Anybody out there heard about WWF’s “Earth Hour”? It started in Sydney, Australia, back in 2007 with 2.2 million homes and businesses turning their lights off for one hour to highlight the need for action on global warming and the seriousness of climate change. Following media coverage the simple event in Sydney in 2007 became a global affair in 2008 when over 370 cities and towns including many famous landmarks across the world, joined in for an hours blackout. This year WWF wants the event to become even bigger and really bring home to governments in every country that dangerous climate change won’t just go away and something needs to be done now and not when it is too late.
8:30pm, Saturday, 28th March is the time and date for this years “Earth Hour”. Sit on your own in candlelight or get together with friends and have a candlelit dinner party or maybe a storytelling session around the fire. There are various ideas for what to do (and how to raise money for WWF whilst doing it) on the WWF website where you can also register:
MetaPagan blog aggregator
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Follow Up: Kiva and Pagan Charities
Just a quick follow up to Yewtree's comments about Pagan charities; Kiva, an organization Yewtree mentioned in her last post, is popular with Pagans for a number of reasons, but one is their wisdom in allowing members to join together in "teams"--groups whose members decide individually how and what to donate, but whose donations are tallied together.
This kind of strategy lets Pagans not only continue to support people who need it, but to demonstrate to outsiders that, though we lack the infrastructure many large religious institutions have, Pagans are also generous to those in need. As you might expect, there is already at least one Pagan team: the Wiccans, Pagans, Witches and Fellows team. What's next? Druid grove teams, Heathen kindred teams, Hellenic teams?
All of the above, I hope, and perhaps other charities will be savvy enough to follow suit. The ability to help someone in need and become visible as we manifest the Pagan spirit of hospitality will likely attract more of us to the charities that allow us to do this.
If you're interested, joining to Kiva is easy--PayPal as well as credit cards work just fine--and especially effective, since the money not donated for operating costs is actually given out as loans; once repaid, loans can either be sent out again, to help another individual or community, or reclaimed by the Kiva donor. (Technically, this does mean no charitable donation deduction is allowable on the loan amounts, something important to understand, but not much of a discouragement to make the loans, given the effectiveness of the strategy.)
Know of other charities that allow the formation of teams that allow Pagans a little positive visibility? Let us know: we'll pass it on!
This kind of strategy lets Pagans not only continue to support people who need it, but to demonstrate to outsiders that, though we lack the infrastructure many large religious institutions have, Pagans are also generous to those in need. As you might expect, there is already at least one Pagan team: the Wiccans, Pagans, Witches and Fellows team. What's next? Druid grove teams, Heathen kindred teams, Hellenic teams?
All of the above, I hope, and perhaps other charities will be savvy enough to follow suit. The ability to help someone in need and become visible as we manifest the Pagan spirit of hospitality will likely attract more of us to the charities that allow us to do this.
If you're interested, joining to Kiva is easy--PayPal as well as credit cards work just fine--and especially effective, since the money not donated for operating costs is actually given out as loans; once repaid, loans can either be sent out again, to help another individual or community, or reclaimed by the Kiva donor. (Technically, this does mean no charitable donation deduction is allowable on the loan amounts, something important to understand, but not much of a discouragement to make the loans, given the effectiveness of the strategy.)
Know of other charities that allow the formation of teams that allow Pagans a little positive visibility? Let us know: we'll pass it on!
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