1. Donate new blankets to kids in homeless shelters at projectnightnight.org.
2. Shop or donate to thrift stores such as, Out of the Closet, which helps support the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
3. Before you shop online, go to goodshop.com. Then buy from participating retailers and the site donates a portion of your purchase to the charity of your choice.
4. Spend an hour or two a week helping an immigrant learn English (check out literacyvolunteers.org).
5. Donate old cell phones to victims of domestic violence for emergencies (go to ncadv.org and click “donate”).
6. Vaccinate 50 children around the world against deadly diseases such as meningitis, measles or polio with a $50 donation at doctorswithoutborders.org.
7. Provide a month of care for a child rescued from sexual slavery for just $30 at sharedhope.org.
8. Find projects that help children in your neighborhood at dosomething.org.
9. Make a $10 donation to freethechildren.org and a special matching-funds program will turn it into $100 worth of medical supplies for kids around the world.
10. Mentor an at-risk teen online at icouldbe.org.
11. Help an aspiring student pay for college at scholarshipamerica.org.
12. Send a DVD or video game to hospital-bound kids via childsplaycharity.org.
13. Helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing at 826national.org.
14. Look at your medical history, then donate to a cause that could help your loved ones, be it the American Heart Association (americanheart.org), Susan G. Komen for the Cure (komen.org) or another charity.
15. Train your dog to be a therapy dog for children in hospitals at tdi-dog.org.
16. Sell gifts you don’t need through eBay’s Giving Works program (givingworks.ebay.com), which earmarks a percentage of sales for the charities of your choice.
17. Give to donorschoose.org; a small donation can help create cozy reading nooks for underfunded classrooms.
18. Upgrade your laptop; worldcomputerexchange.org will send your old one to a child in one of 61 countries.
19. Give blood and save a child’s life at givelife.org.
20. Become a bone marrow donor at www.marrow.org, it could be a child’s life you save.
This list is only a small list of charities and organizations that will help you to directly help a child in need, but remember the child in need may be closer than you think. You do not have to have money to make a child’s wish come true, time is a wonderful gift. Remember the child down the street who lives with only an elderly grandparent, the children in need of foster care, the boy down the street who is desperately trying to learn a sport but his single mother doesn’t know how to teach him, the family who this year hasn’t enough to buy presents for their children, etc… The list of possibilities goes on and on, and so do the children in need.