2020 donation list

earlier this year I started donating ~$25 a month to a different cause. here is my list for the year. it's interesting, but prior to actually donating, I would have thought I'd mostly donate to food orgs. but as it were, I didn't donate to a single food org this year. partly it's cause I know food orgs are getting more attention this year anyway (altho they could absolutely use more help). but also with the election stuff, I really thought a lot about fair politics and unbiased reporting. plus, I volunteered a handful of times at the OC food bank this year so I did technically help fight against food insecurity :) 

april - the guardian

may - terrracycle pet food bag recycling (jojo)
june - equal justice initiative 

july - planned parenthood, south atlantic

august - in-n-out foundation, slave 2 nothing (t's 5k)

september - long beach arts council

october - dress for success, miami (a's non-profit)

november - kiva

december - radiolab

collection drive - USB and SD cards for Recycle USB and Flash Drives for Freedom

priority orgs for next year: NPR, PBS, Vox, Pro Publica, waterstations.org, solarbuddy.org, comptonpledge.org, abortionfunds.org, RIP medical debt, Food Finders, Harvest Partners, Food Forward, Seed Savers

december 2020 donation

this month I donated to Radiolab, my all-time favorite podcast. it covers an expanse of topics, has interesting guests, and is well edited. I hesitate to list any favorite episodes because I haven't heard a bad one yet. tho, it was The Other Latif series that really got me into this podcast.

RIP medical debt

during a road trip last week j and i talked about "if you were going to die soon and had a bunch of money (nothing crazy, but like a couple million or under), what would you do with it?"

j would start a scholarship fund. I had a bunch of ideas but soon settled on creating a non-profit that bought up old medical debt and either collected on it at cost or slightly more (to offset admin costs). there are collection agencies that buy medical debt for pennies on the dollar then go after the debtor for all of the original cost, often times plus interest. that's fucking terrible. but welcome to america where it's all terrible all the time. (seriously tho, privatized health insurance is a fucking racket. for instance, did you know that the CEO of kaiser's 2017 salary was $16.1 million)

but I don't particularly believe in starting non-profits because generally there's already a pre-existing one  doing great work with a limited budget. and guess what? RIP Medical Debt does almost exactly what I described above. difference is, they straight out forgive it. which is even better.

USB drive tally

yesterday I mailed off 32 USB drives to Recycle USB for Sugar Labs and another 38 USB drives and 28 SD cards to the Human Rights Foundation for #FlashDrivesforFreedom. I sorted USBs depending on required size. Sugar Labs requires USBs to be over 2gbs so anything that and over went to them; HRF got anything smaller and all SD cards.

UPDATE: 2/1/2021
yahoo! we joined a number of others who donated drives to Recycle USB at the end of last year. my name is incorrectly spelled but that's almost certainly entirely my fault. 

I also got my HRF package returned :( so I wrote them recently to confirm the shipping address.