[Buddha-l] Dana

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 23:07 +0100, Mike Austin wrote:

> What are your preferred charities - and why?

My preference is charities that work with the environment and with
endangered species. For example:

Nature Conservancy is an outfit that buys land adjacent to national
parks and forests so that natural habitation can be kept from being
mined or "developed" into housing and so forth. (www.nature.org)

Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org) works with environmental issues on many
levels and does a lot to promote educational projects and lobbying
efforts.

Ducks Unlimited (www.ducks.org) has various operations that support the
restoration of wetlands for waterfowl. 

Greenpeace is much too radical for my tastes these days and it
occasionally sponsors illegal activities, so I no longer support them,
although I used to.

During the past year, the president of the university where I work has
encouraged all faculty,staff and students to respond to the crises
occasioned by he tsunami, the hurricanes in the USA, the mudslides in
Guatemala and Mexico and the earthquakes in Pakistan by giving money to
the Red Cross and by giving blood to United Blood Services. This request
seems quite reasonable to me. I'm a big fellow with lots of blood, so
I'll probably make giving blood a regular routine for a while.

In the past the bulk of my daana was given to Buddhist organizations,
but nowadays we prefer the Vedanta Society and the Unitarian-
Universalist Association, because both of them seem to us (my wife and
I) to be promoting our values better than anyone else is doing these
days.

And how about you, Mike? What gets you to dig into your pockets?