October is breast cancer awareness month

I've been meaning to put up some ideas on volunteering and more active charity work, and now's a good a time as any. October is breast cancer awareness month, and there's plenty to do to help battle this illness.

For starters, the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer is hitting New York City on Oct. 4-5, so if you're in the NYC area like I am, check it out. The walk helps under-insured women to get checked out, since early detection is so critical. For any North Carolina readers out there, the Charlotte walk is next up, at the end of October.

The American Cancer Society's Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walks are certainly more plentiful -- they're happening throughout the nation, throughout the month. Click on over, register, and help fund research and education about breast cancer around the country. Thanks to loyal Five Dollar Hero (and amazing, wonderful wife) Kate for the links!

And, of course, keep an eye out for the weekly charity postings; Five Dollar Heroes will be sure to get in the spirit by devoting a week's worth of donations to these important efforts.

Hole in the Wall Camps

Paul Newman readily confessed that he exploited his celebrity. Indeed, it was on every bottle of salad dressing, pasta sauce, salsa and popcorn his company produced: Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good.

The talented actor, director, producer and, yes, salad dressing impresario, died Friday at the age of 83. His Newman's Own Foundation got all the proceeds from his food business and, over the course of Newman's life, donated $250 million to various charities. Newman, of course, was rich, but he wasn't Bill Gates rich; the foundation probably gave away more than Newman earned over his entire career.

One of Newman's favorite charities was the Hole in the Wall Camps, which he helped start in 1988. These camps allow chronically ill children a chance to have a normal, fun camp experience. Over the past 20 years, more than 119,000 severely ill kids have been able to leave the hospitals, hospices and confining bedrooms and know what it's like to spend some time in the sun.

So in tribute to one of the great philanthropists of the past 30 years, Five Dollar Heroes is naming the Hole in the Wall Camps as the weekly charity. So check out what the camps do, and please, donate by clicking here. And yes, it's another $10 minimum. And yes, once again I think I need to rename the blog...!

Finally, if you're of an athletic bent, consider joining Team Hole in the Wall for your next race, and run on behalf of a local camp!

The Grameen Foundation

You've heard the old adage about the benefits of giving a guy a fish versus teaching him to fish. The Grameen Foundation, this week's charity, puts that into practice by providing poor people with the means to start businesses and lift themselves out of poverty.

The Grameen Foundation offers microloans to people around the world, mostly women, so they can start businesses. A loan of $100 may not seem like much here, but in Africa or Asia, that seed money can be used to start a business to save an entire family from hunger and homelessness. The foundation's partners set goals for the borrowers, in terms of business success as well as social success. Through Grameen and its many partners, thousands of people aren't just getting fed -- they're out of poverty for good.

A little money goes a long way...just like the Five Dollar Hero spirit! So click here to learn more about the Grameen Foundation, and then click here to donate your $5. I bet if all the blog's readers chipped in, we could, at the very least, fund one microloan somewhere, and help change a family's life.

Update: I may have to change the name of this blog...Grameen is only accepting $10 donations online. I'm going for it anyway, because I admire what they do. So make it $10!

Five Dollar Heroes is a month old!

It's been a little more than a month since I started Five Dollar Heroes, and it's already doing better than I thought it would at this point. The blog has had over 100 unique visitors, logging in from 16 different states (and D.C.) and five foreign countries on three continents. Thanks to everyone who e-mailed their friends and colleagues about this blog!

As you can see from the badges on the right of the page, I've registered Five Dollar Heroes at BlogCatalog.com, a blog directory, and with Bloggers Unite, a group of bloggers concerned about social issues. (Bloggers Unite will be blogging about refugee issues on Nov. 10, and I've begun researching an appropriate charity to receive the Five Dollar Hero treatment.) I've also nominated the blog for the Bloggers' Choice Awards for Best Charity Blog, in hopes of getting more people to surf over and join us.

I don't really have a tally of how much the blog's readers have given over the past month, but we've received e-mail thank-yous from Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross and the U.N. World Food Programme. So I'll extend those thank yous, and add my own, to everyone who's been reading and contributing!

And if you have any ideas on how to make this site better, or have a good charity you'd like to see promoted here, drop me a line at fivedollarheroes@gmail.com.

Play a game online and fight hunger

Forget about Minesweeper -- this is a much better way to waste time at work, and it helps fight hunger at the same time. FreeRice.com is a multiple-choice game that tests your vocabulary. For each right answer you get, the site's corporate sponsors donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. You may be thinking, "Twenty grains? Big deal." Well, in just five minutes of playing, I donated 500 grains of rice. That's somebody's dinner right there.

FreeRice is a partner site to Poverty.com, which was started by John Breen, an Indiana computer programmer. Since the site started in October 2007, thousands of people have chipped in to learn new words...and feed two million people. This is, needless to say, all kinds of awesome.

So close out the Solitare program and dial up FreeRice.com. It's better for your vocabulary, and you'll be helping to feed the hungry around the world. And if vocab isn't your strong suit, click "Options" on the toolbar on the top of the FreeRice page to play games based on art, foreign languages, math and even chemistry.

Hurricane Ike disaster relief

This week's Five Dollar Hero entry gives you a choice in your efforts to assist those hit hard by Hurricane Ike out in Texas and Louisiana. This wasn't a Hurricane Katrina, but it was certainly bad enough to leave thousands homeless -- most temporarily, and some permanently.

I've always admired the work of Habitat for Humanity, but I never realized they were a ecumenical Christian ministry. For me, I'm perfectly fine with that; I think there are too few religious folks who put their money and time where their mouth is, and I give Habitat huge props for doing so. So check out Habitat's site and if you like what you see, donate to their Ike relief efforts.

All that said, I also promised to keep religion out of things as best I could on here. So if an ecumenical Christian housing ministry isn't your cup of tea, then I strongly encourage you to revisit the Red Cross National Disaster Relief Fund and donate as much as you can.

Note that neither Habitat nor the Red Cross are actually accepting $5 donations on their sites; it's a minimum of $10. But this is a big-deal storm, with lots of people who are suffering. So we can all collectively skip another latte this week, right? Go for it! Be a TEN Dollar Hero!

Vote on where $2.5 million will get spent

The folks at American Express are having a competition of sorts to determine where $2.5 million should be donated. American Express members nominated 1,190 charitable projects, which were then winnowed down to 25 worthy causes by AmEx's advisory board. Now, everybody -- not just cardholders -- can vote to see which get funded. The top five projects get $500,000 each.

I think it's pretty cool that everyone on the Internet can chime in on this, and I'll be quite interested to see which projects make the top 5. It'll tell us a lot about what problems people think need to be tackled first.

So check it out at membersproject.com. You have to sign in as a guest to vote, but if this speaks to you, go for it. Voting ends Oct. 14, so be sure to chime in!

Save the Children

This week's charity comes courtesy of another reader (Thanks, Terri!) who noted the work that Save the Children was doing in the wake of Hurricane Gustav. I surfed on over to Save the Children's site and was immediately impressed.

Save the Children really does immense amount of work to help children through such an incredible variety of difficulties. Here in the U.S., they have literacy programs and aid for poorer kids, along with disaster relief. Abroad, they're fighting to give kids a better life no matter the circumstances -- poverty, war, disease, you name it.

They're also good with their money, too -- 90 percent of what they collect goes right to kids in need, with only 10 percent going to administrative costs and fundraising. (In nonprofit terms, that's really impressive.) Plus, they won't spam you unless you want more e-mail from them.

Really, this is just a wonderful organization, and I'm proud to slap my $5 down for them. I hope you join me. To learn more about Save the Children, click here. And to donate to the Global Action Fund, click here. You can also make memorial and gift donations, too.

You've got mail! And more mail...and more mail...

I'm glad I opened a new e-mail address (fivedollarheroes@gmail.com) for this site, because there's been an unforeseen by-product to all this giving. I'm already getting a bit of charity spam coming my way, and I'm sure it's only going to get more intense.

So here's a helpful hint: If you're planning on becoming a regular Five Dollar Hero, you might want to get a free Gmail or Yahoo e-mail account for your charitable efforts. Not only will it spare your personal e-mail some extra spam, but you'll also have all your electronic contribution receipts in one handy account come tax time.

And you can also use that account to sign up for the semi-official Five Dollar Heroes mailing list by dropping me a line at the above e-mail, too...!

Obama and McCain are both Five Dollar Heroes

So the Obama campaign took a day off from filling inboxes with pleas for campaign contributions, instead filling inboxes with pleas for contributions to the National Disaster Relief Fund. Putting small-dollar contributions to work en masse...that's the Five Dollar Hero spirit! (Which I borrowed from the Obama campaign in the first place.)

And on the other side of the aisle, First Lady Laura Bush and would-be first lady Cindy McCain opened the Republican convention by encouraging delegates to each contribute five dollars (sound familiar?) to relief efforts.

So Barack Obama and John McCain, you are hereby declared Five Dollar Heroes. Now, both of you, don't make me regret it. Play nice.

And if you, dear reader, haven't contributed yet, the link in this post will take you there. Next week's charity pick will also focus on Hurricane Gustav relief, so stay tuned.

Hurricane Gustav: How to Help

So it looks like Hurricane Gustav managed to miss New Orleans, and thank God for that; the Big Easy hasn't had it so easy of late. But Gustav did hit somewhere -- a little place called Cocodrie in Cajun Country, about 72 miles southwest of New Orleans. And those folks will need help.

It's too early to tell the extent of the damage, but right now, emergency services likely will be key. So here is a link to the American Red Cross' National Disaster Relief Fund, since helping survivors and those without homes is the top priority. The minimum donation is $10, so we get to be Five Dollar Heroes twice over. How cool is that?

I'll blog some more this week on Gustav as the situation sorts itself out and needs are better identified. Be well, and be generous!