Last year I started a special Christmas in July program. Normally something with this name means that the company is running a sale of some kind. What I decided to do last year was take a percentage of our income and put it towards charitable endeavors, chosen by our clients. This time, I tried something a bit different.
This year, most of our contributions were made locally, even though our client base is spread across the US. While some of the recipients were suggested by our clients, I chose others myself. One of the factors in deciding on the recipients was overhead costs – how much of the contributed money was going to the cause, and how much would go towards operating costs and so forth. I’m happy to say that for most of our recipients, 100% of the donated amount went directly to the end recipients!
Our first contribution was to a memorial scholarship fund at CNY Karate, the school where I train and teach. One of our instructors and long-time student, Sam Barber, passed away earlier this year after a brief illness. His love of martial arts, and the changes he saw it make in young students over the years, prompted his widow to ask that funds be donated to a scholarship in his name in lieu of flowers or other memorials. I admired Sam, and was glad to call him my friend and teacher. Over the years, I’ve seen troubled young people learn self respect and self discipline at the dojo. Many of the karate students who stick with the program go on to enter the college of their choice, and keep the life lessons they learned at CNY Karate propelling them ahead of their peers.
Another donation was made to a division of the Downtown Writers’ Center in Syracuse. The Young Author’s Academy serves all youngsters with a love of writing and learning. While it’s open to anyone in the greater Syracuse area, many of the YAA members come from less privileged areas of the community. Our contribution to the YAA is going directly to supplying these enthusiastic young folks with important books and other supplies that will help them become the novelists or non-fiction writers of the next generation.
Syracuse Stories is a non-profit program that’s taking video commentary from people of all ages, races and backgrounds. Most of the footage is being shot by volunteers. In addition to donating the use of the Agile’ video cameras, we also fed these unpaid interns for the three days of shooting during the annual Arts festival July 27th – 29th. These commentaries will be combined with interviews shot in Brazil earlier in the month. The object is to create a ripple effect, drawing video commentaries from a larger and larger pool of communities around Syracuse, and then around the world, and making the edited clips available via the web for anyone to search and watch. This is the 2nd year the group has collected these stories, and I look forward to seeing how things progress.
Kitty Corner is a unique entity. It is a not-for-profit, volunteer “foster caretaker” system for orphaned or abandoned cats, run by two sisters out of their house in Liverpool, NY. And yes, this one was selected by me. My wife and I have two cats which we adopted from Kitty Corner. They do a great job with their cats, and even keep cats that don’t get adopted. But as a volunteer endeavor, they often find themselves scrambling for money and help – their web site is out of date, for instance. The funds we donated go directly to the health and well-being of the cats, who all receive periodic vet visits while under Kitty Corner’s care.
We’ve also donated funds to a local non-profit cultural arts center, and to a national cancer research foundation this year. We hope that you believe, as we do, that the small amounts we’ve been able to donate have gone to worthwhile organizations which will direct them to “where the rubber hits the road.”
We could not have done this without our clients and vendors – thank you so much for your help!