I'm tripling down on my donations that I placed at the beginning of the year. Feels right.
donations
2011 Donations
By mlissner - Posted on January 22nd, 2011
I'm entering year number two of my plan to annually donate a small sum of money to a handful of organizations at the beginning of every year. This year I picked the organizations that had a major effect on me personally, are fixing environmental problems, or are working towards fixing the American political system.
You'll see that I've given the most money to organizations that are working to reform voting methods, and campaign finance. I believe that if those two things were fixed properly, we'd have good people in office that could fix all of the other issues we see from day to day.
| Organization | Amount | Why | Donation link |
|---|---|---|---|
| UC Berkeley School of Information | $50.00 | They're my alma mater, and generally teach good things. | Donate |
| Pitzer College | $25.00 | They're my other alma mater, and generally create good people. They also influenced me greatly. | Donate |
| Pacific Crest Trail Association | $25.00 | Because they are maintaining and creating a trail from Mexico to Canada, so that's awesome. | Donate |
| Catalog Choice | $25.00 | Can you imagine how much junk mail there is in America? Catalog Choice actually makes it pretty easy to opt out, and they just keep getting better and better. | Donate |
| Geany | $25.00 | It's a pretty darned good open-source IDE that I use regularly. I shall give them my money. | Donate |
| Django | $50.00 | Without Django, I'd be a less-skilled, and less useful programmer. It's a great tool and a great community. | Donate |
| Electronic Frontier Foundation | $75.00 | Because the Internet needs more lawyers to keep it useful. | Donate |
| Fair Vote | $100.00 | Democracy in the U.S. has many issues, and they've got excellent ideas for fixing them through voter reform. | Donate |
| Fix Congress First | $75.00 | Until we fix campaign finance, what's the point of electing people? They're all going to be biased towards getting the next buck if we don't fix this. | Donate |
| Public Citizen | $50.00 | They are looking at a handful of important issues, and generally leading the way on all of them. | Donate |
2010 Donations
By mlissner - Posted on January 12th, 2010
Tagged:
Every year, a handful of organizations reach out to me to give them my money. I'm never sure how much I've given them, when the last time was, etc, so I'm always convinced some of them are tricking me into donating more than I would otherwise.
Well, this shall happen no more. I'm starting a new scheme this year in which on January 1st of each year, I donate to all the organizations that make the cut.
Here are this year's results, including amount donated and links to their donation page. Please let me know if I'm making any grave mistakes:
| Organization | Amount | Link to donate |
| Pacific Crest Trail Association | $25 | Donate |
| Secular Coalition | $15 | Donate |
| Pitzer College (my alma mater) | $30 | Donate |
| Zotero | $25 | Donate |
| Electronic Frontier Foundation | $40 | Donate |
| Catalog Choice | $10 | Donate |
| Food and Water Watch | $10 | Donate |
| Creative Commons | $20 | Donate |
| International AIDS Vaccine Initiative | $10 | Donate |
| gnome-do | $15 | Summon > Donate > Enter |
