Over the last few weeks, quite a few readers have written to me asking about Angel Food Ministries. I’ve been very hesitant to discuss Angel Food Ministries on The Simple Dollar for a handful of reasons, but this is clearly a topic that many readers are interested in hearing about, so I’ll do my best to navigate this minefield (meaning, I’m pretty sure I’m going to say something that’s going to set someone off, though I’m not intending to). I should also point out that I have a bit of experience in the past with Angel Food Ministries on the ground – I’m personally aware of the type of items that they distribute.

What Is Angel Food Ministries?
Angel Food Ministries is a non-profit group that distributes low-cost food options in many communities (a typical basic box from Angel Food Ministries costs $30 and has approximately $55 worth of groceries in the box).

Most of the funding and organizational structure of Angel Food Ministries is handled through evangelical Christian churches in the United States. Many churches serve as distribution centers in local communities, and each box contains a leaflet that outlines some of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

What’s in the Box?
The May 2009 menu provides a clear example of what a box from Angel Food Ministries will provide:

.5 lb. Lean Chopped Beef Steaks (5 x 8 oz.)
5 lb. Leg Quarters
2 lb. Chicken and Corn Bread Stuffing Casserole (Ready to Cook)
28 oz. Salisbury Steak Dinner Entrée
1 lb. Boneless Pork Chops (4 x 4 oz.)
1 lb. Corn Dogs (6 ct.)
12 oz. Deli Sliced Ham
5 oz. Chunk Light Tuna in Water
32 oz. French Fries
1 lb. Sweet Corn
15 oz. Musselman’s Apple Sauce
15 oz. Pears (Product of U.S.A.)
8 oz. Dinner Roll Mix (Makes 8 Nice Rolls)
7.5 oz. Mac ’n Cheese
32 oz. 2% Shelf Stable Milk
Dozen Eggs
Dessert

This box is available for $30.

At first glance, this is a pretty good deal, and if your primary concern is getting food on the table at a very low price, this is likely a great option for you.

However, if you dig a little deeper, some of these options may not be the best value for your dollar. For example, I would be hesitant to feed several of the options on that list to my children on any sort of consistent basis, at least not without some careful inspection of the actual nutrition facts and ingredients of those items (the corn dogs, the “dessert” item which is often something like Twinkies or Moon Pies, etc.) Under that perspective, though, if I were to get the box, then throw out a third of the items, I might as well simply go to the grocery store at my own convenience and choose the exact items I want for my $30. Other writers have come to largely the same conclusion – it’s a value on the surface, but the quality of items may not be up to many personal standards.

Some would argue that I am somewhat looking a gift horse in the mouth here, and I agree that I am. From my perspective, this box is one option for spending $30 in food for my family. Depending on your financial situation and your food priorities, this can be a great bargain. It mostly depends on the type of value you’re seeking.

What Angel Food Ministries Does Right
One area where Angel Food Ministries hits a home run, in my opinion, is with some of their optional packages. You can choose an optional package as an addition to the basic package, as listed above. For example, one of their optional packages for May 2009 is the “Fresh Fruit and Veggie Package”:

1 head Premium Fresh California Iceberg Lettuce
1 head Premium Fresh California Romaine Lettuce
1 5 oz. Package Fresh Gourmet Classic Caesar Croutons
1 Package Wiley’s Citrus Garlic Salad Seasoning
1 lb. California Cello-Pack Carrots
2 each Premium Jumbo Vidalia Sweet Onions
1 each Premium Jumbo Red Onion
1 6 oz. Bag Premium Fresh Florida Red Radishes
1 head Premium Fresh Green Cabbage
3 lb. Premium Idaho Baking Potatoes
3 lb. Premium Tree-Ripened Valencia Oranges
3 lb. Premium Washington State Red Delicious Apples
1 each Premium Large Vine Ripened Honeydew Melon
AFM May 2009 Fruit and Veggie Recipe Sheet

For $22, that’s a very strong deal, especially if you want to get fresh produce on the table and you’re struggling to make ends meet.

Another strong advantage of Angel Food Ministries is that they often distribute in central community locations (like churches) that are quite accessible for many families that may not have access to transportation to get to the grocery store. Using a church as a distribution center means that the distribution often occurs in the middle of a residential area, making it easier for many people to access the food – particularly those who need it the most.

Is It Right To Use This Service?
In terms of using this service, my biggest question is whether it’s a justifiable option. Quite obviously, this service is trying to target lower-income families who can really use the savings provided by the options made available through the ministry.

The question is whether or not it’s ethical – or socially appropriate – for a person with a higher income level who is simply trying to maximize every cent to take advantage of this service.

On the one hand, the service makes it clear that it’s intended for everyone. There are no requirements at all for people to take part in receiving food from Angel Food Ministries, and they claim that there is plenty of food to go around.

On the other hand, if you’re in a situation where you have a reasonably large monthly food budget, why would you choose to use this service? If you are making it your goal to feed yourself and your family a well-rounded, high quality diet, many of the options in the basic box from Angel Food Ministries probably do not fit the bill, making it much less of a savings for you.

Thus, I think the question really comes down to your own personal food choices. If you are in a tight financial place and the goal is to get sanitary and diverse food options on the table at the lowest cost possible for your family, Angel Food Ministries is where you should go – and you’re exactly the type of person the service was designed for. On the other hand, if you have enough of a food budget that you can make detailed conscious choices about what goes on your table and what does not, you’re likely better off going to the grocery store and the farmer’s market – which, again, is appropriate.

In other words, Angel Food Ministries somewhat self-regulates – if this is a good deal for your life situation, they’re ready and willing to help. For me, though, I’ll stick with my own meal planning, which gives me much more control over what goes on my table (albeit at a higher price – a price I’m willing to pay).

Angel Food Ministries as a Charity
As you can see, in large part, I support the work that Angel Food Ministries does on the ground in getting low cost foods to people who really need them. In fact, I had considered donating to Angel Food Ministries in the past – and, as I’ve mentioned before, that means I sat down to research how the charity itself worked.

What I found sent up a few pretty big red flags for me.

First of all, the charity is not listed with Charity Navigator, an impartial service that evaluates charities in terms of how they manage themselves internally and how much of their revenue actually goes towards charitable work. This is a basic step that many charities of any size take on – it’s the honest way to conduct a charity.

Second, the charity is being investigated by the FBI for reasons that are not being made clear by either the charity or the FBI. Here’s some details on the investigation.

Perhaps the biggest red flag, however, comes from MinistryWatch, a watchdog group for Christian-affiliated charities. It issued a “donor watch” for Angel Food Ministries, stating the following:

Angel Food Ministries is marketing to help individuals that are on the low economic side of the scale and in “need”; however, the leadership for the organization has higher salaries than the norm. In addition, the higher salaries consist of the leadership of individuals that are related. This is just for the known year of 2006, it is unknown of the more current years.

1. Wesley J. Wingo: $588,529
2. Linda Wingo: $544,043
3. Andrew Wingo: $529,014
4. Wesley Wingo: $454,673
5. L.M. Wingo: $384,694

Let alone the fact that these five people are related, the individual salaries are above and beyond what charities typically pay their employees, even large charities at the highest management levels.

Obviously, these discoveries are much more of interest to people who are considering donating to Angel Food Ministries. This should in no way prevent you from using Angel Food Ministries in your community.

My Final Take
On the ground, Angel Food Ministries provides a good service that many people really need – a lot of food at a very reasonable price at the expense of flexibility. For someone in a poor financial situation, Angel Food Ministries can really be a godsend.

However, as a broader charity, I would not donate to Angel Food Ministries when there are many highly ethical charities out there to contribute time and effort to. In many larger cities, there are local versions of Angel Food Ministries that you can donate to or be involved with – just ask around in your own community.

When I was about twenty years old, I was walking near the edge of a rough part of Des Moines, Iowa and I saw something that’s stuck with me ever since.

There was a young boy there, about six years old, and he was climbing out of a dumpster behind an apartment building. He was dressed in a dirty tank top and shorts and was barefooted. In his hand, he had a wadded-up fast food bag. When he hit the ground, he ran around to the far side of the dumpster, opened up the bag, and pulled out a handful of french fries, which he stuffed in his mouth as though he were starving.

I have never in my life felt so compelled to help someone out, but I didn’t know what to do. I looked around and spied a McDonald’s about a block away and so I walked over near the child and said hello to him. He looked scared and started to run away.

I told him loudly that I wanted to buy him some food. He stopped and looked back at me for a minute. I told him that I was going to go down to the McDonalds down the street and buy him some food and that I would come back and leave it by the dumpster. He could come and get it if he wanted.

I decided to do it this way because I figured the kid wouldn’t follow me there and I also didn’t want to create the appearance that I was abducting him. He seemed to understand the arrangement, so I walked down to an ATM, withdrew $20, went to McDonalds, bought about $15 worth of food (thinking he could perhaps share some with his mother or any siblings or friends he might have), and put the change from my twenty dollar bill in the bag – four ones and some coins.

I came back to the dumpster and the boy was gone – which I kind of expected. I put the bag on the ground by the dumpster, looked around, and walked away. I watched for a little while, but I never saw the boy come back. I ended up just leaving the food there in hopes that the boy would eventually come back and find it, but to this day I don’t know if he did or not. I like to think that he came back, found the bag, took it to his mother and his little sister, and they were able to at least get some calories in their system to sustain them for a little while.

This experience has stuck with me for more than a decade now. I’ve seen some situations where desperate need was quite obvious, but never again has anything stuck with me quite like that barefooted boy squatting on the ground beside the dumpster eating rotten french fries.

There are so many situations that we come across in our lives where people could be helped out with just a little help at the right moment. I’ve seen a single mother (with two kids beside her) offering to sell the wedding ring on her finger outside of a grocery store. I know an elderly couple who have been very close to having their electricity cut off this winter. A close friend told me about a food pantry that simply ran out of food and had to turn people away at the door recently.

Lately, I’ve started carrying more cash in my wallet than I ever have before. Each week, I put a couple twenty dollar bills in the back pocket of my wallet and rarely do I spend them. Instead, I just let this cash accumulate over time until I find a reason to spend it.

I call this my “giving pocket,” and it’s already begun to make a difference in how I see these kinds of situations.

It’s pretty simple. All I do is keep cash in that pocket and wait until the right moment comes. Inevitably, every few months, I come across a situation where someone is in desperate need – and instead of feeling helpless in the moment, I give them what they need to help with the problem.

I’ve written so often on this site about how I’ve been able to pull myself back from the financial brink and put myself and my family in a better financial place. Today, we’re stable and safe – but there are so many people who don’t share that safety and security, through no fault of their own.

The giving pocket allows me to seize the moment when I see someone that really needs help, and my financial success gives me the ability to keep the giving pocket full.

Perhaps, just once, I’ll be there at the right time to help someone who really needs it – and that one moment of human compassion and help will put them on a better path in life. If I can do that, then the giving pocket is worth far more than what I will have ever put in it.

Each year, I like to highlight a charity that’s near and dear to my heart and encourage readers, if they’re considering donating money to a charity during the holiday season, to look carefully at this charity.

This year, my charity of choice is Jump for Joel.

What’s Jump for Joel? Jump for Joel’s mission is to directly improve the baseline living conditions and educational opportunities for impoverished children in sub-saharan Africa, particularly in orphanage situations. They do this through directly sponsoring volunteers to travel to that region in Africa, as well as directly buying supplies for children in such situations (school supplies, toilets, etc.).

The charity was started in 2007 by a University of Illinois – Springfield student who spent two weeks on a volunteer project at the Gathiga Children’s Hope Home in Nairobi, Kenya. The conditions that the orphaned children lived in shocked her into action, bringing her to start Jump for Joel (named after one of the children in that orphanage).

I became aware of Jump for Joel through my sister-in-law, who spent much of the summer of 2008 volunteering in an orphanage in Romania. It was through this experience that she became acutely interested in what she could do here at home to help out children in such impoverished situations, and through that she became a part of the Jump for Joel team.

What have they done? Since its inception, Jump for Joel has raised almost $20,000 for the Gathiga Children’s Hope Home, which enabled the home to construct a two toilet outhouse, a stone entrance gate, bunk beds, a functional kitchen, a roof over the room where the children sleep, and floors and walls for the classroom and sleeping rooms. Currently, the project is focusing on buying doors and windows for the sleeping rooms, and they intend to branch out from there into other homes and orphanages in the area.

Jump for Joel also engages in partnerships with churches in the Springfield area for other fundraisers, raising money for school supplies for the children as well.

Why do I support Jump for Joel? As I’ve discussed before, I tend to lean towards supporting charities to which I have a personal connection, so I can personally witness the passion and sincerity that is being brought to the table.

With Jump for Joel, I can see this passion in the eyes and actions of my sister-in-law. Her deep passion for helping disadvantaged children runs through almost every aspect of her life, from her college major to her many, many years spent working for day care homes and centers (dating back to when she was twelve) and her time spent abroad volunteering to help disadvantaged children.

It often seems to me as though helping disadvantaged children is what she was born to do, and Jump for Joel is a framework in which she (and others with a similar perspective as her) can channel her work and passion to bring real change to children’s lives.

Another factor which drew me in as a fan of Jump for Joel is their openness. One only has to browse their website for a few minutes to see this – they write blog postings that detail their activities, produce podcasts to describe what they’re doing and share ideas, and actively respond to pretty much any question you might have as soon as you ask it. I find their YouTube channel to be particularly interesting, as it provides a great visual description of their mission that text and audio just can’t quite provide.

Explore the Jump for Joel website for a bit and you can just feel the passion bubbling under the surface.

How can you support Jump for Joel? The biggest thing you can do to support Jump for Joel is to donate a few dollars to them via PayPal. The money directly goes to improve the living conditions and further the educational opportunities of truly impoverished children.

If you don’t have money to spare but would like to keep tabs on their good work (and also promote the cause a little bit), you can follow their blog or become a fan of Jump for Joel on Facebook.

My wife and I are planning on giving several people gifts for Christmas that are donations in their name to Jump for Joel. I hope you’ll consider doing the same.

Many of us want to give to others. We see others in need and deeply desire to reach out and help them. We want to give to the charities we care about and to other causes. Many people want to give to their church or religious organization as well, using that as a conduit for helping the community and the world.

That desire is often counterbalanced by financial reality. When it comes down to the cold reality of making all of our bills for the month. many of us are pressed to make very hard choices that we don’t wish to make. Is it really fair to make a choice between a check to Habitat for Humanities and a check for our mortgage? Yet, quite often, that’s the type of choice many of us have to make.

My response to that is simple: give what you have. No one expects or wants you to put yourself in a deep personal crisis to give. Instead, give of those things which you have in abundance and wait until your financial life is in order to contribute money.

Instead, contribute of yourself in other ways. Here are six powerful ways to donate in ways that don’t force you into difficult and painful financial choices.

Give things you can make You might be pinched so tight that you can’t afford to drop a check in the collection plate, but you can take the pears from that pear tree behind your house and make several dozen jars of pear butter. Take those jars and give them to the organization you’d like to help for an auction or to give away to the needy. Another option: do what my father has always done. He grows an abundance of vegetables in his garden and gives much of the bounty away to others. What can you make (or grow) that has great value to others? Figure that out, step up to the plate, and give away the fruits of your labor.

Give your time Tempted to donate to public radio but scared it’ll put you in a tough spot with your bills? Offer to donate your time doing a menial task like answering the phone during pledge weeks. Offer to work as a receptionist a few hours a week for them. Your gift of time can often be much more valuable than the money you could scrape together.

Give your patience Most charities have menial tasks that no one wants to do. In lieu of putting your money in their hands, put your patience there instead. Recently, I did this myself by taking on the task of rewriting a very lengthy document that needed to be rewritten in order to maintain the legal status of an organization. It didn’t take smarts to do it – just a lot of patience and a willingness to jump through all of those hoops to get everything right. Perhaps you can show your patience by volunteering to help with preschool Sunday school classes or as an assistant one day a week with Head Start.

Give your compassion Hospice organizations often desperately need people with great compassion to step forward and help out with people in end-life situations. If you’re a deeply compassionate person, this is another spectacular way to give something special of yourself, a gift others with plenty of money in their pocket are often unable and unwilling to give.

Give your expertise Many people have strengths in a particular area – computer programming, paralegal skills, teaching skills, etc. These skills have great value to others and that’s why they can often help you to earn a solid paycheck. Applying these skills to a charitable organization can be even more valuable – if you can offer your programming skills to help an organization develop a key piece of software, you’ve given the cost of someone to consult for that piece of software, and that can be a sizable amount. Got skills with accounting? Serving as a free auditor for charities you care about can bring tremendous value to their door.

“Give what you can” doesn’t have to mean squeezing an extra nickel from a rock. Instead, take a broader look at things. What can you really give? When you find ways to give, you’ll find a great deal of additional fulfillment in life, often in ways you never expected.

We only have a limited amount of time on this wonderful Earth, and there are almost countless people around the globe who have far fewer opportunities for a pleasant life than we have. Thus, it’s natural for most people to eventually come to the conclusion that it’s quite important to share the wealth we’ve earned by sharing the resources we have with those that are less privileged in life. If we have an excess of resources while another person doesn’t have enough resources, it makes sense to share those resources.

When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor’s gift.
- Maya Angelou

Giving Now

Many people argue on behalf of giving money now. I disagree – one should never give money to charity if it endangers their long term financial future. There, I said it.

If you give money to a charity, especially amounts large enough to put your own financial future at risk, you risk having to line up and take back charity money for yourself later on. You’re far better off making your financial ship very sturdy – but that doesn’t mean rampant consumerism is okay. It means pay off your debts and build some long term financial security and independence, so that you’re never at risk of having to eat charitable money yourself.

That doesn’t mean you do not have gifts that you can give. Give your time. Give your talents. Give your youthful energy. Devote a few evenings and a weekend each month to working for a charitable group, giving them your ideas, your energy, and your effort to make sure that the group’s work is done. It doesn’t matter what charity you work for – just find one that can utilize your skills and makes sense to your own personal values.

Giving Later

Andrew Carnegie, in his famous essay Wealth, argues on behalf of giving later:

Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race iii which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good.

In other words, the people who are already rich know how to accumulate wealth, and their best gift to charities is to keep using this knowledge to accumulate more wealth if, in the end, it is eventually bequeathed to the needy.

This philosophy is derided by many as being greedy, but I don’t see it that way. I think Carnegie is actually quite right, and I think he’s basically voicing the exact same philosophy that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are espousing with the Gates Foundation.

To put it simply, if you have a gift for acquiring wealth, but you need those financial resources to earn more wealth, then you should not just sign over all of your assets to a charity while you can still use that gift. Instead, plan to bequeath what you have to charity once you can no longer use your gifts – in your dotage or after your passing. Alternately, you can devote time and money by bequeathing a large portion of your wealth to a charity then agreeing to serve as that organization’s treasurer, putting your wealth-building skills to work.

To me, this is charity in its purest form – people using their gifts, both monetary and non-monetary, to help charities.

Giving Both

My belief is largely this: give time now, give money later.

Early in life, the resource you have huge amounts of is time, not money. Thus, it makes sense for a young person to give their extra time to charitable work. Find a charity you actually agree with and spend some weekends and week nights working for them. Maybe you can volunteer to coach the community Little League team, or perhaps you can help hand out food at the food pantry. Maybe there are local committees that could use your input and attention, like a church council or a local school board or a political campaign.

On the flip side, younger people often don’t have as much money. They might be working at well-paying jobs, but they’re often facing huge debts from student loans and mortgages, and they also need to financially plan for their old age. Many are also loaded down with children who also eat into the pie and also need some planning for their future.

On the other hand, later in life, time is shorter. You might not be working and you might still be able to give your time and talents to charities, but you don’t have the youthful vitality of others. Often, your role is teaching others how to hold the reins.

However, late in life is when many people have the most wealth. It’s also the time when you can be setting up bequeathal plans, giving much of that accumulated wealth to people who may need it, both when you’re alive and after you pass.

Because of that, I generally believe that earlier in life, your time is your best gift, not your money. Your time can be used to provide all sorts of services, and your youthful vitality makes that time quite valuable, because most volunteer work really thrives on energy and focus. Take your money and do sensible things with it, ensuring that your family doesn’t have to use the charities, now or later.

Later in life, use that experience in both time spent volunteering and money saved to allocate some financial gifts. You’ll have a very good idea of good places for your money to go, plus you’ll have the experience to hand over the reins of your volunteer work to others in a sensible fashion.

Obviously, there’s no reason not to give a surplus of money now, nor no reason not to give a surplus of time later. The key is to look at what you have in terms of both money and time and give what makes the most sense, but never forget to give. There are many, many people not just in your community but in the world as a whole who could benefit from your help.

As I write this, Iowa is suffering through incredibly disastrous flooding. Levees have been breached in Des Moines, and Cedar Rapids is nearly underwater. If you want to see how bad things are right now, the best place to watch is KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, which has had amazing coverage of the events around here. Even worse, the water is flowing downstream, breaking levees all throughout Iowa and Illinois, and likely causing flooding of countless homes over the next week and a half.

Over the last forty eight hours, many people have sent me emails and messages asking what they can do to help. Many people see news like this on television, feel some pity for the people involved, but think there’s no way they can really help the situation. While it would be wonderful to have hundreds of thousands of people come to the area to help with sandbagging efforts, that’s only one way you can lend a helping hand to people in disastrous situations like this. You can help, wherever you are, when disasters like this strike. Here are seven things you can do right now to help out with this (or with any major disaster that may occur later).

Donate money to the American Red Cross In 1993, when the Mississippi River floods of that year wiped out my hometown, the American Red Cross was incredibly helpful to everyone in the town. Before the flooding, when the sandbagging was ongoing, they came to town with food and beverages for people volunteering to help sandbag, keeping us cool and strong. During those crucial hours after the levees broke, providing food, water, and assistance to everyone who needed it. Services like this don’t run on magic – they need your help. Kicking even a small $5 donation towards the American Red Cross can help immensely during any domestic disaster. Use the American Red Cross donation form and select “Where the Need Is Greatest.” Even a dollar can help get a bottle of clean drinking water to someone in Cedar Rapids, where there is no potable water.

Put your unused leave to good use Many large workplaces, like the federal government, allow people to give unused leave to others. Contact your HR representative and ask if you can donate some of your unused leave to people affected by the flood.

Donate blood to the American Red Cross, too If there’s a blood drive in your area, stop in and donate blood. When fighting floods, people can get injured badly by unexpected levee breaks and rushing water. Sufficient blood supplies are important. Here’s information on blood donation for the American Red Cross.

Donate unwanted items such as clothing, blankets, bedding, and so on to the Salvation Army After the flood waters began to recede, our town received huge bundles of donations from the Salvation Army – clothes, blankets, and so forth. These items helped many people start to recover from the disaster. If you have some old shirts and pants, some old blankets, or other bedding, drop them off at your local Salvation Army office and ask that they be given to flood relief (or another specific crisis).

Donate bottled beverages, soap, shampoo, etc. to a local church. You can also contact your local church and see if they can point you in the direction of any larger efforts – many church diocese and synods send large trucks of donated goods to disaster areas.

If you’re a spiritual person, include the flood victims in your prayers. Many people rely on their faith to handle disastrous situations. You can help with that by including victims of the flood (and other disasters) in your prayers. Even just a few moments of serious reflection and contemplation of their situation can be a powerful thing, because putting yourself in someone else’s shoes subtly changes not only your perspective, but can also affect their situation, too, as a result of any choices you make because of that contemplation. Pray and/or reflect for a moment on the flood situation, and react with your heart.

Consider National Guard usage when you vote – or get politically involved. When disasters like these floods and Katrina occur, they’re often made worse by a National Guard that’s stretched too thin with overseas deployments. Consider that issue when voting – we need a sufficient National Guard here at home to help out with disaster situations.

The real key is to just find what you have on hand and can easily give. A water bottle and a dollar bill can make a huge difference to someone out there.

Each year at Christmastime, I identify a particular charity that fills an important need in a community. I usually choose one that I have a personal connection to, having visited the facility and/or have had a close friend or family member working there, and the charity must be in line with my personal values of helping people who truly need help. If you wish to give a Christmas gift to charity this year, I truly hope you’ll consider this group.

L’arche Tahoma Hope is a small group of four homes in the Tacoma, Washington area. These homes open their doors to adults with mental development disorders, providing them a place to live in a communal environment with their peers and with a staff that lives on-site with them. A typical home consists of four to ten people – assistants plus “core members,” where core members refers to the developmentally challenged individuals living there.

I’ve personally visited one of these homes. The one I visited had six developmentally disabled individuals living there, along with five assistants. At any given time during waking hours, two to three of those assistants were always involved with working with the core members.

What did they do? The home had a very large garden, and the assistants and core members all worked together as a group in that garden, raising vegetables and flowers that they would either consume themselves or sell to the public as a fundraiser. The more technical tasks were performed by the assistants and they also provided a lot of emotional support and friendship to the core members, who were largely involved with picking the vegetables and weeding and such.

The group also made paper mache flower pots for the plants out of flour, colored water, and newspaper. These actually turned out quite well, and if it were not for the fact that I was thousands of miles from home, I would have purchased one for myself.

At meal times, all of the core members and all of the assistants that were present would eat together around a large table as a group, sharing food and talking about their day.

I will be the first to admit that I do not have the spiritual fortitude or patience to do this job. I simply could not live there with the patience required day in and day out, and I am deeply thankful that there are people out there who do have that kind of patience and caring for others.

The truth is that most people don’t have that level of patience and most families do not have the support structure that is needed to provide for individuals with mental development disorders. For the most part, these individuals come from loving families who simply recognize that they don’t have the patience or the ability to truly care for them.

These homes provide a quality of life for individuals with mental development disorders that they simply could not find anywhere else in the world. They’re in an environment with their peers, where they’re not seen as outcasts, and with individuals who care enough about their situation to wish to live there and help them in many one-on-one situations.

I know that if I had a child with similar disabilities, I would truly hope that in adulthood, they could find a situation like L’arche to live in, and I am truly thankful that such places do exist and that there are people out there with enough spiritual and mental strength to work and live there, making a better life for people who weren’t given the same tools and abilities we were given at birth.

If you’re thinking of making a charitable donation this year for Christmas, please consider donating to L’arche Tahoma Hope Community. Take some time to visit their website and find out more about the amazing and life-transforming work that goes on there.

Furthermore, I will match all donations by my readers, dollar for dollar, up to $1,000 between now and December 25, 2007. All you have to do is donate to L’arche Tahoma Hope Community via JustGive.org and then forward the receipt of your donation to me – you can delete any personal information from this receipt if you wish. So, if you donate $20 to L’arche Tahoma Hope this year, I’ll match it and that gift becomes $40, and so on.

If you’d like, you can read about my 2006 charity drive for the Child Abuse Prevention Center of Dallas County, Texas.

Recently, my wife and I took account of all of our charitable spending. Over the last year, we’ve donated small amounts ($10-$50) to many different charities, a list that was almost shocking in length when we finally examined all of them together. Our total charitable spending was an amount we were comfortable with, but we wondered to ourselves whether or not one large donation to one charity we both cared about and were sure was a legitimate and healthy charity.

One big reason why we feel that the small donations are fine is that most charities are based on a model of receiving a lot of small donations. Their organizations assume – and operate – on the basis that there will be many out there like me and my wife,

Another benefit of the small donations is that we can support a lot of organizations that we believe in. There are many, many charities and organizations out there that we believe in and agree with the concept behind, and thus there are many that we have interest in supporting financially.

Even given those ideas, however, we’re leaning towards reducing the number of our charitable donations significantly in the coming year (down to just a very tiny handful), and donating much larger amounts to these charities. Here’s why.

The charities that we are most strongly tied to are either highly local or tied closely to our family. These charities are extremely involved on the local level, facilitating positive social work in the community itself instead of on a broader scale. They provide the opportunity for us to directly witness our dollars at work, as well as donate our own time if we so wish.

These charities tend to be much smaller than other charities. In one case, it is an organization that provides fulfilling living conditions for physically and mentally handicapped people in a specific community. In another case, a small, independent food pantry that provides food to people below certain incomes that actually work for a living – they target minimum wage earners with families, mostly, and provide them quite a bit of free, fresh food. In both cases, the organizational structure behind each of these is small.

These charities also enable us (and very close relatives of ours) to directly donate time and talent, as well. In every case, the charities are local enough that my wife and I – or members of our immediate families – can directly volunteer or work for these groups. This means that we have the clear opportunity to do even more than before – and spend our volunteer time and money working for the same goals.

In my eyes, the benefit of supporting local charities is the greatest of all because you can directly witness their good work – and even participate with your own effort quite easily. Because of this, our charitable donations next year will be much larger and focused on small organizations within communities where my family and I can potentially not just make a financial contribution, but a personal one as well.

I guess, in the end, Your Money or Your Life had a broader impact on me than I would have ever guessed.