When calculated as a percentage of income the neediest become the most charitable.

Those who earn less than $20,000 become twice as charitable as those who earn $100,000 even though they donate one fourth as much.

The most common reason for upper income people not giving to charity: They can’t afford it.

[via Charity: Who Cares? on Mint.com]

For those of you who are statistics junkies and like looking at fancy charts and graphs about things, this survey by Mint.com about who gives to what charities, what types of charities are donated to and a bunch of other demographic information in a fancy, easy-to-read format will be a quick and easy read.

For those of you looking to make last-minute donations as a gift alternative or for year-end tax offsets, Mint wisely recommends Charity Navigator as a good resource for finding causes to donate to where the most money goes toward the actual cause rather than to administration costs.

Have a merry Christmas, friends. Hope you don’t get too much junk you don’t need.

She was forced to have sex with hundreds of men before she turned 10. After such a brutal past, what does her future hold? In a Marie Claire exclusive, Sreypov Chan tells her phenomenal life story.

(via Diary of a Sex Slave: Child Prostitution in Cambodia)

Have I ever told you about my sister? I don’t think I have. Not on my blog, at least.

Jessica works in Pattaya, Thailand: a city renowned for its prostitution problem. For many severely perverted men around the world, this is a great place. For most everyone else, it’s one of the darkest places on earth.

My sister’s job in Pattaya is to play music and hang out in bars on Walking Street (the central location for most of the city’s prostitution) and elsewhere around town, befriending prostitutes and pointing them to resources to help them get out of the endless cycle and into a safe, healthy job. She also runs a church for many of the women who have escaped the sex industry.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit Jessica and see what she does in Pattaya. We went to her church, strolled Walking Street (during daylight hours) and got a feel for her life. She deals with stories similar to Sreypov Chan’s all the time.

If I hadn’t known it before, those couple days that I got to see Pattaya proved to me that my sister is strong. If you want more stories, not just bad ones, but the happy endings, you should check out her blog. (And, she didn’t ask me for this, but if you would like to make a donation to fund what she’s doing there, you can do so here. It’d make for a damn good Christmas gift.)

Definitely stole this from Caleb, who is spending the next few months getting rid of almost all his stuff. I have a huge amount of respect for him for doing this.

I am a firm believer that we need a lot less stuff. It’s why I like what Caleb is doing a whole lot. I feel like I am on a constant quest to have less stuff. It’s not easy to do. Every time I move, I try to throw away even more stuff. Every time I get tired of my cluttered room, things I didn’t need in the first place inevitably go in the trash or to Goodwill.

If I had it my way, I’d have one shelf for my books and music, a clear desk with my stereo and computer and nothing else. My general rule when buying physical stuff now is that, unless it’s something I’m going to use all the time, it’s not worth owning.

I’m kind of glad my family isn’t doing much for Christmas gifts this year. I already have plenty of stuff. If you haven’t started buying Christmas gifts yet (doubtless, unless you’re a dude like me), maybe you should consider buying non-physical goods, like iTunes gift certificates or a donation to charity.

I wonder what would happen if it weren’t considered bragging to tell people about our generosity. Do you think people would see what others are doing and feel the need to “keep up” by being more generous? Would that be generosity in the wrong mindset?

A while back I did this Twitter For Food thing and announced on Twitter that I’d skip lunch and donate $10 to hunger relief instead. I got some semi-negative responses about showing off, but I wasn’t doing it to be proud. I wanted to show other people how easy it is to help.

Today is World Aids Day and, of course, it trended on Twitter with all sorts of people “raising awareness.” But I wonder how often anyone actually acts on that awareness. Then along came Merlin Mann in all his wonder:

Roiling emo outrage over the Human Condition gets way more credible if you quit fucking around on the internet and go DO something.

So, here I am, wondering what to do. Because I do donate money to a fair number of causes and have volunteered countless hours of my time over the years. But I don’t tell people how much I give or to who, really, because that’s common courtesy. And I wonder what would happen if I threw that common courtesy out the window, and others did too, so that we’re using social networks to tell people what we’re actively doing to help instead of just “raising awareness.”

Sometimes I get carried away when I write. I have a lot to say about all the bad things going on in the world and why it’s our own fault and that we might be doomed. And then I realize that maybe I put up a more negative image of myself than I intend to.

Truth be told, I have a lot to be thankful for. And I don’t mean to flaunt that in front of those of you who don’t.

First and foremost, I have to say I am thankful to live in a country where it is nearly impossible to go hungry or without shelter. In the very worst case scenario, there are still homeless shelters and soup kitchens in most cities. And in cases where there aren’t, it honestly isn’t very hard to find a charitable person on the street or a church to help you out.

Aside from that, I’m thankful that, in this crazy world we live in, love still exists. We all get discouraged and downtrodden, especially in times like these, but most of us have someone to love us. And if you feel entirely unloved by everyone, chances are there’s a person out there looking for you just so they can love you. I know this because some of the people I love myself are the kind who actually take joy in loving the difficult ones. I have a hard time putting myself among them, but I’d like to think myself a rather patient and caring individual when I see it’s needed.

Finally, I’m thankful for music. That’s a no-brainer. When things go wrong, when you have a bad day, a bad week or a bad year, music is still there. I have friends who have seen almost every kind of trouble imaginable, but when things are particularly rough, they sit back, roll a cigarette and ask if I’d like to play my guitar along with them during a rousing rendition of “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd or any one of a hundred Beatles songs.

Music gets us because it IS us. It gets to our souls because that’s where it came from; it comes out of one heart in hopes that it can go back in to a hundred others that we might continue to identify with one another as human beings, fighting the good fight together. I’m thankful that God or physics or logic or whatever you choose to call holy gave us that.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Please don’t eat too much. And only make what you’re going to eat. Give the rest to someone who needs it. Or donate the extra cash you’d have spent to hunger relief. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t buy into Black Friday.

This week’s episode of Radiolab presents an interesting hypothetical that in turn presents some bigger-scale questions.

The hypothetical is this: you are wearing a thousand dollar suit. You are walking along the edge of a lake and see a girl drowning nearby. She screams for help. If you jump in to save her, you will ruin your thousand dollar suit. So do you save her? Common morality says yes, right?

Skip forward a couple days. You are now walking downtown and you pass a man at a booth saying that, for a thousand dollar donation, you can save the life of some girl you don’t know in another part of the world.

My guess is you’d be less likely to donate that money. But why? Because she’s not an immediate, tangible concern? Because, if you didn’t save her, nobody would judge you negatively for neglecting a child?

Radiolab goes on to discuss how this difference in thinking is due to a long-standing human mentality, that we have evolved to the point that emergencies in our physical location are those of importance and all others are easily ignorable.

What does it take for humans to evolve to the next level? To be aware that there is always an emergency somewhere? To gain a global consciousness?

Certainly the resources are there. Despite our recent economic crisis, America still has most of the world’s money; a small fraction of it could end the plague of starvation, ensuring every man, woman and child on earth did not go hungry. If only we’d think globally instead of locally. (That said, why do we buy burgers for homeless people when our local homeless shelters seem to be able to feed them just fine? Why not donate the money to fund relief in Africa?)

So the growing pains are there. People are making attempts at solving this, at pushing forward to encourage people to think about emergencies globally. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Is this a sign of mental evolution? How much longer until people react together to solve any emergency in the world? My guess is that we’ll get closer, but never quite there.

[via i can read]

I could write a large rant right here about how materialistic we are as a society. But I’ll just point out that the American Church, many of whom feel we shouldn’t be paying taxes into welfare, is only giving about 2% of its collective income toward tithing and giving to those in need.

Welfare is full of its problems. But my question is: if most American Christians got to keep their taxes that go toward welfare and give the money to a charity of their choice instead, would they? Would those in need be provided for? The stats don’t seem to be in favor of “yes.”

Today my friend (and former boss’s boss) Tim is heading up the charge to bring some attention to world hunger causes by recommending Twitter users skip a meal and donate what they would have spent on food to a world hunger organization.

Join me in a one-meal fast. Let’s see what we can do.

Linkage

• Twitter for Food (includes links to where you can donate)
• #twitterforfood on Twitter