Are You Aware of the Children?

One one thousand.

Two one thousand.

Three one thousand.

Four one thousand.

A child just died.

It’s true. Every four seconds, a child dies somewhere in the world. Children, young and defenseless as they are, need to be taken especially good care of. Starvation, war, disease, natural disaster; all of these things take their toll on human life. They can be extremely traumatizing to a young child. Of course, adults are in need around the globe as well, and they need your help just as much. It is the responsibility of every person to do what they can to help other human beings, specifically young ones.

Kars for Kids, an American-based non-profit organization, is doing their part in helping the children of the world. By donating your car to them, you are providing needed funds to a camp in upstate New York where children are given a Jewish education. By simply handing off your old or unused car, you can give these children exciting camping experiences and a meaningful education.

Needy children can be helped in so many ways, there’s no reason for you not to do something or make some gesture. There are plenty of good charities in the world worth donating to. These organizations work to provide daily care to children around the world, build schools for them to receive an education, strive to provide basic needs like clean water, nutritious food (and enough of it) and emotional support. Are you sure there isn’t something you could spare? Money is obviously one of the first things to come to mind, but what about other commodities? Clothing? Your time or efforts? Your car?

With everyone in the world doing their part—donating what they can—the earth can be a better, happier place, especially for the children. Right now, 22,000 children die every year; one every four seconds. If we all do our part, we can change that.

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Making Your Non-Profit Work Better

When you either own or run a not-for-profit organization, you can generally tell the economic trends that are prevailing even better than a well-paid economist can. After all, when times get tough, one of the first places that most people cut back on is in the realm of charitable giving. As painful as this is, the burden you bear is still the same, no matter what the economy might be doing. After all, you are involved in this thing for a reason that goes well beyond making a living, or even putting together an impressive P&L statement. You want to make a difference in this world! And it’s great if you can do it in the same free-wheeling style that you use when times are great.

But how can you tighten the belt, and still accomplish the mission of your organization? By being creative, good reader. First off, you can use online collaboration software such as Google Documents to keep everybody working on the same page and can get plenty of things done. For another thing, you can use company credit cards, or even supply each employee with a prepaid credit card for when they need to purchase something. The prepaid option might actually be better, because you can exercise a lot more control over how much an individual employee spends with it.

Another couple of things you can do to keep your expenses down are to merge with a similar non-profit organization (assuming that your goals are very similar and your teams can work well together), and to use social media to promote your organization. While social media is not nearly everything that some folks think it is, you can get your name and your mission out to the right people, if you think through it carefully. Just be sure that you don’t hire someone expensive to design your offering for you, or the savings won’t be that substantial.

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Involve Yourselves In Contributing To A Charitable Cause Once In A While

Most of us have busy schedules. We have fixed blocks of time for going to work, meeting employers or employees. We have fixed blocks of time to spend with family, we have set aside time to relax and go on vacation. We even have fixed blocks of time to go to church or some place of worship of a heavenly father. How come we do not set aside some time to help our fellow man? This is a strange phenomenon as most of us think of Sunday’s as a day of religious worship. Or maybe it’s a Friday for people of another religion.

But every religion on earth teaches us to extend a helping hand to our fellow man and to help our brothers. Every religion teaches that helping others is the way to save ourselves from damnation. And yet nobody does this. The same people will go to church every Sunday and pray. What use Is prayer without deeds. It is the same as theory without application. The greatest prayer one can offer to any god is to help somebody in need of help. No god would demand words of prayer to him in church or a mosque or a temple while somebody is dying right outside for want of your help.

So just as you would set appointments to meet your business associates or friends, set aside some time every week to be involved in a charity. Let us start a culture of serving those who need service. If everybody can adopt this doctrine, the world would be a better place. If all of us set aside a few hours on Sunday afternoons for charity work just as we would devote some in the morning for prayer, we can change the world. Let us make it part of our calendar for the week.

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Doing Well By Doing Good

For a long time, charity and philanthropy have been considered to be something you do out of the goodness of your heart alone and that it is not supposed to increase the revenues of your business in any way. In fact many people would still find this concept sacrilegious. Social service is something you do purely for the benefit of society right?

How can you expect to benefit from it? Isn’t that against the basic idea of charity? If you think about it, there is no contradiction. You have to think about the purpose of all charity’s and social service initiatives. If it is to help someone, isn’t the best way to do it a way in which you can keep doing it again and again? In short, we are talking about the sustainability of the charity. A service organization may survive purely on donations from well meaning contributors but how long can they sustain the effort? What if some of the main contributors go bankrupt or just decide to pull out? Whether an organization’s aim is to make profit or not has to learn to sustain itself. Only then can it survive and flourish.

This is why companies which are socially responsible preach the slogan “Do well by doing good”. Companies such as microfinance companies aim to build a workable business model around servicing the poor. There is no contradiction as the aim of helping the needy is met. If the organization can do well out of doing this good deed, not only will that organization flourish, others will also be attracted to be socially useful projects. The whole idea is to tell businessmen and normal people that you can contribute to a good cause without being a saint. This seems to be a more practical approach to philanthropy.

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