Donate to Green Community Projects
I found an interesting company called GlobalGiving that is trying to help promote green projects throughout the world. They have created a site called GlobalGiving Green that aims to connect people to make donations with small community projects in rural parts of the world. They describe on their site how they judge the “greenness” of each of the projects:
We’ve evaluated each project according to how well it helps reduce harmful emissions, plus how it stacks up in areas such as providing sustainable, positive economic growth, aiding the culture and environment of a community, educating future generations on green techniques, and more.
About GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving was founded by Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle. They originally created a competition while working for the World Bank that would give bank employees the opportunity to submit their best ideas on how to fight poverty worldwide. Mari and Dennis used this same concept to the public to award innovative ideas several million dollars of the World Bank’s funds. The competition ended up giving away close to $5 million to the 44 projects. After seeing that a marketplace for philanthropy could succeed, GlobalGiving was created in February of 2002.
The new GlobalGiving Green really allows people to make a difference worldwide. They have a massive database of projects that you can donate in several categories:
- Emissions reduction
- Reforestation
- Green Technology
- Climate Change Education
Each project has a number of photos, details and specific donation amounts could provide as well the people benefiting from them. Donations can be made in amounts as little as $10 and can be tax-deductible since they are a non-profit company. One thing that always concerns me with making donations is what percentage of the funds will actually get to the project I am donating to. I was a little disappointed to not find it on their site. I looked around a little further and found that they keep 10 percent of the value of the gift. The cost is understandable since it does cost money to maintain their website and connect people with these green projects.
