End of 2011: Giving Back
As you all may have noticed, it's 2012 now. The end of every year has its' share of annoyances, not least of which are people trying to get you to donate money before the end of the year. If you visited Wikipedia at all in the past month, you've no doubt completely tuned out the "Read a Personal Appeal!" banners that were strewn across each page. Normally I tune all that stuff out too, but this year I got to thinking a bit about how privileged my life is.
- Grew up in a solidly middle class family
- Graduated from both high school and college
- Have a full-time job with health insurance
- Disposable income to buy Apple kit
- Disposable time to program said kit
It's pretty remarkable, actually. I'm probably in the top 1% of the world in terms of having a comfortable life. So I decided to try to be a little bit less of a selfish prick and donate some of this past year's gaming income to a worthy cause.
I decided to help the scholarship fund for Harambee Christian School. It's a K-7 school in Columbus, Ohio, that provides private education to kids who would otherwise not have many opportunities. I figured that since Harambee is a program in my city that tries to give kids something that I take for granted, helping out financially would be the least I could do.
I realize that this post is about a month late to try to convince people to donate to charitable organizations before the end of the year, but you should think about regularly donating to a non-profit regardless. The audience of this blog is primarily people just like me: middle class, with enough income to buy crap we really don't need. Take a step back and think about how you can really help people, and not just by providing bits of mindless entertainment to smartphone users.
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