You’ve already seen the holiday commercials and the arrival of glitter and tinsel-covered in-store displays. Now, with Thanksgiving-induced comas behind us, the season of shopping has officially begun. From frenzied Black Friday sales through New Years Eve, retailers across the country will continue to pull out all the stops to welcome us into their biggest, busiest season.
Now we know it’s easy to let the all-out shopping frenzy take over — and maybe even distract us from what truly inspires us to give gifts in the first place: because we care for others. So, if you’re going to shop, why not also make a difference in the world at large by buying from a company that promotes fair trade practices or donates part of your purchase towards helping others.
Here are some great resources to help you shop with a purpose, and give back for every gift you give:
ebay’s World of Good lets you shop from the global marketplace and helps your purchases make a positive impact.
GoodShop lets you search and shop for just about anything, while donating to your favorite cause or charity.
Gap’s Red campaign donates 50% of sales of specially-designated Red products to The Global Fund to finance health and HIV community support programs in Africa.
Helpingly donates 2% of your online shopping to the charity of your choice, at no additional cost to you.
iGive is a tiny addition to your browser that automatically tells over 900 participating stores that you want your shopping to support your favorite cause or charity.
OneCause is an online retail outlet that puts a portion of your purchasing dollars towards the charity or school of your choice.
Ten Thousand Villages makes and sells beautiful, fair-trade crafted products and gifts that directly support the artisan or artists’ collective that made them.
TOMS famously donates a pair of shoes (and now eyeglasses) to people in need for every pair you buy. Meanwhile, the shoe company BucketFeet donates a portion of your shoe purchase to kids charities. (check out Repair the World’s interview with their founder Aaron Firestein here.)
NeedsforSale was started as a way to inspire others to help charities with the incentive of art. Each painting represents a need that we would like to fill. 100% of each sale will be donated to charity.
We-Care.com helps you “shop with a purpose” by giving back part of the money you spend shopping or booking travel to a cause, school or association of your choice.
Jewish tradition reminds us to think about the needs of others, even as we do something for ourselves. This shopping season, when you’re thinking about what others might want or need– take a minute to consider what you’re doing for the world at large.
This Thanksgiving, give back a piece of the pie. Photo by Mackenzie Mollo via CC
Polish your gravy boats and slip into your eating pants, people – Thanksgiving is almost here. It’s the holiday devoted to lots: of traffic, of eating, of time with family, and of being grateful for everything we have. (hmmm … didn’t we just do this in October?)
Thanksgiving is also dedicated to those without lots. Every year, millions of people across the country take time out of their holiday festivities to give back through volunteering. And we can think of no better way to celebrate a day of gratefulness than by helping others. After the annual touch-football game is over, why not take advantage of the holiday spirit by participating in one of the service opportunities below.
Too busy prepping the turkey (or tofurkey), whipping the mashed potatoes or just gobbling it up? Fret not. People need help all year round! So prep away, and bring the Thanksgiving spirit into the rest of the year!
Bake or Buy Pie. Across the country, expert and novel bakers-alike are banding together to bake pies to raise money for charity – like this Pie in the Sky event in Massachusetts or these pie events across the country. As if pumpkin and pecan pie could get any sweeter!
Race. Sign up for a Thanksgiving Day run that helps raise awareness or money (or both) for a good cause, like the Run for Food race in California.
Deliver meals to older and housebound residents with Meals on Wheels. Your visit will bring them much more than food.
Visit residents at a local senior center for VA hospital. Many of these organizations throw Thanksgiving dinners or parties for their residents, like this one in New York City, and need extra help and extra friendly faces.
Serve (literally) by volunteering at a local soup kitchen, which provides free, hot meals on Thanksgiving (and the rest of the year) to people in need.
Donate. If you don’t have time to volunteer in-person on Thanksgiving, donating to a favorite charity is a great way to give back.
What did we miss? What did you do? Feel free to share other local and national volunteer opportunities in the comments below.
Israelis have a thing for Nepal. Each year, thousands of young Israelis strap on their backpacks and travel the world, with many ending up in Kathmandu. It’s no surprise then, that the state’s capital city regularly hosts one of the world’s largest annual seders, often feeding more than 1,500 travelers. (That is a LOT a lot of matzah!)
Now, Repair the World grantee-partner Tevel b’Tzedek (The Earth- In Justice) offers another way to have a meaningful Jewish experience in Nepal. This February, Israelis and Jews from around the world can join Tevel b’Tzedek on a 4-month adventure promoting environmental justice and human rights and working to ease poverty in Nepal.
The Israel-based nonprofit launched in 2007 with the mission to “create a community of Israeli and Diaspora Jews engaging in the urgent issues of global poverty, marginalization and environmental devastation from a place of deep commitment to the Jewish people and its ethical and spiritual traditions.” Since then, more than 250 people have participated in the volunteer fellowship in Nepal and Haiti (where they also run service programs.)
The Nepal program combines both Jewish study and volunteering including:
Working with local communities on youth education, agriculture, women’s empowerment, and health
Learning about social and environmental justice, Judaism, economics, globalization and the history and culture of Nepal.
Studying Nepali language.
Volunteering both in Kathmandu and outside in more rural areas.
Check out the Tevel b’Tzedek experience in participants’ own words by watching the video below and checking out their personal blogs. Then, apply for the 4-month program here.
Happy Monday and happy Thanksgiving week! This week’s link roundup is dedicated to service and social action-related posts focused on food, scarcity and abundance and, naturally, thankfulness. Grab a big helping below, and feel free to head back for seconds.
The New York Times’ foodie-in-chief, Mark Bittman, shared a list of his favorite food justice organizations, farmers, home gardeners, activists and other heroes who are working to make this country a fairer and more nourishing place for all.
The Jew & The Carrot chronicled a recent food tour of Israel, sponsored by Hazon, which highlighted the country’s diverse and sustainable food communities.
The Jew & The Carrot also published the account of one Orthodox Rabbi’s attempt to keep kosher while participating in the Food Stamp Challenge. The post generated a lot of discussion in the comments, so don’t forget to read below the article.
The Huffington Post published an article by Marie Clarke Brill of ActionAid USA about the connection between biofuels like ethanol and hunger in America.
NonProfitOrgs created a list of the 50 non-profits they are feeling grateful for this season – everything from Feeding America and the World Wildlife Fund to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. What organizations would you add to the list?
An Echoing Green staff member shared the story of a site visit the organization took to Jessamyn Waldman’s Hot Bread Kitchen, a Brooklyn-based “kitchen incubator” she created to help entrepreneurial immigrant women get their food-based companies off the ground.
What are you feeling particularly grateful for this Thanksgiving week?
Try to picture 3.3 million grains of rice. If that’s too challenging, you could also visualize 200,000 grapes, 35,000 eggs, 4,000 pomegranates, 440 watermelons, or 220 pumpkins. Each of these quantities of food weighs a solid ton, which is the amount of fresh produce collected during UJA-Federation’s first annual Care to Share fresh food drive in conjunction with Met Council, Hazon, and AmeriCorps.
This year’s program far surpassed its initial goal of collecting 1,000 pounds of food for those in need.
Synagogues and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups from all over the city, as well as Westchester and Long Island, contributed to the program’s success and many participants have expressed an interest in taking part again next year. Local soup kitchens and food pantries worked together with each of the collection sites to distribute the fresh produce on the same day it was donated.
Read the remainder of the article here an learn more about Care to Share here.
Check out Repair the World’s post on the Care to Share program (plus a great video) here.
How should we respond to what we read in the news? Photo by dilona via CC
This Torah Tidbit is brought to you by Repair the World and our grantee-partner American Jewish World Service (AJWS). Check out the full dvar tzedek on which this excerpt is based at AJWS.
What do we do when tragedy strikes? How should we react – both to the tragedies we experience personally, and one’s we see from afar? Sometimes it seems like everyday the news has another sad story to share – of famine or war, injustice or environmental degradation. When we hear about these things, is it better to get riled up with anger and outrage, or numb ourselves to the pain and carry on?
This week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, asks just that. It tells the story of Sarah’s emotional death following the near-sacrifice of her son Isaac, and of her husband Abraham’s response (according to the sage Rashi) to marry Isaac so that his lineage lives on.
Read more from this week’s dvar tzedek author, Wendi Geffen, below the jump.
With Thanksgiving coming up next Thursday and finals week looming large, winter break (and all the snow, holiday celebrations and family gatherings that come with it) are on the way! How you can make the most of your time off?
Now you could be a winter-couch potato, but we think there are lots of ways to serve during winter break, whether that means working at a soup kitchen, coordinating a holiday toy or clothing drive, or volunteering at an organization nearby. And over the last decade, alternative winter break programs have skyrocketed.
Alternative break programs combine travel to a new place and meeting great people with meaningful work that makes a real difference in the community served. And in the Jewish alternative break world, there’s often an added layer of learning about Judaism’s connection to service, social justice and tikkun olam.
Hey, college students: Interested in social action? Want to know what Judaism and other world religions have to say about it? Want to meet a ton of great people doing interfaith social action projects that you can bring back to your campus? Then pack your bags and get ready for the to Interfaith Youth Core’s Leadership Institute this January in Atlanta.
Launched in 2002, The Interfaith Youth Core brings together people of all faiths and traditions to lead the way towards a better world for everyone. Since it started, IFYC has helped foster a powerful network of leaders who are building the movement of interfaith cooperation in the 21st century. Pretty nifty, eh?
The movement, which believes in working together across difference and sharing our individual strengths to create a stronger whole, is growing on college campuses nationwide. And IFYC’s Leadership Institute was designed to train students (like you!) and give them the resources they need to be stronger, more vibrant and inspired organizers on their campuses and in their own communities.
Sound like fun? (we think so…).
Save the dates for three upcoming Institutes: January 12-15 in Atlanta, June 18-21 in Chicago, and July 2012 (location TDB), learn more about the Leadership Institute below….then apply! (and let us know you did!) Applications are due by November 28 – find out how to get involved here.
Happy Monday! We hope you had a fabulous weekend kicking through the autumn leaves and drinking hot cider (or is that just our idea of the perfect weekend)? Now, to get your day started off right, here is your weekly roundup of inspiring and thought-provoking service and social justice stories from around the web. Read on…
Have Fun Do Good highlighted the work of dancer Sara Potler, whose amazing organization Dance 4 Peace focuses on conflict resolution and civic education through dance in youth around the world.
JSpot highlighted a recent meeting of faith-based disaster and relief recovery leaders, which focused on how best to serve the low-income communities that are often hardest hit.
The Forward honored Evelyn Lauder (who recently passed away). The daughter-in-law of cosmetics legend Estee Lauder, Evelyn pioneered the pink ribbon that has become the leading symbol of breast cancer awareness.
The Huffington Post published an inspiring article by Racheal Yeager of the HERproject about empowering women to be leaders in sustainable development.
GOOD ends things on a hopeful note with their “document hopefulness” slideshow. It’s a bit cheesy, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with a little excess hope. What are you feeling hopeful for this week? Email us.
Repair the World works to inspire American Jews and their communities to give their time and effort to serve those in need. We aim to make service a defining part of American Jewish life.
