Philanthropic Update
Back in August, I noted that I was trying out a new system to make sure I donated to charity. Back then I'd been doing it for three months. How's it gone since?
Somewhat surprisingly given my checkered history with this in the past, it's been going really well. I started this in May (April if you count my WRUW telethon donation) and every month since then we've donated a flat $150 every month to some charity from our list. So far that includes:
April - WRUW-FM 91.1
May - YWCA Cleveland - Independence Place & Community NIA
June - Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless
July - The Refugee Response
August - Split between Kids Book Bank Cleveland and my friend David's Velosano campaign
September - One of our neighbors was collecting donations for Afghan Refugees resettled in Cleveland.
October - Journey Center for Safety and Healing
November - Lakewood Alive
December - Renewed memberships for both Cleveland Cinematheque and Cleveland Museum of Art
Breaking that down:
- 3 arts organizations. I cheated slightly in December by renewing two memberships, but the total amount was well over the $150 threshold.
- Depending on whether you count the refugee groups, anywhere from to 3 to 5 donations to groups working on some aspect of housing. Or maybe 6, if you count Journey, which supports survivors of domestic abuse. Those were mostly suggestions from M, whose social work background is in housing.
- 1 literacy group (and our donation to Kids Book Bank was ample payback for all the free books Birdie gets.
- 1 medical research donation.
I feel like we did a decent job keeping it local. With the arguable exception of the medical research, everything was local and most were small organizations.
We had a lot of charities on our list that we didn't get to this year. For next year, we're going to update the donation amount, and maybe we'll start doing two smaller donations every month instead of one larger donation. We'll see how it goes, but it does seem like we've finally got a system that actually makes it so that I remember to make donations, so that's a big step forward. I can finally call those 2019 and 2020 resolutions redeemed.
Somewhat surprisingly given my checkered history with this in the past, it's been going really well. I started this in May (April if you count my WRUW telethon donation) and every month since then we've donated a flat $150 every month to some charity from our list. So far that includes:
April - WRUW-FM 91.1
May - YWCA Cleveland - Independence Place & Community NIA
June - Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless
July - The Refugee Response
August - Split between Kids Book Bank Cleveland and my friend David's Velosano campaign
September - One of our neighbors was collecting donations for Afghan Refugees resettled in Cleveland.
October - Journey Center for Safety and Healing
November - Lakewood Alive
December - Renewed memberships for both Cleveland Cinematheque and Cleveland Museum of Art
Breaking that down:
- 3 arts organizations. I cheated slightly in December by renewing two memberships, but the total amount was well over the $150 threshold.
- Depending on whether you count the refugee groups, anywhere from to 3 to 5 donations to groups working on some aspect of housing. Or maybe 6, if you count Journey, which supports survivors of domestic abuse. Those were mostly suggestions from M, whose social work background is in housing.
- 1 literacy group (and our donation to Kids Book Bank was ample payback for all the free books Birdie gets.
- 1 medical research donation.
I feel like we did a decent job keeping it local. With the arguable exception of the medical research, everything was local and most were small organizations.
We had a lot of charities on our list that we didn't get to this year. For next year, we're going to update the donation amount, and maybe we'll start doing two smaller donations every month instead of one larger donation. We'll see how it goes, but it does seem like we've finally got a system that actually makes it so that I remember to make donations, so that's a big step forward. I can finally call those 2019 and 2020 resolutions redeemed.