Archive for the ‘How You Can Help’ category

KONY 2012

March 7th, 2012

“We cared, but we didn’t know what to do.”

We know about World War II. We’ve talked to veterans. We’ve heard from Holocaust survivors – but many people have only heard snippets in modern news about the Invisible Children and the name Joseph Kony is pretty unfamiliar.

Kony is the leader of a paramilitary group that has kidnapped 30,000+ children and forced them to commit horrible acts of violence. As an educator, I want to protect my students. As a father, I want to protect my own children. If what happened/is happening in Uganda happened to a child I worked with, I would want the world to know and to intervene.

That’s where Jason Russell comes in. His movie, KONY 2012, is a campaign to raise awareness and to not just be aware but to act.

This reminds me of how U.S. soldiers had only heard rumors of the concentration camps of World War II and then the shock of seeing some of the results of Nazi war crimes.

Check out the movie. Like the director says, you have to pay attention for 28 minutes, but it’s very eye-opening.

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

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Posted in How You Can Help, Technology

HopeKids – How You Can Help – Part 2: In-kind donations

July 5th, 2011

This week I’m highlighting HopeKids while I hang out with one of their families.

Today’s way you can help:
In-kind donations

Now, I had to have this explained to me. I thought, “In-kind…hmm…well, of course it’s kind. It’s a donation.”

So, here’s a more accurate definition: “in-kind” means “cash-equivalent”. So, instead of donating cash, which sometimes we’re all a little short on, you can donate a good or service. If you run a movie theater, you can donate tickets to HopeKids and then write-off those tickets on your taxes for the fair market value (how much the tickets actually cost) of the tickets.

This works for pretty much anything. I asked if I could buy tickets to a movie/show/sporting event and then donate those and that works, too.

Now, what can librarians do? There are very specific rules for what public school librarians do with old books, so we can’t donate our old books to HopeKids. BUT many of us are talented graphic designers/movie makers, whether by training or circumstances. (How many of us have had to make flyers for library events? How many have edited videos for announcements/orientation/back-to-school night?) Are you talented with a computer? You can e-mail the executive directors for the chapter to ask what work they need done. It might help them to have one less flyer to make, one less video to render, so they have more time to hang out with the kids.

You can see the e-mails for the executive directors here, as well as a list of other in-kind ideas.

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Posted in How You Can Help

HopeKids – How You Can Help – Part 1: Get the word out

July 4th, 2011

This week I’m hanging out with a HopeKids family and I’m always excited to hear about the great things that they are doing for the kids in the community. Check out their site to read some of the stories of kids helped out by having something to look forward to each week while they undergo treatment for some very serious diseases.

I’ve decided to start a new site category called “How You Can Help“. There are many organizations out there serving others. One of the toughest challenges for charities is obscurity, people not knowing that the charity is there to help. Periodically I’ll highlight a charity to get the news out for opportunities to help others.

So this week I’ll be posting some ideas of how you can help HopeKids out. They have chapters in Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, and Utah. Today’s way to help is easy:

Get the word out.

You can ‘Like’ or retweet this article to point other people towards the information or go straight to the source at http://hopekids.org .

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Posted in How You Can Help