Alternatives to Shopping Malls...

Reasons to give Alternatively:

Emergency Relief

Food, clothing and other forms of emergency assistance are always needed, and often giving such gifts gives us the immediate satisfaction of fulfilling an urgent need. Nearly all communities in America have social service agencies whose clients have unmet needs for food, clothing, and shelter. There are also national and international agencies which specialize in providing relief to the poorest of the poor, including denominational church agencies such as the American Friends Service Committee, Catholic Charities, Lutheran World Relief, Mennonite Central Committee, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief, and Church World Service/CROP

Economic Assistance

Also needed are gifts which lift people out of the cycle of poverty and dependence. Most families are capable of taking care of themselves if they have reasonable access to education, resources and job opportunities. Most of the agencies mentioned above provide economic development assistance as well as emergency relief, to allow people to become self-reliant.

For many families around the world caught in the backwash of war, natural disaster, or chronic poverty, a basic need is income-producing activity. Many persons have marketable handcraft skills, and need only the chance to sell their products in order to become self-supporting. These are persons at the lower end of the economic scale who are not reached by the benefits of "development"

SERRV (Sales Exchange for Refugee Rehabilitation Vocations) is a major self-help effort to fight chronic poverty, started originally in response to the post-World War II refugee situation, but now involving thousands of artisans in 60 countries, mainly in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America A high percentage of the retail price of the handicrafts goes to the producers, since exploitative middlemen are eliminated, and because SERRV (a program of Church World Service) is operated on a not-for-profit basis. Another excellent program, Ten Thousand Villages (formerly SELF-HELP Crafts), which markets third-world crafts in ..North America.. is operated by the Mennonite Central Committee. Many other small agencies operate similar programs (see references at the end of this page.)

International Micro-Enterprise Loans

Micro-Enterprise loan funds provide very small loans to help get small businesses started. In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank was founded in 1976 by an economics professor Muhammed Yunus who was concerned about the exploitation of poor women in a male-dominated Muslim culture. Women who work in factories or on plantations receive significantly less than men for equivalent work, but the capital required to buy raw materials and basic tools to establish their own enterprises is expensive -- moneylenders often charge up to 10% per day, and local enterprises are not big enough to qualify for bank loans.

The Grameen Bank has now made hundreds of thousands of loans, averaging less than $100 each, to landless poor men and women for a variety of crafts and trades: book-binding, rope braiding, sewing, fishing, peanut frying, rice milling and selling flowers, bananas, mirrors, and pottery. Borrowers pay interest rates comparable to local commercial bank rates.

ACCION International, founded in 1961, is a private, non-profit organization which provides small loans and basic business training to the self-employed poor throughout the Americas. Through affiliates in fourteen Latin American countries and the United States, ACCION provides loans and training which enable mechanics, vendors, carpenters, seamstresses and cobblers to expand their businesses.

As micro-businesses grow, their owners are able to earn a better living, providing improved nutrition, housing, education and clothing for their families. In addition, the provision of credit and training often allows small-scale entrepreneurs to create new jobs in low-income communities.
ACCION is not a bank, but an intermediary between banks and borrowers; the majority of its operating costs are paid for by donations. In 1995 ACCION loaned a total of $331 million for 277,000 clients, and had an astonishing pay-back rate of 98 percent.

ACCION also accepts loans from American depositors and pays interest to lenders comparable to bank savings account rates.

• National Green
Pages (Co-op America),
202 872-5307

• SERRV International, a Church of the brethren program, markets hand-crafts from developing regions that pay a fair price to artisans. 800 723-3712.

• Ten Thousand Villages is a non-profit Mennonite- related alternative trading organzation
that also markets hand-crafts from developing regions paying a fair price to artisans. 717 859-8100.

Alternative Donation websites:

Operation Christmas Child - Provides gift-filled shoe boxes to children in desperate situations in over 90 countries across the world.

Salvation Army Christmas Charity Campaign

The Family Giving Tree - Bay area (CA) nonprofit organization dedicated to fulfilling the ..Holiday wishes of kids who would otherwise go without gifts

Christmas Seals - Support the American Lung Association by making a gift and sending an E-Christmas Seal!

Christmas Connection - a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the less fortunate families and seniors of Greater Oklahoma City.

Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Foundation - help fight breast cancer and donate to cancer research. Seeking a cure to end breast cancer forever.

San Francisco AIDS foundation - The San Francisco AIDS Foundation provides leadership to prevent new HIV infections. Linking community experience with science, the Foundation develops ground-breaking prevention programs and bold policy initiatives to promote health and create sustainable progress against HIV. Established in 1982, the Foundation refuses to accept that HIV transmission is inevitable.

Living Water International - Providing a cup of water in the name of Jesus.
Water: A Global Crisis
Water, the stuff of life and a basic human right, is at the heart of a daily crisis faced by more than one billion of the world's most vulnerable people—a crisis that threatens life and consigns large segments of humanity to chronic disease, poverty, and insecurity.