Wednesday-Night

This is a great story and we certainly endorse the thought. In fact, we have been doing this for several years . All of the organizations mentioned in the Gazette article are extremely worthy and deserving of support. However, we would like to call attention to one wonderful NGO that has a special relationship to Wednesday Night: Engineers Without Borders (ENB) and the message we recently received from the co-founders and co-CEOs, George Roter & Parker Mitchell (son of David), both of whom have participated in Wednesday Nights.
“This year, you can turn your holiday shopping into an opportunity to help people in some of the world’s most impoverished communities. We invite you to give the Gift of Opportunity - the opportunity for clean and safe drinking water, for irrigated crops, and for people to work their way out of poverty.
By making a donation to Engineers Without Borders in your friend’s or family member’s name, you can give a gift that is truly meaningful - helping people in the developing world gain access to technologies that are changing lives.”

What to buy the person who has everything? How about a goat or a low-flush toilet? Charity gifts are finding their way under more and more Christmas trees as major international charities find new and innovative ways to fundraise.
SUSAN SEMENAK, The Gazette
December 08
The charities are responding to surveys showing that, increasingly, donors want to know how their money is spent and what it accomplishes.
Besides, most of us already have what we need. Seventy-one per cent of Quebec respondents to an Ipsos Reid poll undertaken for the international aid agency World Vision last month said they didn’t want anything this Christmas. Eighty-six per cent said they would prefer to have a gift given on their behalf to help someone else rather than receiving a traditional gift, such as a sweater or a pair of socks.
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Lisa Hartford, communications manager for Imagine Canada, an umbrella group for Canadian charities, says the charity gift trend has boomed over the past four years, with many charities publishing Christmas catalogues. Among the most popular items, especially with children, are adopted polar bears, pandas and other endangered species. Under the World Wildlife Fund’s adopt-an-animal plan, the gift-giver pays $40 and the federation sends a stuffed animal and an information kit about wildlife conservation to the young recipient.
The money goes to fund the WWF’s work protecting endangered animals and their habitats. Hartford says it’s an easy-to-use formula and a great way to get young people started in philanthropy.
Karen Snider of UNICEF Canada agrees. Her organization’s Gifts of Magic have been bestsellers. ….
World Vision Canada’s Most Meaningful Gifts catalogue features hundreds of gifts from under $10 to $5,000 - everything from vitamins, textbooks, fruit trees and farm animals to chicken coops and irrigation pumps. And there must be at least one person on your list who would appreciate a llama stable.
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There’s this little minefield, too: The British animal rights organization Animal Aid has asked poverty relief agencies to stop providing living animals to farmers in poor countries, citing inefficiency, unsustainability and animal cruelty.
Still, a little goes a long way in the developing world - and for worthy causes closer to home - and Christmas is when charities do most of their fundraising for the year. Most charities dispense with the doo-dads altogether, sending only a card to the recipient explaining how the money will be used. People like knowing that their donation will go to cover the full cost of a measurable thing, Hartford says.