For those who are able, the week before New Year's can be a perfect time to contribute to charitable, public service, and arts organizations. Every little but helps. It's the holiday season, and for those who are on vacation, there is time to focus. I ask all of you to please tell us about, and preferably link, your favorite non-profits. I'm particularly interested in lesser known, local organizations.
Large and small, and mostly in their own words, these are some of my personal favorites:
Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
(This one is very personal, for me.)
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment is a national environmental justice legal organization with offices in San Francisco and Delano, California. We provide legal and technical assistance to grassroots groups in low-income communities and communities of color fighting environmental hazards. In our work, we have three ambitions:
First, that individuals taking part in a particular campaign leave the campaign with more personal capacity than they had coming into it.
Second, that the community involved has more power vis a vis decisionmakers at the end of the campaign than at the beginning
Finally, to concretely address the environmental hazard at hand
Rainforest Action Network:
Rainforest Action Network (RAN) is made up of 43 staff members in San Francisco, CA and in Tokyo, Japan, plus thousands of volunteer scientists, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens around the world. We believe that a sustainable world can be created in our lifetime, and that aggressive action must be taken immediately to leave a safe and secure world for our children.
Dubbed "some of the most savvy environmental agitators in the business" by the Wall Street Journal, RAN uses hard-hitting markets campaigns to align the policies of multinational corporations with widespread public support for environmental protection. We believe that logging ancient forests for copy paper or destroying an endangered ecosystem for a week’s worth of oil is not just destructive, but outdated and unnecessary....
On an annual budget dwarfed by those of the companies we target, RAN has helped convince dozens of corporations including Home Depot, Citigroup, Boise Cascade, and Goldman Sachs to change their practices. We've helped to protect millions of acres of forests in Canada, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and beyond.
Oregon Wild
Founded in 1974, Oregon Wild works to protect and restore Oregon’s wildlands, wildlife and waters as an enduring legacy for all Oregonians.
Oregon Wild (formerly the Oregon Natural Resources Council or ONRC) has been instrumental in securing permanent legislative protection for some of Oregon’s most precious landscapes, including nearly 1.7 million acres of Wilderness, 95,000 acres of forests in Bull Run/Little Sandy watersheds (to safeguard the quality of Portland's water supply) and almost 1,800 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers. As a leader of the national grassroots charge for conservation of roadless areas in our national forests, Oregon Wild helped secure administrative protections for more than 58 million acres of spectacular roadless areas across the country.
Forest Ethics
Founded in 2000, ForestEthics is a nonprofit environmental organization with staff and board members in Canada and the United States. Our mission is to protect Endangered Forests and wild places, wildlife, and human well-being. Climate change, which threatens to undermine all of our conservation efforts, is also one of our campaign focus areas. We catalyze environmental leadership among industry, governments and communities by running hard-hitting and highly effective campaigns that leverage public dialogue and pressure to achieve our goals.
Our current campaigns focus on wild places in Canada and California’s Sierra, and on industries that use products that come from these places. Our efforts have transformed the environmental practices of Fortune 500 companies including Dell, Staples, Office Depot, Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma, and many others.
Seeds of Peace
Founded in 1993 by journalist John Wallach, Seeds of Peace is dedicated to empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence.
Over the last 16 years, Seeds of Peace has intensified its impact, dramatically increasing the number of participants, represented nations and programs.
From 46 Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian teenagers in 1993, the organization has expanded its programming to include young leaders from South Asia, Cyprus and the Balkans. Its leadership network now encompasses over 4,000 young people. Currently, the organization is actively working in the Middle East and South Asia.
Peace Education Fund
The Peace Education Fund’s mission is to bring peace and justice education to the widest possible audience and to organize the greatest possible public voice and participation on three priority areas:
* The abolition of nuclear weapons
* Terminating U.S. weapons sales to human rights abusing governments
* Strengthening international cooperation
Children's Cancer Association
When seriously ill kids and their families need more than medicine, CCA is there with compassion and innovation creating moments of respite and hope, in the hospital and at home. Managed by a professional staff and powered by volunteers, CCA brings soothing music in a time of crisis, friendship in a time of loneliness, resources in a time of turmoil and vital support in the midst of life-threatening illness.
I Have A Dream Foundation - Oregon
The "I Have a Dream"® Foundation - Oregon helps children from low-income communities in Oregon graduate from high school prepared for advanced study or rewarding employment by providing a long-term program of mentoring, tutoring, and enrichment with a partial college scholarship available to all Dreamers (students) that graduate from high school.
Southern Poverty Law Center
The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm. Today, SPLC is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups.
Standing Against Global Exploitation Project
The Standing Against Global Exploitation Project—or the SAGE Project—is a nonprofit organization with one primary aim: bringing an end to the commercial sexual exploitation of children and adults (CSE/CSEC). We at SAGE contribute to that goal by raising awareness about CSE/CSEC issues, and by providing outreach and services to CSE/CSEC survivors.
SAGE is a unique collaboration between law enforcement, public health, social services, and private agencies. Our approach is collaborative as well as prevention and solution oriented; it's about restorative justice that benefits individual communities and the whole of our society.
SAGE is also unique in that it is one of the few organizations that was created by and for CSE/CSEC survivors. Within our various programs, we work with several hundred women and girls per week, and advocate for many more in our awareness-raising efforts. SAGE programs are also replicated by other organizations, with expert guidance from SAGE staff members.
National Coalition for the Homeless
The National Coalition for the Homeless is a national network of people who are currently experiencing or who have experienced homelessness, activists and advocates, community-based and faith-based service providers, and others committed to a single mission. That mission, our common bond, is to end homelessness. We are committed to creating the systemic and attitudinal changes necessary to prevent and end homelessness. At the same time, we work to meet the immediate needs of people who are currently experiencing homelessness or who are at risk of doing so. We take as our first principle of practice that people who are currently experiencing homelessness or have formerly experienced homelessness must be actively involved in all of our work. Toward this end, the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) engages in public education, policy advocacy, and grassroots organizing. We focus our work in the following 4 areas: housing justice, economic justice, health care justice, and civil rights.
Coalition on Homelessness - San Francisco
The Coalition on Homelessness was formed in 1987 to foster the active participation of homeless and low-income San Francisco residents and front-line staff in the struggle for economic and social justice. Through an integrated approach that combines outreach, peer support, leadership development, public education, advocacy, and community organizing, the COH works to defend homeless and low-income people from attacks on their rights and their persons, while advocating for permanent solutions to homelessness that take into account not only poverty's devastating effects, but also its root causes.
Marine Mammal Center
The Marine Mammal Center recognizes human interdependence with marine mammals and their importance as sentinels of the ocean environment, the health of which is essential for all life. It is our responsibility to use our awareness, compassion and intelligence to foster marine mammal survival and the conservation of their habitat....
Since 1975, over 12,000 animals, such as elephant seals, sea lions, sea otters, harbor seals, fur seals, dolphins, harbor porpoises and the like, have been rescued and treated at our hospital facility. Each year marine science education programs and events reach over 100,000 school children and members of the general public, helping to foster a sense of responsibility and connection to the marine environment. Our science program increasingly provides vital information on our sick and injured patients - what diseases they suffer from, how their immune systems work, and most important of all, how they are affected by changes in their environment.
Project Vote Smart
Here at Project Vote Smart, Americans young and old volunteer their time, take no money from special interest groups, and have committed themselves to an extraordinary effort that, if successful, will provide their fellow citizens with the tools for a reemergence of political power not known for half a century. Their idea is one you may have thought of yourself. It is a deceptively simple concept but enormously difficult to achieve and would not be possible without the collaboration of citizens willing to lay their partisan differences aside for this one crucial task.
Picture this: thousands of citizens (conservative and liberal alike) working together, spending endless hours researching the backgrounds and records of thousands of political candidates and elected officials to discover their voting records, campaign contributions, public statements, biographical data (including their work history) and evaluations of them generated by over 100 competing special interest groups. Every election these volunteers test each candidate's willingness to provide citizens with their positions on the issues they will most likely face if elected through the Political Courage Test.
This project is an historic undertaking. Citizens come together, not in selfish interest or to support one candidate over another, but to defend democracy. It is an extraordinary gathering of people committed to one purpose: to strengthen the most essential component of democracy -- access to information -- even as it suffers grave attacks from candidates and political parties, many who are now willing to manipulate information and deceive voters.
San Francisco Symphony
American Conservatory Theater
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Founded in 1935, the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is among the oldest and largest professional non-profit theatres in the nation. Each year OSF presents an eight-and-a-half-month season of eleven plays in three theatres plus numerous ancillary activities, and undertakes an extensive theatre education program. Operating on a budget exceeding $26 million, OSF presents more than 780 performances annually with attendance of approximately 400,000.
Portland Art Museum