As a bleeding heart tree-hugging liberal dupe of the special interests, I give to many charitable organizations. Then they send me paper mail to let me know what they're doing and to encourage me to give them more money. Meanwhile, my apartment building has teeny-tiny mailboxes. My mailbox often fills up. Once my postal carrier fills my box with urgent bulletins notifying me that some children in far-off lands are still hungry, sometimes s/he notices that there's not enough room for unimportant mail like bills and invoices and so those get returned to sender. It was like a DDoS attack on my physical mailbox. For the last year or so, I've been letting these charitable appeals pile up--so I could count them. I guessed that there were probably just a few places filling up my mailbox with constant mailing.
And that's true. The following organizations, between them, sent me a little bit more than half of the charitable-org mail I received in the last year or so. I want to remember to not send them any more money until I move someplace with a bigger mailbox.
SPLaC List 2007
(I'm calling this list the SPLaC List in honor of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which I gave some money a few years ago and which responded with too much mail. I had a bigger mailbox then, but they still managed to fill it.)
- Americans United for Separation of Church and State
- Doctors Without Borders
- Environmental Defense
- FINCA International
- Friends of the San Francisco Public Library
- Greenpeace
- Friends of the Urban Forest
- Glide
- The Ocean Conservancy
- Pacific Crest Trail Association
- People for the American Way
- Planned Parenthood of North America
- Project Open Hand
- Save the Bay
- Sierra Club
- United Negro College Fund
- The Yosemite Fund
I'm not saying that these organizations aren't doing wonderful things. I'm just saying that I'm going to let someone else, someone with a bigger mailbox, support them.
Labels: contact, priorities, splac