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At the same time the nonprofits we’re all passionate about
struggle for funding, Americans, alone, spend $250
billion each year on birthday, wedding, and holiday gifts. ChangingThePresent (www.ChangingThePresent.org), a
comprehensive new marketplace for the social sector, seeks to capture for
nonprofits some small percentage of that gift money. We will do so by facilitating donation gifts,
that is, charitable donations made in a friend’s name,
in lieu of giving more unwanted merchandise.
Visitors to the site can choose not just which nonprofit
to support, but more specifically, what charitable good or service they wish to
fund, e.g., an hour of a cancer researcher’s time, books for children, drugs for
AIDS patients, shelter for the homeless, computers for schools, polio vaccines,
meals for the homebound elderly, acres of the rainforest, etc. There are already over a thousand donation
opportunities from hundreds of leading nonprofits. Wish lists, registries
and printed greeting cards further facilitate this more meaningful form of
giving. ChangingThePresent is more than
a tool to facilitate donation gifts; it is also a catalyst to promote them as a
social norm. Imagine how much good we
could do if we were to capture for nonprofits even a small percentage of that
money now spent on fruitcakes and pen & pencil sets.
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