A Way To Give A Little More

Lea este artículo en español

Hello everyone:

This will be my last post of the year. Last week I wrote about making your holidays a little more authentic and environmentally friendly.

This week I want to bring everyone’s attention to Amazon’s Amazon Smile program. It is a free-for customers system on which, before you shop at the Amazon main site (that is the .com one in the US) you register to ask them to donate 0.5% of your shopping total to a charity of your choice that is registered with Amazon. It is Amazon’s gift to charity on your behalf.

When I first heard of the Smile program, my first thought was “bah, 0.5%”. Then curiosity got the better of me and I went online to check the experts’ sales forecasts for Amazon for this holiday season… $20 billion. That means that, if we all signed up to Smile they would give $100 million to our non-profits. That’s crazy.

So, if you are an Amazon shopper, I urge you to visit this page and look for a charity. Please type in the name using uppercase and lowercase correctly, the system seems to locate names spelled with proper upper and lowercase only, like UNICEF). Personally I donated to Water, an organization dedicated to bringing potable (drinkable) water to every area of the planet. It’s today’s worst global problem, the lack of drinking water in the poorer places. But you can type the name or part of the name of the charity you wish to help, and see if they are registered. All the major ones are, I checked: Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, Red Cross, Toys for Tots (FYI, the original one is the one listed as the Marine Toys for Tots out of Virginia), The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, etc.

One of the non-profits registered with Amazon Smile is the WOCCU Foundation for Credit Unions, whose mission is to support the credit union and cooperative systems in developing new activities, and to assist credit unions worldwide in times of disasters. To give you an idea of their work, they have helped rebuild 42 credit unions that had been destroyed in the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami, and provided credit unions in that nation with extra funding to start microcredit initiatives to teach new skills to people whose livelihood had been destroyed, so they could find new work. This was just one of their projects, to see more of their work visit this page. 

And that is all for now, folks.

I hope you have enjoyed everything that we have given to you thus far. Next year I will pick up with a new post on the usual date, the 10th of the month.

Till then, I wish you all plenty of joy during this holiday season, and best wishes for the coming year. 

 I would also like to wish happy holidays to a few people who are very dear to me: first, the boss lady Lucy, who inspired me to remember that members always come first, no matter how busy and crazy things got; I kept that policy on the front burner the many years I worked at OAS FCU and it was the best lesson to learn, as many of you, the members, will know. To Carlos, who pushed me to learn things I never imagined that I would like (like banking law), but that he thought I would; and he was right. To Patricia, who liked my writing and came up with the idea to make this blog happen. To Ruben, for the many breaks over the years. To Raquel and Raul, for being Raquel and Raul (need I say more?!). And to everyone else at the credit union, for many years of so much fun that the office felt like a home away from home.

See you next year!

La gallega