Last chance to distribute your donations to these great organizations
By AdministratorThe second quarter of 2013 is drawing swiftly to a close, and it’s your last chance to distribute your donations among our five beneficiaries. To help you make your decision, take a look at this video for a summary of the important work being done by these beneficiaries.
Here’s a quick look at what our remarkable beneficiaries have been up to these past few months:
Our current Poverty beneficiary, One Acre Fund, looks for long-term solutions to fight the hunger crisis in many African nations. OAF provides loans, storage, and insurance for crop failure to help farmers to find their feet and develop their businesses. With a particular focus on the power of enabling women to support their families, OAF serves more than 137,000 families in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi. As of the end of 2012, One Acre Fund had helped more than 137,000 families, including almost 600,000 children.
Trees, Water & People, our Natural World beneficiary for the second quarter, draws a strong link between protecting the environment and protecting the people who live in it. Their projects include the highly successful Luciérnaga program, which brings solar photovoltaic lighting systems to communities, and its Clean Cookstoves project, which has built nearly 60,000 stoves that are safer and more efficient that traditional stoves—and use local materials and labor, creating jobs and improving lives. In the United States, TWP works with Native American tribes to develop environmentally sustainable practices on their reservations. More than 175 Native Americans have received training that they have taken back to their own tribal communities to make them more energy efficient.
Bernie’s Book Bank, our current Education beneficiary, distributes donated books to at-risk children around the Chicago area. Last year, they distributed more than 600,000 books, and their goal for 2013 is to distribute more than 1 million books. Our Science of Giving series took a look at why distributing these books can have such a huge impact on the future success of disadvantaged kids.
Our encore Human Rights beneficiary, the Innocence Project of Texas, is back for a second round—we first featured them in 2011. IPoT works to overturn wrongful convictions, especially through the use of DNA evidence, and educate the public about junk science in the criminal justice system. We took a closer look at their efforts to reform how eyewitness testimony is used in convictions.
Our Challenge the Gap beneficiary this quarter is T’ruah, an organization of rabbis who work for human rights. Among other projects, T’ruah works to end injustices in prisons, in North America and around the world, and they build bridges across religious traditions to find common ground and work together for justice. They have worked to prevent the eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem and launched a campaign for Bedouin rights, working again to prevent the expulsion of thousands of Bedouins and to secure government services to several Bedouin villages in the Negev region of Israel.
Our current Small Grant beneficiary is the Pathfinders Project. Next month, the four Pathfinders will embark on their year-long global service mission, volunteering for clean water, education, and human rights projects, and blazing the trail for the Humanist Action: Ghana.
And one last reminder: Our current Humanist Crisis Response program to help those affected by the Oklahoma tornadoes will end on Wednesday, June 26. To donate, click here. So far, we’ve raised more than $45,000 for our crisis beneficiaries, Operation USA and the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma.
Don’t forget to log in to the site and visit the “Manage Donation” area under “Manage Account.” For more information, visit our beneficiary pages for links to their websites and social media.