Giving Tuesday
I love the idea of Giving Tuesday–after a week of, frankly, excess, it feels so good to give back. I might be cutting back on spending this year, and I’ve never been one to overindulge in turkey, but Giving Tuesday is still a day I look forward to each year.
This year, I wanted to highlight one specific nonprofit I began donating to this year–Sahar Education. Sahar is a nonprofit that helps to fund girls’ education in Afghanistan–building schools, training teachers, and preventing early marriage, among other initiatives (read more here.) With the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban following the US’s withdrawal, Sahar’s mission is more crucial than ever.
Sahar is guided by an exceptional Executive Director, a former schoolmate of mine who was one of the first students to participate in our school’s education initiative, to help provide full scholarships to girls in Afghanistan to come live and learn in the United States. I’m proud of my schoolmate and friend, and the work she is doing. If you are able, I would urge you to read more about Sahar’s mission, and donate if you can.
I have two other nonprofits I’d also like to mention here. One is No One Left Behind, a nonprofit dedicated to assisting with the resettlement of Afghans who helped US troops in Afghanistan. Another, far better known, is Doctors Without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres, another group doing vital work in Afghanistan and around the world. You can direct your donation to Afghanistan, or donate to an unrestricted fund to help around the world.
What nonprofits do you support, and where are you donating today?
Thank you for sharing these nonprofits! I especially love the mission of Sahar and No One Left Behind. We donate to our local Center for Refugee Services and the Children’s Hunger Fund. Both organizations are extremely active in our city. Donating time/money/resources has really helped my own children to recognize that there are other children nearby who do not have basic necessities, and it is our duty to help and serve them.
One organization I have come to love this year that isn’t local to us is Girl AGain. It is a nonprofit located in White Plains, NY which hires young women on the autistic spectrum who have graduated from high school and are in need of employment and job training. The shop takes donations of Pleasant Company/American Girl items and refurbishes them for resale. They even have their own doll hospital (which I would support over Mattel AG’s in a heartbeat). They work with each woman and train them in all sorts of skills (computers, customer service, detailed handwork, graphics design, social media marketing) and then help them with job placement in the community. My daughter favors the original AG historical dolls and accessories (which match the illustrations in the books), and Girl AGain gives me a place to shop for those items and support a wonderful cause. Win-win!
Thank you so much for sharing yours, Judith! I’ve been trying to speak about donating with my toddler–as the director of a nonprofit that’s a huge part of my job, naturally, and my toddler and I are starting small with donating old books to the Little Free Library in our neighborhood! 🙂 I love that he’s so interested in that!
Girl AGain sounds fantastic. I loved the historical American Girl dolls (still have my Felicity!)