Click and view for charity

x-posted from Muse For Jews

I’m sure you’ve received emails telling you to go to such-and-such site to click to ensure that some corporation will donate money to breast cancer research, food for homeless pets, etc. Today I got one that read:

Friends & Family,

In an effort to raise money for research on autism, the band, Five for Fighting, is generously donating $0.40 to Autism Speaks for *each time* the video is viewed on the attached link. When you have a moment, please visit the link below to watch the video and pass it along to your friends and family. They are aiming for 10,000 hits, but hopefully we can help them to surpass this goal.

Link to the site: http://www.whatkindofworlddoyouwant.com/videos/view/id/408214=20

So immediately I went to Snopes to check it out and found out that it’s legit (I love when that happens).

Here’s the deal: the site contributes money to one of the designated charities each time someone views one of the posted videos. Charities include:

• Augie’s Quest (www.augiesquest.org)
• Autism Speaks (www.autismspeaks.org)
• Fisher House Foundation (www.fisherhouse.org)
• Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org)
• United Service Organization (www.uso.org)

But - and this is lovely, just lovely - anyone can create and upload a video on the topic of “what kind of world do you want?” Imagine - plain old people just making videos about their vision of the world and what it can be, posting them online, sending them out to their friends and families, and raising money for charity at the same time.

Why, I feel a class project cooking up.

I spent a few minutes checking out the videos on the site (there are currently 183). Many are about people living with autism, ALS, and Asberger’s Syndrome and the effect on their families. One is about war’s effect on children (okay, I cried). The cool thing is that while I’m raising money for charity, I’m also learning the human side of these charities and the people they help.

What an awesome class project: pick one of the designated charities, make a video, raise money