Good Deed Week #10

Good Deed #64.  Andy forwarded an email to me this week from his girlfriend (Jenn) who is raising money for the March for Babies (aka March of Dimes).  She is the Henrico County Public Works Department Coordinator for the March of Dimes and she is walking in the event in April.  Before the event, she needs to raise $500, so if you have $5 (or more) to spare please visit her site and make a donation.  In case you don't know, the March of Dimes / March for Babies is the leading nonprofit organization for pregnancy and baby health.  The organization is dedicated to improving the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality.  

Good Deed #65.  Did you know half of all child deaths worldwide are caused by malnutrition?  Project Peanut Butter is a program for malnourished children in Malawi and Sierra Leone.  It was founded by Dr. Manary, a pediatrician at St. Louis Children's Hospital and a professor of pediatric medicine at Washington University School of Medicine. He was the first to conduct clinical trials of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a peanut/dairy/vitamin/mineral food that offers a 95% recovery rate for severely malnourished children and is administered at home.  This represents a vast improvement over the milk-based formulas of the recent past that offered recovery rates of 25% - 40% and required hospitalization.  To help this cause, I donated $15 which covers the cost for all the food ingredients to provide a malnourished child with RUTF for the duration of treatment.      

         

Good Deed #66.  Keeping in the same theme, I also created an account and donated to the Fill the Cup campaign with the World Food Programme.  It takes just 25 cents to fill one of the "red cups" that the WFP uses to give hungry children a regular school meal of porridge, rice or beans.  I donated $15 which will feed 10 children for one week.  

Good Deed #67.  I don't think I can go a week without doing something for the troops.  Maybe because of the way I was raised or maybe because I admire the sacrifices they make immensely.  Either way, more than 8,000 wounded Marines have returned home and are now facing daunting challenges in their recovery. Having entered the Marines with patriotism, many young Marines lack the professional skills and have no alternative career to turn to upon leaving the hospital.  As a result, I have donated to the Wounded Marine Career Foundation, which is a pilot program that will train two classes of 25 or more wounded Marines per year in media, filmmaking, sound design, editing, graphics, and photojournalism.

Good Deed #68.  To continue our efforts to cut down the amount of waste we receive in the mail, I registered on Catalog Choice and selected the mailings that come to our house that we do not want to receive.  Each year, 19 billion catalogs are mailed to American consumers.  That means 53 MILLION trees are used, 3.6 MILLION TONS of paper, and 53 BILLION GALLONS of water, enough to fill 81,000 olympic-sized swimming pools.  HOLY COW!  If you want to reduce your environmental footprint, please visit the site and select the catalogs you no longer wish to receive - its free and incredibly easy (It took me less than 5 mins to register and select the catalogs).     

Good Deed #69.  Saturday was the 97th International Women's Day.  It is a day when women in 52 different countries celebrate the achievements and progress of women and women's rights. To support women in my local community, I bought 10 boxes of Girl Scout cookies.  Yes, I wanted the cookies, but it also supports a great organization of our future women.  I also donated some of the boxes to Girl Scouts Gift of Caring - which will send cookies to the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Good Deed #70.  Brian and I were doing some spring cleaning this weekend (with our new green cleaning products - love them!) and decided it was time to donate all of our glass bottles.  We have been delaying this task for about 9 months (if not more) and we finally donated the 200+ bottles that we were storing in our garage.  Don't worry Mom and Dad - it was mostly spaghetti bottles (wink wink).