Q:JOHN JOHN IM GETTIN A CHRISTMAS CARD FROM WHEEZY I'M SO EXCITED also i had to explain to my mother that ye aren't all thieving corrupt people when i told her about p4a. THAT IS ALL IM SO ODJDOSJF (this isn't a question) (oops)

wrellis

Yay! Enjoy your wheezywaiter ugly sweater Christmas card!

But on this topic:

Parents are right to be concerned about charitable initiatives on the Internet. But the Project for Awesome is not a scam. We’ve been doing this for six years. We’ve distributed money to organizations like Save the Children, kiva, Partners in Health, the Harry Potter Alliance, and many more. 

Here is Save the Children bragging about the p4a; here is kiva.org celebrating their Project for Awesome donation last year; here is the official YouTube blog talking about it. 

100% of the proceeds from the Indiegogo campaign will be distributed to charities chosen during the Project for Awesome. The Foundation has no overhead—everyone who works on it, from the Board of Directors to the people who pack up calendars and mail them to you*—volunteer their time. 

So donate, if you can afford to! The indiegogo is already over $25,000, and hopefully this will be the biggest and best p4a yet. And remember, EVERY DOLLAR donated up to $50,000 will be matched by our generous anonymous donors. Yay!

* Full disclosure: In many cases, the people mailing calendars and the Board of Directors are the same people.

Savann Tabak and water.org

justsitstill:

I gave up swearing for lent with a friend this year. We agreed that we’d donate 25 cents every time we swore and use the money for a night of drunken swearing. Half way through the forty days we gave up on our lenten promise. The preliminary reason being because swearing is a lot of fun. For me, however, it’s also because arbitrarily choosing to give up something just for the sake of lent misses the point (in my opinion (each person is entitled to handle their faith as they wish)).

I still wanted to do something with the money I put away and I wanted it to be something charitable since one of my year 22 goals is to research charities and get involved with them. I made that goal a stepping stone to the larger one of making a p4a video this year. Even though p4a isn’t until December, I wanted to start my research early since I honestly don’t know much about charities and I don’t want to half-ass it.

A few weeks ago Hank Green made a video about water.org and their project in Savann Tabak, Haiti. Click here for the video.

If you know me at all (either IRL or through this blog), you know that I’m a huge freaking nerdfighter and am, therefore, inclined to automatically support vlogbrother advocated projects. However, I didn’t want to donate money to Savann Tabak/water.org for such a superficial reason (which, I have to admit, “because Hank said so” would’ve been despite how Hank is completely made of awesome). So I started following the community. I get e-mails every now and then from water.org with updates on the project and I’ve thought really hard about how water.org functions as a charity.

There are a lot of things I like about water.org. I like how my involvement is project specific (that is, specific to Savann Tabak), I like how water.org has the long term goal of sustainability, I like how it understands that water is not only a people issue but also an environmental issue, I like how they formed a diverse committee of locals and made discussion a goal for the project, I like how they keep me informed, and I’m sure as I keep on following this community I’ll find much more that I like.

I made my donation to Savann Tabak tonight and I feel really good about my decision. I’m not saying that water.org will be the charity I’m going to do my p4a video about, but it’s the first of many charities I hope to get involved with this year.

I’d like to start volunteering my time to a charity based here in Toronto. Especially since the place I volunteer at right now is closing soon for the summer (aside: a post on where I volunteer to come sometime in the near future). But I still have a lot of charity research to do before I choose which one I’d like to give my time to. Suggestions, as always, are more than welcome.

Today’s picture is a bit of a cop out but I figured it was more relevant/interesting than a picture of what I’ve been doing all day. Which is lying on my living room floor, suffering through caffeine withdrawal.

DFTBA <3

Clarissa.

Post Script:

Click here for Savann Tabak’s water.org page.

Reading this post made me so happy.