Customizing Gifts of Charity

One way of giving on behalf of colleagues and other professionals during the Holidays, is to give something related to their field of endeavour. For instance, for a training and education professional, you might give on their behalf to a school in Cambodia.

Organizations like globalgiving.org and givemeaning.org make it easy to target a sector of charity (medicine, education, justice and human rights, racial justice, etc.) that’s within the sphere of daily life and work of your colleague or loved one.

It’s a creative and appropriate way to give on occasions where giving to the world is precisely the point.

K***,

As a gift to you this Christmass, I have given $10 on your behalf to The Sharing Foundation’s Khmer literacy school in Cambodia, to help Cambodian children find a road out of poverty.

 

The literacy school runs three sessions a day for 120 children of Roteang village’s poorest families. Ten bilingual Cambodian college graduates teach English to 500 students in 19 sections offered daily after school hours at the village school.

 Thousands of Cambodian children grow up illiterate, with few educational options. The Sharing Foundation’s (TSF) Khmer literacy school helps farm children learn their native alphabet and numbers well enough to attend elementary school. Its English Language Program offers village students, ages 8-18, the opportunity to learn Cambodia’s language of commerce, allowing them to obtain jobs in tourism and word processing. These students are so dedicated that some meet on their own to study on weekends.

The gift was made via www.globalgiving.org and you can visit the project’s page at:

www.globalgiving.com/pr/1400/proj1382a.html 

One of the students: Chheng Srey Mom, 16, whose parents stopped school in grades 3 and 7, and whose two grown brothers also stopped in grammar school, has completed grade 8. She first went to the Literacy school five years ago, then joined the public school at the 4th grade level, and also began after-school English classes with TSF. Srey Mom wants to be a teacher; her favorite subject is Khmer. At her interview, she wrote she “wants to work hard for high education, and when I have good knowledge, I can help my community.”

 

I hope you’ll find this an appropriate gift for the birth of Christ, and as fellow training-education professionals.

 

Sincerely,

  

Daniel DiGriz