I try to donate to charities throughout the year. Each person has their own favorites that are near and dear to their hearts. While others just really strike a chord, and compel you to give. I think a lot of people have tendency to want to do more around the holidays. Sometimes some of us are in a tight spot ourselves and wish we could do more.
There are lots of ways to donate to charity and causes for little or no cost. Or by doing things you already do. Here are some examples:
1. One of my favorite charities to donate to during the holidays is Toys for Tots. One way you can give without really spending extra money is through mycokerewards.com. If you collect coke points on mycokerewards.com you can choose to donate some of your coke points to toys for tots. Anywhere from 1 point to all of your points if you wish.
2. Yoplait lids. Around September yoplait has the pink lid campaign. Send in your pink lids for breast cancer research.
3. If you visit one of these sites: www.thebreastcancersite.com you can click on a pink button on the top of their page daily to help fund free mammograms. Also there are other tabs on the site for www.thechildhealthsite.com, www.theanimalrescuesite.com, www.theliteracysite.com, www.therainforestsite.com, and www.thehungersite.com. All of these have different goals for what they do when they raise money with your clicks. All of these can be done daily. Also, if shop through their site a percent of the sale goes to the charity of the site you are shopping on.
4. Donating items to women’s shelters. I know each year, especially around the holidays, they place an ad in the paper asking for donations of clothing, toiletries, beauty products, alarm clocks, diapers, toys, and lot of other stuff to the local women’s shelter. How many of us have clothes we don’t fit into anymore, samples of body products we get in the mail, giveaway prizes, etc that we can donate.
5. Other ideas could be something as simple as shoveling an elderly or disabled neighbors sidewalk, volunteering time, and as bloggers placing an add for a charity, fundraiser, or cause on our site free of charge or doing a blog post about it.
This is only a couple ways. I’d love to hear some of your ideas or some of your favorite charities to donate to.
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I recently donated a big bag of women’s and some kids clothes to a local homeless shelter, as well as a huge bag of mine and my son’s old (but still very wearable) shoes. This is a place that’s not out of my way very much and I always have piles of things I’m not using and now that I know how easy it is to donate there, I’m planning on doing it all the time.