Other than that, go for a Slow Food/Organics type of charity and support that. It may not do as much good as keeping poor kids from dropping out, shooting someone and breeding too early, but at least you’ll eat well at the charity event.

We have our first meeting in about a half hour, so I’ll bring both up with I’m there.

I’m pretty excited about this. I’m typically not the volunteering type, but this is something I can get into.

Oh, and I found out it’s OK for me to talk about the amounts the company is kicking down (not that most of you know where I work, anyway, but still wanted to keep it on the QT, just in case). Our office gets $50,000 of seed money, as do a few others.

In total, the company is throwing down $250,000 among the various offices, so we should, company-wide, have a pretty damn good opportunity to help a lot of people. Not a bad chunk of change.

My charity is Morris Animal Foundation (I don’t know how to link) but that’s just because my dog died of cancer a long time ago and it’s a soft spot for me.

Here:

http://www.morrisanimalfoundation.org/

Relay for Life

There are 7 Relays within a 40 mile radius of Portland, so you might even find one for your neighborhood. Some of the money goes to the national campaign, but a lot of it stays local. I have a good friend back in Klamath Falls who’s still alive because the American Cancer Society pays for her treatments.

But, the best part is they will help you come up with all sorts of fun ways to grow that seed money. Plus, as long as your local event isn’t run by a bunch of church-y types, the Relay itself is a lot of fun.

There is Doernbecher Children’s Hospital…

I worked for a couple weeks at OHSU, actually. One of the saddest things I saw was when they gave me a tour around the campus and I saw a bald kid wearing a hospital gown walking down the hallway, smiling. That juxtaposition between the smiling and the tell-tale chemo signs was heart-breaking.

One of the ideas someone in the company came up with involved a program that would help fund mobile clinics that provide basic health care to underprivileged, uninsured kids at the schools. Really liked that one, too.