Getting Involved, Changing the World - one Blog Post at a Time.

Live Chat

Craft for a Cause

By sarajean on 8/24/10 5:02am
Add Comment

Attention all artists, knitters, crafters, tinkerers, and people who generally like to make stuff: how would you like to engage in your hobby while earning money for your favorite charity—as well as some prize money (in the form of a JoAnn gift card) for yourself?

JoAnn Fabric and Craft Stores are hosting a “Craft for a Cause Contest 2010” just with this idea in mind. With a very simple premise and an easy way to participate, the contest allows entrants to do what it is they do already—make stuff!—and enter in the contest at the same time.

Read more >

Save Iranian Women From Being Stoned to Death

By sarajean on 8/10/10 5:14pm
Add Comment

Outside Shirley Jackson fiction, stoning is not something that has a place in our world. The practice involves the condemned—men and women who’ve often done things that wouldn’t even constitute as grounds for imprisonment in other countries—being buried up to his or her waist or neck and then hit repeatedly with stone after stone until death occurs. Archaic and brutal, it is not only cruel and unusual punishment by American standards (which says something, since we do allow for plenty of other cruel forms of punishment, including torture when “merited”), but also by most of the world at large as well.

Read more >

Help Victims of Domestic Abuse

By sarajean on 8/3/10 10:41am
Add Comment

We often hear about domestic violence shelters on television—usually on programs like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit—and we think, well, there’s where people can go if they’re getting beat up by their partner. Many of us are lucky enough to not have had experiences with such things—and lucky enough to not have needed them—so we don’t really see what goes on in a typical shelter, nor how a person can get help from one. While one of the things I want to do before I die is to work for or with a women’s safe house, I honestly have no idea how they operate other than what I’ve garnered from television and Stephen King’s Rose Madder, my absolute favorite novel.

Read more >

Will You Keep Buying From Target?

By sarajean on 8/3/10 10:19am
Add Comment

I am all about boycotting any company that doesn’t feel ethical to me. I was happy boycotting Taco Bell—a restaurant with lots of vegetarian options that I love so much—when they didn’t pay their tomato workers fairly. Boycotting Kimberly-Clark until they agreed to get their materials from another source rather than the old growth forests they were helping decimate. While I hate that companies don’t always act out of their own conscience and it takes us refusing to buy from them—and giving them bad press—to get them to make ethical changes, I do love that we, as consumers, do have the power to help things change.

Read more >

Charge BP with Animal Cruelty

By sarajean on 7/30/10 4:52pm
Add Comment

As the BP oil saga continues—cap or no cap, payouts or no payouts, ridiculous apologies or “take-backs”—animals continue to die every day in the Gulf of Mexico. Recently I overheard a news anchor talking about how the oil was thinning out—which does not mean that the situation is getting better. On the contrary, we already know that the matter cannot simply disappear, and if thinning, it will only spread even further on the surface—harming more animals of a wider area in its course.

Read more >

Donate to the African Wildlife Foundation for Free

By sarajean on 7/30/10 2:05am
Add Comment

People are always talking about how online activism—also sometimes referred to as “armchair activism”—and causes on social networks don’t make much of a difference, if any at all. Having worked for a nonprofit organization for several years, I can attest that this is not true. In a single organization alone, we raised money for dozens of organizations—including ones that helped homeless children, shelters, animal sanctuaries, and a program to get toilets in a developing country. We also raised awareness through hundreds of debates, articles, online and offline discussions and training sessions, and helped develop hundreds of projects across the globe with our site’s resources. You bet online campaigns and activism work!

Read more >

What is Up with Care2 Daily Actions?

By sarajean on 7/15/10 9:36pm
2 Comments

I absolutely love Care2.com. It’s the place where I really started to become an activist outside my own head and ideas—where I started actually taking action and learning about issues rather than just being mad about what goes on in the world. A friend’s mom told me about the website and I was immediately hooked. It’s grown into something enormous since then (that was nearly ten years ago—wow! Has it really been so long?), with lots of actions, petitions, and functionalities. It even has a place where you can “earn” credits to donate toward things like planting trees or providing clean drinking water to people in lesser developed nations. In a word, it’s sweet—at least, to me it is.

Read more >

Summer Volunteering

By sarajean on 6/29/10 11:58pm
Add Comment

Summer’s here, and along with the sweltering heat, ice cold lemonade, and flowers in bloom comes a plethora of opportunities to do good around your community. Here are just a few ideas you might wish to use in your volunteering adventures this summer.

Indulge in passion fruit—or make fruit your passion! Open up a lemonade stand for a cause (such as Alex’s Lemonade Stand) with a twist: offer fruit juices or smoothies with real sliced fruit. People may pay extra for these sweet indulgences, especially in the heat.

Cool people off. Hold a fun water day for kids with disabilities or the local hospice, if possible. Bring a sprinkler, a slide, and some water guns. Or simply make some sweet, cool treats to give out if playing in the water isn’t possible.

Read more >

Act Against the BP Spill

By sarajean on 6/28/10 7:04am
Add Comment

As a country, we’ve shared an outrage over the past two months as a wasteland has been made of our beautiful Gulf Coast. We’ve created rage-filled Facebook pages like “1 Million People for the Plugging of the Oil Spill with BP Executives” and seen some hilarious yet still sad videos like this one. We’ve expressed frustration and anger as our government, BP, and basically everyone in power has failed to stop the spill—and has succeeded in destroying our land, water, wildlife, jobs, and people. All in all, we are largely together in this.

Yet, as individuals, we can feel pretty powerless.

Read more >

Ivory Coast Soccer Star Didier Drogba Credited with a Civil War Cease-Fire

By becksta on 6/16/10 11:00am
Add Comment

Didier Drogba Helped Stop an Ivory Coast Civil WarDidier Drogba Helped Stop an Ivory Coast Civil WarI was watching Portugal play the Ivory Coast during the first round of the 2010 World Cup when the sportscaster mentioned how Didier Drogba, who is the star player both for the Ivory Coast national team and a Chelsea player, just happened to save his country from a civil war. His words  may serve as an example of the most effective celebrity use of fame to reach peace.


Read more >