGoes.org. It’s a site that spreads awareness of healthcare workers in developing areas who just need a little support to be able to save lives. Save the Children, of course, is a 4-star charity as rated by Charity Navigator, meaning that the maximum amount goes towards its programs. Even the marketing campaign to promote GoodGoes.org was provided pro-bono by BBDO. On this site, you can read all about how trifling amounts of donations from us can empower health workers to save lives and better lives in the world’s poorest regions.

He who is given much, much will be expected. Every cause on this site is a great cause, but there are few causes where so little will yield so much immediate help.

I don’t normally offer giveaways on this site, but as part of their blog outreach, Save the Children gave me a very stylish pedometer to give away to one random reader. You clip it onto your belt, and it’ll count the number of steps you take a day. It’s an item symbolic of the distances that local health care workers walk each day to take care of the poor children under their care.

To be eligible for this, just do one of the following:

1) Go to http://www.goodgoes.org/ and click “Like” on the bottom of the page.

2) Link to this post from your blog or Web site (http://www.charitablegiftgiving.com/2010/08/30/save-the-children/). As a bonus, put the link in your reply, which should give your site a little nice boost in the search engines.

3) Become a Facebook fan of GoodGoes.org at http://www.facebook.com/goodgoes

After you’ve done one of these things, come back here and leave a comment (be sure to leave your email address so I know how to contact you if you’re selected, it won’t be published!).

Good luck!