Speaking of Charity....

[booker81]

Do you give/donate/etc?

Saw the other thread about CEO salaries, and was thinking about my wee town.

There is no Red Cross/Goodwill/Salvation Army etc within about 20 miles here. We have a food bank.

Our local little grocery store does a neat thing each year, and for the first time I "participated". They will bag up non perishables and other needed supplies (shampoo, soap, laundry stuff, home cleaning), and staple the receipt to the bag. They place all the bags in a section of the store, with a sign that they are for the food bank. If you so desire, you just grab a bag, put it in your cart, and at checkout, they enter the price, you pay, and they give you the receipt from the bag. They then take the bag and place it in the food bank bin. All of the bags are $5-$10, and the contents are printed on the receipt. The food bank is local, and serves local people.

My goal this year is to grab a bag each time I go to the store. Figure if they go through the trouble to make it this easy to donate, I may as well participate.

I thought it was a pretty neat idea. They've done this for as long as I remember, this is just the first year I'm able to do something though.

 

[Mattemma]

Our kids school collects food for the food banks.There is a bin in the drop off area,and the kids just place it in there. I usually give items to resale stores.Good stuff that I should probably sell.I donated a lot to a no kill cat shelter that was raising funds via a garage sale.

I stopped giving cash years ago,but I don't mind giving food I changed my mind about,or house stuff that can be resold. I donate to the local women/children shelter too.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Our extra eggs go to church. People that get them donate whatever they think is a fair price to a fund at the church. Two years ago, it went to the Heifer Project, last year to Haiti, this year to a local Senior Citizens Center. Some people give $5 a dozen, some give $1. Whatever makes them happy.

My wife does a lot more than me, but together last year we donated more than 250 hours to various things around town.

 

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

Our extra eggs go to the food bank, and generally I try to pick up a few extra things at the market whenever I have extra and give that to them as well. Things were very tight for us after DH got laid off and while we stopped donating we never had to ask. Things have gotten better

so we're back to donating.


We also are friends with a number of the local cops and have let them know if there is some family they know of that is in trouble to let us know. I will drop off eggs anonymously and/or get in touch with the food bank to make a drop off. Some people are really in need and they either don't know there is help available or they are too embarrassed to seek it out.



Some one mentioned the women's shelter - a big item they need is dishes and pots and pans. so if you get new for the holiday season instead of giving them to goodwill give them to the local women's shelter! When battered women are relocated they need to start a kitchen from scratch - not an easy or cheap thing to do!

 

[A.T. Hagan]

When we have extra eggs they go to the local homeless shelter. My daughter's 4-H clubs do a food drive every Thanksgiving which we contribute to, we've got another one coming up for Christmas, food drives at their schools, food drives at work, the Salvation Army gets a good deal of my pocket change every season, and some of our grocery stores do the food in the bag thing for the food banks as well which we have done in the past.