Some worthy causes to consider if you have some charitable dollars to spare:
If you have ever found a Wikimedia product useful, consider donating to their fundraising drive. Their goal of making an enormous amount of information available in a convenient form free of charge and advertising is one I heartily support.
Now that school is starting, consider making a donation of school supplies to classrooms in need. You can usually stop by your local chain office supply store, where they often have donation bins for supplies you've purchased. You can also check out iLoveSchools, which is a non-profit that tries to match up teachers' requests with donors' offers. I was chatting earlier this week with a friend of mine who's a public school teacher, and hearing from her how very much teachers end up spending out of their own pockets to provide supplies for their kids (and consider what a pittance teachers make to begin with). We talked about these kinds of donation programs and how much they can help both the teachers and the students.
If you use Campbell's products, contact your local schools to see if they take part in Labels For Education, where Campbell's donates educational supplies to schools in exchange for the labels those schools have collected and turned in. I remember my mom saving labels constantly throughout my childhood, so I was pleased to see they're still doing this.
On a more esoteric level, the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel is continuing to collect funds for the New Alexandrian Library project in Delaware, as they build an interfaith spiritual and esoteric research library that will make a tremendous amount of material (including rare and preserved documents) available to all seekers. The goal is to make as much of it as possible available in an online archive as well to increase accessibility.
And on a more whimsical note, if you have beloved books you'd like to share with the world, consider registering with BookCrossing, where you leave books in public places (after marking them with a BC ID number obtained from the site) for others to find and read and hopefully pass on in the same way. The site tracks the journeys of these books, and calls itself "a fascinating exercise in fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature".
Finally, you might check out Books For Soldiers, a charitable project that encourages us civilians to send some good reads to the troops overseas along with our best wishes for their safety.
Not that I'm getting into a totally nerdy back-to-school spirit or anything, nooo...
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