Category: charities

Please donate to Feline Friends London

March 14, 2019 • 8:15 am

I must admit that I was a bit disappointed in the response when I asked readers yesterday to kick in a few bucks (or pounds) to support the Official Website Charity®, now Feline Friends London, a no-kill and all-volunteer cat rescue organization that re-homes felines taken from the London Streets. I thought that people who read this site regularly and enjoy at least some of it wouldn’t mind paying, say, $5 for ten years worth of entertainment.

A lot of people did donate (and said so in the comments, which enters them in a book contest), and I’m immensely grateful for their response. However, only about 50 people responded in the comments, and I had expected 100. After all, if every subscriber gave just one pound (donations are in pounds), the charity would get $77,781.45! One pound isn’t a lot, is it? (I recognize that some who donated might not have registered with a comment.)

I’ll be repeating this appeal every other day for about a week, and then leave you be. But if you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so, as it’s a terrific cause and the organization is not flush with cash. You can donate as little as you want (donations at the site below—click on screenshot—start at ten pounds, which is only two Starbucks lattes, but you can write in less, using your credit card).

Please click on the site below (or this link) to donate to the organization, described in my earlier post.  The cats thank you, Feline Friends London thanks you, and for myself, well, that goes without saying. If you donate, put your name in either the comments below or at my first post, and you’ll get the chance to win an autographed book with a cat of your choice drawn in it.

Here are some of the cats who need homes:

OMG: $6100!

March 28, 2015 • 2:00 pm

Bidding on the autographed and Houle-illustrated copy of WEIT has gone up another thousand simoleons, and there’s still a bit more than a day left:

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I take no credit for that high price, which I attribute to all the nice autographs that festoon the book and the spiffy artwork, but I’m still pleased that it will provide unexpected help for Doctors Without Borders (the recipient of all the proceeds), who say that donations can do stuff like this:

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So we now have 6000 treatments for children with malaria, and 200 months of therapeutic food for a malnourished child. I hope the well-heeled remember that when they’re putting in their bids.

Note as well that at Kelly’s Books Illuminated auction site, 100% of the money for her beautiful cover painting (a full-sized version of the final cover of The Illuminated Origin, with bids now at $970) goes to DwB, as well as $36 out of the $120 for the Darwin’s orchid + pollinator print, of which there are 4 left.  Here’s one of the latter with her description of how it’s done:

I’ve been illuminating orchid and moth prints, a limited edition of 30. I’m painting directly on the surface of the print with mica-based pearlescent paint (made by Fine-Tec in Germany) and shell gold to represent sunlight reflecting off the leaves, flower, and insect wings. It’s not easy to capture the effect in a photo, but this one comes close.

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Kelly says she’ll continue to add items with charitable donations to the site, so keep checking back.

And, if you want a nice gift that isn’t as pricey, there are lovely greeting cards featuring Darwin’s first phylogenetic tree in gold letters, 10% of the price also going to DwB (I have a box of those, which I send out only on special occasions). I can’t imagine better presents for the evolution-friendly, especially since you’re helping a good cause at the same time.

Finally, let me leave a link to Kelly’s Facebook page, where she explains the various techniques she uses to create her paintings, prints, and illuminations.

 

Save a life in 3 minutes

February 1, 2014 • 1:21 pm

A reader who is taking Paul Bloom’s free online course “Moralities of everyday life” (it started Jan. 20), sent me this short video that Bloom uses in the course.  It’s based on Peter Singer’s argument on why we’re obligated to help strangers, and I find it very convincing.

The link at the end to The Life You Can Save site, which recommends some good charities. I also recommend using Charity Navigator, an American site that rates charities based on their effectiveness, financial transparency, and the proportion of donations actually used to help people. I was pleased to see that Doctors Without Borders, the Official Website Charity™, gets the highest rating (4 stars), and gives nearly 87% of its income for its medical program.

I’ve also used Charity Watch (formerly the the American Institute of Philanthropy), which has a convenient page giving the top-ranking charities by area (international relief & development, environmental protection, child protection, literacy, women’s rights, and so on). They give Doctors Without Borders an “A” rating, just a tad lower than the highest, A+.

h/t: Miss May