Giving for Good

Each of us has important people in our lives whom we like to honor with tokens of love, gratitude, and affection. The quest to find meaningful gifts that will be enjoyed and not stowed can be daunting, expensive, and exhausting. I have assembled a smattering of ideas for alternative gifting that I hope will help and inspire you. 

Honor the Person Who Needs Nothing with a Gift that Keeps on Giving 

• Consider making a gift to Kiva in his or her name. Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Here’s how it works: You make a gift to Kiva in the amount of $25 or more in honor of someone. Kiva notifies the individual about your gift with an invitation to search through the Kiva database of over 5,000 loans and select a borrower. When the loan is repaid, the process repeats! 
• At Oxfam Unwrapped YOU choose the gift when you honor someone. (For example: A Christmas donkey for $150 or a toilet for $50.) You receive a humorous gift card to send. 
• Heifer International works in much the same way. You can browse their gift catalogue here. 

Stuck with what to give a grandchild? 

• How about the gift of an adventure with you? Check out the intergenerational offerings at Road Scholar. 
• Or consider a gift to his or her college fund. Ask your son or daughter for info on how to make a contribution. Or, set up a CHET account yourself and take the CT tax deduction.

If you want to give a tangible gift, try these ideas:

Edible Gifts:

• Homemade baked goods.
• A gift certificate to a favorite coffee shop, deli, or restaurant.
• Support a family farmer by shopping at CitySeed Farmers Market (Saturdays and Sundays until Dec 18) OR online through Local Harvest with its catalogue of over 5500 products including fresh fruits, nuts, dried fruits, and non-edibles from beeswax candles to clothing and baskets.

Shop for Good:

•  Make someone’s life better by shopping at Ten Thousand Villages, a fair trade retailer, with an online shopping site AND a physical store on Chapel Street. The company strives to improve the livelihood of artisans in developing countries. According to the website, “$140 million in sustainable income has been earned by makers who would otherwise be unemployed or underemployed since our founding in 1946.”
• Shop to benefit a local not-for-profit such as Creative Arts Workshop’s Celebration of American Crafts. 
• Shop at a museum gift shop: Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum, or the New Haven Museum Shop.
• Give a green and useful gift like LED lightbulbs, good for the environment and for the user’s budget. IKEA is a great place to shop for these; it is the only type of bulb they sell.
• Also at IKEA: For every toy, piece of play furniture, or children's book sold until December 24, the IKEA Foundation will donate $1 supporting children's right to play and develop. The New Haven store is collecting soft toys for the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, so buy a few extra to put in the donation bin. 

Other Ideas:

• Do you have too many cookbooks? Pass some of them on, perhaps adding tabs for your favorite recipes and decorating with a gadget or two instead of a bow. 
• Make a gift. 
• Do you have too many notecards? Give them, along with a selection of beautiful stamps, to someone who still likes to correspond the old-fashioned way. 
• Divide and repot your plants. (Be sure to keep them warm when you transport them).
• If you have a skill you would like to share with someone, give the gift of lesson(s).

Happy Gifting!

[Note: This is an edited version of an article I wrote for the holiday issue of HomeHaven News, a monthly newsletter for the members of HomeHaven, an organization in New Haven helping seniors to "age in place." While some of the ideas are geared to shopping locally, I hope they will give you ideas for ways to help the community in which you live.]

Meatless Monday: Supporting Family Farmers with Your Holiday Dollars

Not a fan of Buy Nothing Christmas? Then you are fast approaching the last possible date for getting your holiday shopping done and your parcels in the mail. 

With a busy week ahead, online shopping is probably become more and more enticing. Well, do I have an idea for you! Farmers across the country have had a particularly challenging year — from those in New England hit by a late-season hurricane followed by an October blizzard to Texans plagued by drought. I know a great way to lend them a hand, while bringing joy to your loved ones and cutting out the need to stand in line at the post office.

Skip online food gift retailers like Harry and David, and go right to the source. Check out LocalHarvest, a website where you can locate produce and other agricultural items in your area AND shop online for items not available locally or for items you may want to send as gifts. 

LocalHarvest, located in Santa Cruz, CA, was founded in 1998 by activist and software engineer Guillermo Payet. According to information on the organization’s website, “LocalHarvest is now the number one informational resource for the Buy Local movement and the top place on the Internet where people find information on direct marketing family farms. We now have more than 20000 members, and are growing by about 20 new members every day. Through our servers, our website and those of our partners, we serve about three and a half million page views per month to the public interested in buying food from family farms.” 

This well organized site is easy to navigate. “Farms” is where you can search for shopping opportunities in your area. “Shop” is where you will find an illustrated catalog broken down into categories such as fruits, honey and bee products, wool, lavender, meats, and many others. If the item is available only for local pickup, it is clearly indicated with a bright yellow banner. While  on my tour of the site, I discovered many lines of alpaca wear, Texas pecans (and pecan pie), frozen heritage turkeys, beeswax tea lights, jams, citrus fruits. I finally ordered some Page oranges from the Orange Shop in Citra, Florida with FREE SHIPPING. This fruit was described as “an heirloom USDA hybrid between Honeybell and Clementine released many years ago, widely considered to have the best flavor of any variety. They're small in size, fairly easy to peel, and have a rich, sweet taste…” I hope this gift will bring a smile to a couple who love fresh fruit but don’t have the chance to enjoy it every day.

The site also includes a section on CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and a tool for locating CSAs near you. [There was quite a list for the New Haven area.] And a calendar of events… and a newsletter… and member blogs and photos. Local Harvest is clearly about supporting small farmers, in every way they can and  wherever they are.

Yes, I believe in shopping local first. But in my experience you can’t always get what you want in your own little corner of the world. If you check out this site, you might find you can get exactly what you need.

I offer up this discovery as one more way to help out the little guys. They may not live next door. But they still need your support to stay in business. Their communities need them to stay in business. And we all need the family farmers to ensure the availability of safe, flavorful, and varied sources of food.

Happy shopping. 

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”