Help End World Hunger

The United Nations has estimated the cost of ending world hunger at about $195 billion a year. Twenty-two countries have pledged to donate this money by contributing 0.7% -- less than 1% -- of national income to international aid, but the goal has yet to be reached. Five countries have already met the goal, while others are on target to meet it in a few years. Some, including the U.S., are lagging. If you'd like to encourage US lawmakers to work harder to donate the necessary funds, visit this page at Poverty.com and print a letter that you can send to your congressional represenatives, or use the letter as an example for your customized letter.

What if you could help end world hunger without spending any money or even leaving your house? Would you do it? If the answer if yes, then bookmark The Hunger Site.com and visit every day.

With a single click of the mouse, you can provide food for hungry people in the U.S. and around the world.

It's a simple way to make a big difference. So far, visitors to the site have helped provide more than 300 million cups of food to people around the world - all at no cost to the web visitors who click every day. Donations are paid for by advertisers who purchase small banner ads on the site, and 100% of the advertising fees go to nonprofit organizations working to end hunger. Currently, The Hunger Site's charitable partners are Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest.

Funds are split between these organizations and go to the aid of hungry people in over 74 countries, including those in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and North America.

So make a difference in the life of a hungry child or adult. Visit TheHungerSite.com and make your free donation.

FreeRice.com is a wonderful new site that can help end global hunger. Launched in October 2007, FreeRice.com is reminiscent of TheHungerSite in its ease of use and wonderful ability to impact the world. Like The Hunger Site, it allows you to make free advertiser-supported donations to the World Food Programme. All you have to do is sharpen your vocabulary.

The site asks users to play a multiple-choice word game to generate donations. For each word you get right, FreeRice.com will donate the equivalent of 10 grains of rice. The site shows you a word and then asks you to choose a synonym from a list of four others. The more you get right, the harder it gets.

In its first month, the site has already raised over 1 billion grains of rice for the UN World Food Programme. So surf on over to FreeRice.com, sharpen your vocabulary, and do a world of good for the hungry.

NeoAid is a new philanthropic site that just launched in 2009. They're making it easy for people to donate money to good causes, including world hunger, simply by searching the web or performing other online tasks such as shopping or signing up for special offers.

NeoAid's homepage looks much like any typical search site, with a big search box in the middle of the page, but the results you get here will do more than just point you to the information you're seeking. They'll also generate money for charities, including the UN World Food Programme. In addition to generating donatoins through searching, users can also click on the Shop, Offers, or Free Software links to donate even more money to charity.

There area couple things I really ike about this site:

- They donate 90% of their net revenue (gross income minus running expenses) to charity.
- They started with a small number of charities. Some other charity search sites allow users to select almost any nonprofit organization they wish to support, but this usually means that each charity may only get a few dollars or even a few cents, so the effectiveness of the effort is minimized.
- The seven charities they're supporting cover a wide wide of issues and are all well-known, trusted organizations:

Poverty: : United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)
Animal Welfare: International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)
Children: : UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund)
Emergency Aid: : Direct Relief International
Environment: : WWF - World Wide Fund for Nature
Health: : City of Hope
Human Rights: : Amnesty International

The site has only launched recently, but if they become as successful as The Hunger Site or Free Rice, they could make a significant impact. Check out NeoAid.com.

This lens was nominated as one of the Best Charity Lens in the 2008 Giant Squid Awards.