Sitting at the airport waiting with Mari and Elmer for their plane to board we spoke about their future plans and they told us about the missionary work that they were hoping on doing. Talk got around to the various organizations that are around and those that we support, and I thought that I’d just put in a couple of sentences about those that the studio supports and why.

We mainly support two organisations, The Smile Train and World Vision, The Smile Train is an organization that provides free cleft surgery and World Vision allows you to adopt a child and pay for their schooling. I won’t go into their whole spiel, but what I like about these organizations is that you get to make a difference to a particular person not to a cause.

In the case of World Vision there is an actual child out there who now gets to go to school instead of collecting wood and cleaning the house. You get a photo of the kid every year and they send you pictures from school etc. While in the case of The Smile Train, your $250 goes towards the surgery, $0 goes towards admin. Which means that when you donate your $250 there is one kid out there who has the surgery and gets a chance at life. Its a fantastic feeling donating that $250, and getting those before and after images. I understand that staples are important to running any organization, I’d rather my money was used to help an actual person. It just makes me feel better.

Edited: I’ve gotten a couple of emails in regards to this blog and I just wanted to add that there are many watchdog organisations out there. We normally have a look via Charity Navigator which rates different NPO’s, what they pay their top executives and how much money actually goes towards their actual activities. You can have a look at the Charity Navigator rating for World Vision here

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.