Why Being Charitable Matters
31 Jan 2010
At Church I heard a talk that got me thinking. Giving of ourselves whether it be time, talents, money, or other ways for others is indeed an important part of our religion. I wanted to find out how we as are doing.
I learned that Americans donate more than twice as much money to charity than any other country in the world. Americans give almost 1.7% of the country's GDP in charitable contributions. Number 2 in the world is th UK at 0.7%. (http://www.cafonline.org/pdf/International%20Giving%20highlights.pdf)
Of all of the states in the United States, citizens of Wyoming average the highest tax-deductible charitable contributions at $10,000 per tax payer. Utahns and those from Washington D.C. are in second and third place at over $7,000. (www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0572.xls)
Millions have been donated to humanitarian organizations for victims of the earthquake in Haiti (http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1629828/20100115/story.jhtml). Organizations like the Red Cross and Unicef efficiently use less than 10% of the money donated for overhead, leaving the rest going directly to those who need it.
According the the Department of Labor, one quarter of Americans donate time to serve others (http://blog.charitynavigator.org/2009/04/one-quarter-of-americans-donating-time.html), averaging 52 hours per person per year. That's wonderful!
The need for service is all around us. I believe there is a direct correlation between personal happiness and service to others. We can be the richest country on earth by giving and serving to others in need.
Finding ways to give are so abundant if you just look. Here are some ideas that I found:
- List your website on GoodSearch / GoodShop (http://www.goodsearch.com/goodshop.aspx).
- Contribute to Project Linus -- giving blankets and quilts to those in need. Over 3 million blankets have been donated to date!
- Give an option to customers to donate $x to charity during checkout.
- Start up danemco.org for charitable project ideas. As a company we can donate time, server space, etc.
- Do St. George Linux user's group.
- Boy Scouts
Emily, for her birthday, got an automatic bread maker. So I tried it out today. I like 100% Whole Wheat bread so I followed the recipe EXACTLY and let the bread maker do its thing. While it was baking, I peeked in the window and it didn't look all that normal looking, but I trusted the machine would just do its thing and things would work out like the bread you see on the cover of the brochure that comes with the recipes. Well, it came out really funny looking. Our children were like, "What is that?" I'm sure their imagination ran wild. Another thing that makes this really funny is that we have a terrible track record for bread making. For the life of us, the bread we make just never comes out right. Emily has even gone over to the neighbor's house and watched her make her bread with her recipe and it works just fine at the neighbor's, but when that same recipe is repeated in our home, it just never works.
So you can see my excitement (and Emily's excitement too) about getting an automatic bread making machine -- finallly, a computer chip brain powered system to control the entire kneeding, rising, and baking process! But no, it didn't turn out right.