Areas of Unrest

6 December 2007 - Charity and Rock

First, I am not sure if I will be able to update the next few days. If I can't, I will probably backfill entries.

I'm going to write mostly about something else, but I don't want to discontinue my Jewish music series for Chanukah. My thought for today has to do with the collecting phenomenon (which is, by the way, shared by Canadians.) What I mean is that there are certain people who will, when hearing mention of somebody who is not necessarily known to be a member of the tribe immediately comment, "you know he's Jewish." I used to make fun of my parents for doing this, but more than one person has heard me make that response to a remark about, say, Kevin Youkilis.

What this has to do with Jewish music is that I can so easily get sucked into a website like Jewsrock.org. Oh, sure, everyone knows that Bob Dylan is Jewish and most people know Lou Reed and Gene Simmons are. Simon and Garfunkel are pretty obvious and I suppose you can't get more obvious than Matisyahu (whose songs even have some Jewish content). If I thought hard enough, I'd have realized Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits and now doing great solo work like the recent "Punish the Monkey") is one of us. But Marianne Faithful? And all the members of The Knack? Who knew?

On to the real subject of the day, which is charity and, specifically, The Holidailies Charity Project. Now, one of the good things about moving is that charity junk mail does not get forwarded and I am not swamped by them at the moment. I decided some time ago that I should focus my charitable giving, vs. the scatter shot approach I used to have. If you give larger sums to fewer organizations, you can influence those organizations more.

So I increased the donations I give to my alumni association and to my local public library foundation and to a couple of local arts organizations. And I stopped donating to some larger charities that were spending too much of my money spending me more solicitations. America's Second Harvest, for example, once sent me 5 separate solicitations the same week.

My personal favorite charity is The Book Thing, which gives away thousands of books every weekend. If you look at their web site, you will get an idea of Russell's passion for his brainchild.

As far as the Holidailies Charity Project, though, one can't pick a small local organization and garner the support of a few hundred folks around the world. I'm not even sure choosing a U.S. based organization is reasonable to do. If it is, I would suggest The Libri Foundation which provides new hardcover children's books to rural libraries.

The only thing that really comes to mind internationally is Proliteracy Worldwide, which is an international umbrella organization for literacy groups. I have some reservations about them (based on having had a hard time digging out some of their financial information and some general qualms about umbrella organizations).

My other idea is to just encourage people to donate to their local public library foundation / friends of the library. But Chip and Jette seemed to be looking for a single organization.