Their programs range from glass blowing classes, to creating an on-air kids’ cooking show, to providing gallery space and professional exhibits for Chicago’s young artists.

Like so many non-profits, they struggle each year to come up with the funds they need to manage and implement new projects.

We hope that you will take a look at the three fundraisers they are doing, and choose the one that best fits your giving interests.  We’re sure you’ll find one of them to be a good fit!

Click here to see the details:

Chi-Town Chefs- a youth produced cooking show

So Fresh Printing- a youth run t-shirt business to support art education

Art! Art! Art!- supplies for youth arts programs

We would like to invite all GiveForward users to tune in OR join us tonight at Raven (Clark and Belden) to watch Ariana, our director of marketing, as she gets made over on Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style on Bravo TV.  The show airs tonight at 9pm CST.

For those of you able to make it to our Launch Party in August, you just might catch a glimpse of yourself during the final scene, where they do a brief follow-up on Ariana.

Tell us what you think of the show!

Here are a few pictures from the event.  You can check out the rest of the album on Facebook

My sweet mom sent me one of those feel good emails today.  Don’t tell her, but usually I erase them without reading them…I’m a total sap and tear at anything that involves random acts of kindness, animals, or dying wishes.

But something told me today’s email would be valuable, so I read it.  The email was a short story about a passenger who boarded a plane and was suddenly surrounded by U.S. soldiers heading off to Iraq.  One soldier asked another if he was going to pay $5 for the on flight meal, and he responded that he thought that was too expensive for a sack lunch.  The passenger then took $50 to the flight attendant to buy the soldiers’ lunches.  This one act inspired three other passengers to contribute $25 to the lunch (which was given to the soldiers) and left the original Good Samaritan with a first-class lunch and a round of applause from the rest of the passengers.

When I read this, I realized that most people don’t ever get to understand what a matching gift really means.  (That is, in fact, what the Good Samaritan experienced).

Matching gifts, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is when corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals will “match” the donations of average donors, thus leveraging their resources to create the greatest impact.  If you ever listen to NPR during a fundraising campaign, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

A matching donation does several things.  First, it increases the total amount of money going to a worthy cause.  Second, it affords the matching donors the opportunity to share the fact that they are giving with a broader audience.  And finally, it helps create a connection between the individual donor and the matching organization, helping them feel united in an effort to make the world a better place.

But I wonder, why don’t more of us individual donors replicate this matching system?  Many not so wealthy individuals give more than $1,000 a year to wonderful causes.  Imagine if they created a GiveForward fundraising page and sent it to their friends, telling them they would give $1 for every $2 or $5 their friends donated.  Suddenly, that normal $1000 annual gift would be $5000.  Now imagine if just 100 people agreed to do that.

That would be $500,000 for worthy causes.  Half a million dollars for writing a few extra emails and donating what you would have given otherwise.

It’s definitely something to think about.

Water is the gift of life.  We hear that often - but ask anyone who has suffered months of drought and they will tell you, indeed, this truth is more powerful than we might ever imagine.

Every day we are bombarded with statistics about how many people in the world are experiencing certain hardships; twelve million are refugees, over a billion live below the poverty line and countless others are deprived of adequate health care.  But without putting a face to the statistic, we often experience a sense of resignation in the face of such unsettling facts.

I used to feel that way about the water shortages plaguing so many people in the world.  I had read about how nearly 450 million people in 29 countries currently face severe water shortages today and by 2025 (when the world’s population increases by another 3 billion), as much as two-thirds of the world population could be water-stressed.   But here in America, homeowners water their lawns for hours at a time, fire hydrants spray plentiful water onto the street and people leave faucets running because they are too lazy to turn them off.  Americans may know that somehow water is important, but many certainly don’t treat it as the most valuable natural resources in the world.

I have witnessed the perils of water shortages on previous trips to Africa; once while hitch-hiking through the sun-baked country of Namibia, I was dropped off for the night at a river where I could purify some water and set up camp.  I walked to the sign that promised Red Gorge River, but arrived to find a dry riverbed.  Suddenly deprived of this precious water source and saddled with a dehydration headache, I empathized with those that face this daily struggle.

While in graduate school, my interest in water issues continued, as I wrote a major research paper on the future prospect of water-related wars, an especially dangerous possibility in the Middle East and East Africa, but it wasn’t until I met Jonathan Shuraki Koshal, a Maasai warrior from Kenya, that this water emergency hit home and inspired me to make a difference.

Late last year, my mother heard a report on NPR about a Chicago woman who while on a safari in Kenya with her family, was taken to visit a local Maasai community.  The horrid conditions of the public school, coupled with the existence of a wonderful nearby charter school, inspired her to create her own foundation, Matanya’s Hope, which aims to improve the educational opportunities for these Maasai children.  My mother befriended the founder and upon my return to Chicago this spring, we all worked together to organize fundraisers and traditional dance performances for Jonathan the five other Maasai tribesmen who were coming to Chicago to publicize their cause.

Though tall, dark and lanky like his Maasai brethren, what sets Jonathan apart is his disarming smile and playful nature.  The time I spent with Jonathan over the course of a month was wonderful; we visited the aquarium (much to his child-like fascination), listened to music (he was enamored with my reggae collection), went out for ice cream and cooked big dinners here at home (Mexican was his cuisine of choice).  At one point, while the cooking their native chapati bread in our kitchen, he and his friends confided that they only make these breads on special occasions because they cannot afford the flour.  Bread, our most basic staple, is saved for “special occasions” due to the cost of flour?  It is moments like that when the desperation of these peoples’ living conditions really hits home.

The Maasai are an indigenous pastoral tribe from the Great Rift Valley of Eastern Africa who are trying desperately to hold on to their rich cultural heritage while guaranteeing their own survival.  Though communal in nature, they have been forced to embrace a market economy, which has made them dependent on market forces often out of their control.  But the single existential threat facing the Maasai today is the scarcity of water.  As a semi-nomadic peoples, the Maasai always moved based on the availability of water; in addition to their personal needs, water is crucially important to maintain their cattle, the Maasai’s only treasured possession.

But the English colonial government and the current Kenyan and Tanzanian governments have tried to settle the Maasai by introducing “group ranches” and individual ownership, which has disrupted their traditional water-based migration pattern.  As Jonathan tells me, this has had disastrous implications.  The Maasai, he explains, have always believed water to be a community resource, with access guaranteed regardless of social status.  They have a strong conservation ethic, as everyone is responsible in keeping water clean and herdsmen traditionally move from one wetland to another to allow the land to recover.  But recent modernization in Kenya has made the wetlands a prime location for large-scale commercial agriculture projects, which is pushing the Maasai off of their traditional lands onto more arid landscape.  Being confined to smaller areas of land with their livestock leads to over-grazing and land erosion which in turn results in desertification.  The results, in many cases, have been deadly.  When the small communal lake that the Koshal family has been confined to dried up last year, they were forced to travel over twelve miles to fetch water.

Needless to say, trekking such a long distance through desert-like conditions makes everyday survival a tough task.  Jonathan himself nearly died of thirst last year and at one point, was forced to drink cow urine to stay alive.

Finding myself face-to-face with a friend who nearly succumbed to death by dehydration, I felt ashamed for all of the times I had used the expression, “Man, I am dying of thirst!”  Then and there, I pledged two things: first, never to use that expression and second, to assure that Jonathan won’t either.

With the help of my donors, I have contributed 20,000 Kenyan Shillings (US $300) to build a family-size rainwater storage tank for the Koshal family.   This tank will guarantee a steady water supply for Jonathan and his extended family, ensuring their survival through the upcoming dry season, as water becomes more and more scarce.   I am planning a trip to Africa in the fall and while there, I will look for local NGOs that are finding sustainable ways of increasing the water access for those in need, but until then I aim to support Jonathan’s family and other families in the Maasai Mara that are faced with life-threatening water shortages.  Once again, a profound thank you goes out to all of my donors from Jonathan, his family and mine.

I am currently raising money for my upcoming humanitarian trip to West Africa, where I will be helping build water wells in Mali, a land-locked country with serious need for greater water access.  Please check out my Give Forward project: Help Save Children’s Lives by Building a Water Well in West Africa
http://www.giveforward.org/100friends-africanwaterproject/

Or visit my blog

To be a Guest Blogger on GiveForward.org, email us!

Individual fundraisers on GiveForward.org have raised $21,455 as of this afternoon.  That is $21,000 that is going to amazing causes like stem cell research, animal rescue clinics, canvassing for presidential candidates, and more.

Yesterday, alone, GiveForward processed more than 40 individual donations, which might not sound like a lot, but for only being 9 weeks old…that’s pretty incredible!

Thank you all, especially those of you raising money for Run for a Reason this weekend in NYC!  You all have done an outstanding job of sharing important causes with your family and friends.

Keep up the great work, fundraisers!  And good luck to all of those runners in Central Park this weekend!

This fundraising stud is raising money for the Fresh Air Fund, an organization that provides free summer vacations to inner-city kids from NYC. You can check out his page here.

Aron is one of over forty people running in GiveForward’s Run for a Reason five-mile fun run next weekend in New York City. Although Aron has admittedly never run five consecutive miles in his life, Aron decided to be like Gheorghe Muresan, and “score one for the kids.” Way to go, Aron!!

For all the ladies out there, you can catch a glympse of this big-hearted, fundraising stud at 8:30 AM on October 26th as he completes his history making, first ever, five mile run through Central Park.

Anyway, if you’re reading this Aron, we just wanted to say “Congratulations” on this monumental accomplishment. GiveForward will be sending you a congratulatory bottle of Gheorghe Mursesan cologne for your efforts.

We’ll keep a running tally of our total raised and add more updates on the blog as the race approaches.

Thanks again for all your hard work!

Be sure to visit Million4Obama.com and give a dollar, and tell your friends!

OK, so maybe it’s not as monumental as $700 billion, but we are giving away 300 smackers to help jumpstart your fundraising efforts. Here’s how the GF bailout plan works:

On October 26th GiveForward is traveling to New York to Run for a Reason in the Poland Springs Marathon Kickoff Fun Run.

If you are running with us on the 26th, you are eligible for either of the two cash prizes below