This blog has taken quite a charitable bent, and yet I still haven’t posted a picture of my last hat donation. You know how it is in an arctic country! The turn-crank on my camera is frozen. I’ve put it in the refridgerator to heat it up a bit, so hopefully the crank will be thawed by next week when we get our monthly day of sun.

This morning I found a blog post on 10 Creative Ways To Help Charities For No Money. (I wonder if he’ll donate part of his Google Ad revenue this week; he’s sure to get lots of hits this time of year!) I’ve come across quite a few ways that are easy, and I want to share them with you. I’ll start with the knitting content first!

• There’s a neat option on eBay where you can donate anywhere from 10-100% of your profits on an auction to charity. It’s called Giving Works, and I think I’m going to try it out. I’m a huge pack rat, so I’m going to try to get rid of some things and donate the profits to a cancer or parkinson’s foundation. And here’s where the ingenuity comes in; I’m going to auction off knits! Only super chunky ones, so I can finish them in 2 hours and get a whole batch done in a week or so. Then off to the auction house, sold maybe for $10-15 a pop, and hopefully at the end of it all I’ll have a few hundred dollars to donate. I’m kinda excited about this. What do you guys think?
• From now on I’m using GoodTree instead of Google for all my searching. For every search you make, a little bit of money is donated to the charities you specify (you can set your charity selection on the homepage). And it leverages Google, which means that you won’t lose any of your favourite Google functions by using GoodTree instead. For Firefox users, you can even add a GoodTree engine to your search bar.
• I don’t shop for groceries very often (maybe once every two weeks), but when I do, I’ll be paying more attention to cheap items that I may not be so interested in, but are a great price. I’ve signed up for email promotions at my local grocery stores (no frills, A&P, and Food Basics), and every time I go shopping I’ll check their flyer for hot dealz. One of my housemates set up a food bank box yesterday (we had a Christmas party and people actually brought donations!) so every time I shop I’m going to put at least two things in the box. My only fear is not being able to carry everything home with all those extra cans in my bag…
• Charity Click Donations simply require you to click a button so it can display ads at you (and of course the ad revenue goes to charity). There’s a bulk donation site that can handle a few of these sites at a time. You can set one of those pages as your homepage and every time you open your web browser you’ll have donated a little something to someone who needs it. My “homepage” is actually a set of sites that open up in individual tabs; if you don’t want to see that page every time you open your browser (and you have tab functionality) you can set it as a second or third tab and then you only need to see it when you want to. (I suggest you look at each ad at least once; some ads actually record whether they have been displayed or not, so if you don’t display them, the charities don’t get any money.)

If I can manage it, my next post will contain a picture of the hat, as well as a final list of all the entrants to the pretty in pink contest. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about it! I’ll be drawing the names within the next week or so. Grad school applications are due in ten days! Eek!