Tip-toe through the sidebar

UPDATE: All of the following links can still be found in my sidebar, however they are now text links and on the right hand side of the page (a bit re-organized). All wonderful and worth checking out.

Let's take a moment to play around in my sidebar and remind ourselves of a few simple ways to save the world. Once we scroll past the slideshow of my beautiful baby, the categories for my random postings, the blogrolls for my favorite reads and my familial reads we come to the first point of interest:


Visit 29-Day Giving Challenge
This is a fun way to save the world: give. Give of yourself or give a gift to be held. Make a difference in your own life as well as the lives of others.

Give one thing away each day for 29 days. Share your stories about how it
impacts your life to focus on giving. Join the 29-Day Giving Challenge community
today.
Why? Because to see the world change, we have to do something to
change the world. Plus, the best way to attract abundance into your life is to
be in a perpetual state of giving and gratitude. Be an important part of the
global giving movement that inspires more generosity on our planet.



The R word campaign is just a reminder of your responsibility to others when you open your mouth. Your words are powerful. What kind of power do you what them to have?

The “r” Word Some people have mental retardation. While mental retardation is
not a bad word, when used to describe someone or something you think is bad it
becomes another thoughtless hurtful word. People with mental retardation are not
bad, their condition is not bad, the prejudice and discrimination to people with
mental retardation is BAD…and WRONG! Please stop using the word ‘retard’, it
hurts people with disabilities.

Every Day you can click on this button , and sponsors will donate money toward free mammograms. That is all you do. You click, they donate, a life may be saved. It doesn't get easier than that! After clicking you'll notice at the very top of the page are tabs for other "click projects".

You can click to give food to those in need at the the Hunger Site.

You can click to to give free child health care at the Child Health Site.
You can click to give free books at the Literacy Site.
You can click to protect natural habitats at the Rainforest Site.
You can click to give free food and care at the Animal Rescue Site.

All of these are just a click, just a second of your time, no money, barely any effort... and you can make a big difference.

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Free rice is another FREE way to help end world hunger. Click on the button and you will be moved to a page where you can take a vocab quiz. For every word you get correct 20 grains of rice are donated to someone in need.

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.
FreeRice has two goals:
Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.
Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.
Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.

Team In Training is a fun way to train for and complete an endurance event (marathon, half marathon, triathlon, etc.). All the while you are raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. This is an incredible experience, and although it is much more of a commitment than the organizations above... it is well worth it. You'll make new friends, get in shape, accomplish a major goal and SAVE LIVES - not to be taken lightly. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience and will definitely be doing It again sometime.

Remember when you all freaked out at the suggestion of making your own sanitary napkins? Well, bite your tongue and check out this terrific organization called Goods 4 Girls. This project is to get reusable sanitary napkins to girls in Africa so that they do not have to miss school every time Aunt Flo comes for a visit. What you can do is buy, make or donate money toward these reusable pads. There are lots of ways to do it and all of them would make a huge difference in another woman's life. (can you imagine having to use newspaper, camel skin... or nothing at all?) The cost is low, and the good is great!

Goods 4 Girls was started to seek out donors to sew or purchase new, reusable menstrual pads for donations to areas of Africa where these products are needed most. Providing reusable supplies not only provides a more environmentally friendly alternative for these young women (in areas of adequate water supply for washing), it reduces their dependence on outside aid organizations to continue providing for their monthly needs.

The Eat Well Guide is a free online directory of thousands of family farms,
restaurants, markets and other outlets that offer local, fresh and sustainable
food in the United States and Canada. Visitors simply enter a zip or postal code
to search for food that is free of antibiotics and added hormones, and produced
by healthy and humane methods that include organic, pasture-raised and heritage.

For those of us who are trying not to use all of those plastic bottles and instead have switched to filters.... what to do with the filter? You can't recycle it or reuse it... so what's a greenie to do? Sign the petition to get the Clorox company (who owns Brita) to make some changes. Also you can send your used filters to the address on this site and they will give them back to Brita for us (as a visual aid to the landfill clogging problem of the current filter design).

Use the Z Report. At the Store. With Text Messaging.
Posted by Jeremiah McNichols
Have you read and reread the Z Report on BPA, but have trouble remembering which brands are which when you get to the store?Have you been meaning to replace some bottles or a sippy cup, but have a hard time deciding when you're staring at all those products on the shelf?Now you can keep the Z Report at your fingertips, with information that doesn't go out-of-date, updated with new products at the same time they arrive on store shelves. Thanks to a partnership between ZRecs and Mobile Commons, our comprehensive directory of BPA in children's feeding products is now available via text message.

Well, now I think we are all acquainted with the sidebar, and maybe we can make a few easy changes or larger commitments to do our part in saving the world!