Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: Charities I Recommend
There are thousands of worthwhile charities in the United States, so sometimes it’s difficult to choose only one or two to support. Listed below are links to five national charities which received an A+ rank from Charity Watch. Each of them spend 90% or more of their budgets on programs, spend $5 or less to raise $100 in public support, do not hold excessive assets in reserve, have met CharityWatch’s governance benchmarks, and receive “open-book” status for disclosure of basic financial information and documents to CharityWatch.
All Hands and Hearts provides community-inspired, volunteer-powered disaster relief.
Conservation Fund works with partners to protect America’s land and water resources through land acquisition and sustainable community and economic development, emphasizing the integration of economic and environmental goals.
Hispanic Scholarship Fund aims through scholarships and student/family services to provide students all the tools they need to get a college degree and succeed in life.
World Central Kitchen uses the power of food to nourish communities and strengthen economies in times of crisis and beyond.
World Resources Institute creates change that improves people’s lives and ensures the natural world can thrive.
Instead of donating to national charities, you may prefer to support charities closer to home. In my city, for example, the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank does excellent work distributing food to indigent families.
Casa San José provides vital support for Latinos in Pittsburgh, including maintaining a Rapid Response Network of volunteers to document ICE operations.
The Waldorf School of Pittsburgh, which my wife Eva and I co-founded and built thirty years ago with other families, educates children from pre-school to eighth grade with an emphasis on nature and imagination.
Madville, which has published five of my speculative novels, was founded by Kim Davis who is the best editor any writer could wish for. I encourage you to support the press by purchasing books and making a donation.
And finally, Autumn House Press, which I founded in 1998 and ran for 18 years, is now led brilliantly by Christine Stroud. AHP consistently publishes some of the best poetry and prose books in the United States.
In the comments section below, please feel free to list charities which you believe deserve widespread support.
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So many wonderful suggestions. Thank you, Michael.
I would add “No More Deaths / No Más Muertes”.
My wife and I have personal connections to these folks, and can testify to the authenticity of their mission.
“No More Deaths / No Más Muertes” is a humanitarian organization based in southern Arizona. They are an official ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson. For immigrants, they maintain a year-round humanitarian presence in the deserts of southwestern Arizona and the northern Sonora Desert. Volunteers hike the trails and leave water, food, socks, blankets, and other supplies. Medical teams and volunteers provide emergency first-aid treatment to individuals in distress. In short, they work in the remote areas into which our brutal immigration policies have pushed folks. For this work of God, several have been arrested and put on trial. The Border Patrol regularly destroys the supplies they leave.
It is a charity for which a small donation can literally save a live.
Good Works Education Fund
2810 N Church Street PMB 467109
Wilmington, DE 19802
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Excellent suggestion, John. Thank you! And also, thank you for your service as a city councilman in your city. You’ve made tremendous progress by supporting the arts and preparing the community for climate change.
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thank you for your warm heart. Yet we do not see food as a priority. What use of food for dead people. We are dying of cold, darkness if not illiteracy. Thousands are holding inappropriate Ph.Ds from every where across Europe, USA and Russia. But ignorance is still in rise. Students do not respect their professors.
yes we need charities improving morals and standards.
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Good point, Saleh. Can you suggest charities that address morals and standards?
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of course you know better. Thank you for your concern
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That’s generous of you to say, Saleh, but I do want to know what can we Westerners do to make this scurvy world better? One thing we can do, of course, is to find better leaders than Trump and his minions. Many of us are trying to do so. What else? Please let us know…
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many thanks. I do not know what to say. I read poetry. Some times i review a new collection. But politics is not my business. We can not afford playing with fire. I lost my son in prison without any reason. He had been liquidated just like that. Bla, bla, bla..
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I’m so sorry that you lost your son, Saleh. I’ve lost family members to violence as well. It seems so pointless and unnecessary.
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The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York
The Washington English Center
The Whole South Heritage Works
The Music Maker Foundation
Thanks, Michael, for starting this.
Jordan
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Excellent choices, Jordan. Thank you!
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Because visiting Pittsburgh helped greatly in healing my grief: from the Carrie Furnace ruins site, to the Tree of Lights Synagogue massacre site, where there were hundreds of children’s responses with their outpourings of love posted on the fence outside, I’ve always wanted to give back to the city, the Burgh. Casa San Jose is my choice.
When Pam died, she asked me to tell people at her Memorial service to donate to her favorite charity, if they wished, but alternatively to the local food shelf of their choice. Direct help to neighbors. Though, as others have said, neighbors are in dire straights throughout the world.I also like to consider the environment as a neighbor.
Caritas (the Latin word for love) is a way to sing, to cherish, to heal or ameliorate dire straits. Thanks here for all the options that people have seen work.
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Casa San Jose is an excellent choice, Jim. One of their projects is to host families with children whose fathers have been deported by ICE. The families are given lodging, food and counseling. This is truly neighbors helping neighbors.
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anera (American Near East Children’s Aid) <https://www.anera.org/> and MECA (Middle East Children’s Alliance) <https://www.mecaforpeace.org/about-us/> are highly rated nonprofits that bring aid directly to child refugees in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq.
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Thanks, Angele!
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i’d like to add partners for world health – based here in portland maine – which after the unconscionable gutting of USAID is more vital than ever. also, any local organizations offering support to immigrants. we have an amazing community of big-hearted people here, but given….everything, they’re hurting and the need outstrips the resources. also, as always, thank you michael for thinking of this. the suggestions offer not just practical guidance but balm for the soul, a small light in the darkness. to better times….
https://www.partnersforworldhealth.org/
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To better times, Abby. Thank you!
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I want to add the Keres Children’s Learning Center in New Mexico, which is a small Montessori school attached to Cochiti Pueblo which teaches children in their endangered native language, Keres. KERES is a language isolate, which means it is unlike any other language in the world.
As with other Native American languages, Keres is an endangered language. There were believed to be just 13,190 Keresan speakers in 2013 (Source). “About 60% of the 1,200 members of the Pueblo de Cochiti are fluent in Keres” as of 2022, according to the Albuquerque Journal. For Acoma Keres, there were believed to be only about 100 speakers in 2017.
For these communities, survival of their language and culture is paramount. Says Christine Sims, a professor at the University of New Mexico and member of the Acoma Pueblo: “I think a lot of people don’t fully recognize how invaluable – how these languages are an existential part of our cultural survival.”
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Perfect! Thank you, Eva!
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Thank you for these excellent suggestions, Michael (and otherss). For poets or poetry-lovers in California, a very worthy recipient is Poetry Flash (https://www.poetryflash.org/) an organization that for more than 50 years has maintained a calendar of readings all over the state, with a particular focus on the Bay Area. Because of deep cuts to the funding they have historically received from state-funded organizations like the California Arts Council, Poetry Flash needs every penny it can get. I only wish I could give them more.
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Wonderful organization, Annie. Thank you.
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I remember when we first came to America. We had nothing. A trunk full of clothes and blankets. I don’t know what would have happened to us except for the kindness of some ladies in the neighborhood who brought us food.
I wrote a piece about their kindness:
Charity in America
When we first arrived in Chicago in 1952, we were lost. My family had spent 6 years in the DP camps in Germany after the war and another year outside of Buffalo, NY, working for a farmer who paid our passage over to America.
But now we were in Chicago, and we were lost. We had nothing, just the things we brought with us from Germany. I remember years later asking my mother what we had brought to America in the wooden trunk my father built. She shrugged and went through the list: some plates, a crucifix, a wooden comb, some goose down pillows, a frying pan, and letters from a friend in America.
In Chicago we lived in dark rooms in small apartments in that we shared sometimes with two or three other DP families from the camps in Germany. We were all people who had lost so much and had left so much behind, our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters.
We were alone and didn’t know where anything in this new world was. I remember one time my father was going out looking for a store where he could buy some Polish sausage, and my mom stopped him and said, “Maybe they don’t have kielbasa here.”
I was 4 years old that first winter in America, and I remember staring out a window at the snow falling on the buses moving slowly up and down Milwaukee Avenue, and begging my father to take us back to the refugee camps in Germany. I said it was too hard for us here.
We were lost in America — but sometimes people helped us.
We didn’t know who they were or what their names were or why they helped us. But they did.
I remember one time two women who came to our apartment. They didn’t speak Polish, and the only English my parents knew was “Thank you, Missus.” These two women came and brought a dress for my mother, rubber boots for my dad, cans of pork and beans and loaves of bread for all of us, and for my sister and me, they brought some comic books, a hard rubber toy, a doll and a red truck with a missing tire.
We didn’t know who these two women were or how they found us. We didn’t even know their real names, so we gave them names. We called one woman “dobra,” and the other one “fajna,”
We knew what these two words meant. These were “good” and “fine” women.
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Beautiful writing, John. Thank you for sharing this personal account.
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….and Doctors Without Borders who often risk their lives to save others in war-torn countries…
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Yes! Eva and I have supported DWB in the past. A brave band of heroes.
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Thank you, Michael.
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Thanks, HC!
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Great idea, Michael. I’d add Southern Poverty Law Center to the list https://secure.splcenter.org
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Excellent addition, Jan.
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Thank you for this!
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Thanks, Kathryn. Happy Holidays!
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I would like to add the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA). They have been doing essential work for the children of the West Bank and Gaza for many years.
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Great suggestion, Kathryn!
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