December 1 through 25, a suggested charitable or non-profit donation will be made. The goal is to open doors for people, not doors for chocolate, and work on building community. Though Christmassy, this is a secular project. The only organizations with religious ties to be featured will be fully inclusive of all people. The range of organizations will be diverse and are not intended to be exhaustive suggestions; our city has too many to cover all. (So I'll do this annually to promote as many wonderful organizations as possible.)

Please consider monetary or in-kind donations for the featured organizations. I'm hoping each reader can contribute $5 per organization, per day. Please feel free to give more or to give what you can; some organizations have lists of items they need. Many are desperate for volunteers now and all year.

Please post if you have contributed in some way. I'd like to see if there is interest in a municipal charity advent calendar.

Thank you for participating!

Friday 18 December 2015

8 More Charities & The Future of The Giving Advent Calendar

There are so many amazing charitable non-profit organizations in Edmonton, all of which contribute to making this city a better and better place to live.
As I mentioned to Portia Clark on Radio Active, the Giving Advent Calendar hopes to be offering a cross section of organizations: large to small, well-known to lesser-known, all important and requiring financial, volunteer, and other types to donation to continually offer and expand their services.
25 days is simply not enough to cover all of them and it was difficult to select just 25.

That said, the Giving Advent Calendar has been received by Edmonton in ways I couldn't have imagined. It's getting thousands of views a day.

As I mentioned just a few days after I launched the Giving Advent Calendar, this is something I plan to do every year. I threw it together very hastily this year, not expecting much more than to show my partner, for whom it is a Christmas gift (we do donations in our family as the "big" gift) a document of the gift. I realized maybe I could get a few other people interested in giving too, so I started tweeting about it. It was not developed and planned ahead of time in the detail I would usually put into a public project; I honestly did not know it would capture so many of you. It's quite humbling.

Next year, I intend for this to be a much more polished project. There are plans in the works for the #ArtAdventCalendar on Twitter, another Edmonton-based initiative planned spur-of-the-moment like this one, to look at ways of working together or joining as one, bringing some of the best parts of life, giving and art, into something... we don't know what yet. There will be brainstorming and there will be much more work in advance, whether we work aligned or as a joint project.

So although 25 charities got featured this year, there are going to many years to come and many, many more charities, non-profits, and not-for-profits to be profiled.

Thank you for following along for 18 days so far; we have 7 days and 7 more charities to feature. I hope you stick with us for the next week and join in again in 2016!
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