my regular contributions are to the food bank, MSF and dance (with a focus on supporting the arm that does school outreach).
I am low-key looking for an environmental charity that resonates for me
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love the ideas here!
monthly, I currently give to the local food bank, regional queer youth society, an indigenous environmental law trust, the residential school survivor fund, and an orphanage in Haiti.
As needs come up, I try to give to various mutual aid or fundraising type situations. sometimes to big NGOs when the government matches donations.
In the new year, I want to find some local or regional arts places to donate to and see if I can donate to the local drug users support network. I donāt know if theyāre a registered charity (and it doesnāt matter really), but they are doing a lot of advocacy work and want to support them.
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We have donated to the Aravind Eye Foundation in India (they are a registered non-profit in the U.S.) over the years and this year we donated a huge amount to fund specific needs after talking to their Executive Director. We went to visit the hospital in Chennai when we were in India last month and the staff gave us a presentation and a tour, and I canāt tell you how impressed I was by what theyāre able to accomplish and the constant optimization and innovation. This is an organization where donating $10 can probably fund a cataract surgery for someone in need. Iām always concerned about bureaucracy and where my money is actually going but with Aravind Iām sure that the money is being used very efficiently and can go so far in helping people in India with their vision.
This year we donated to their Spectacles for Scholars program which provides eye screening and glasses for school children (because the ED said it was the organizationās biggest need at the moment) but over time they plan to have local businesses sponsor them so that the program can be self-sustaining and have more reach.
details from our visit
Visit to Aravind Eye Center
We spent four hours at the Aravind Eye Center and it was very enlightening but also exhausting! They did several presentations about the history and the work that they do, and another presentation about the Spectacles for Schools program that we donated a huge amount to this year. They want eye care to be available to everyone and they only charge 100Rs ($1.20) to sign up and you get three appointments in three months. If one of the appointments is for vision then you can get glasses made right away (for $7) so that you donāt have to make another trip.
They also wanted to reach rural villagers so they started ācampsā which were 1-day events to bring care to the villagers and then they would bus them to the city for cataract surgery or any follow-up care that was needed. They thought they were reaching a lot but someone did a study and found that the camps were only reaching 7% of the people in need, so thatās when they started creating the Rural Vision Centers (what Marmalade initially wanted to donate toward, but thatās not where their financial need is right now). Even before broadband was available everywhere they were setting up their own towers so that a staff of two trained technicians could treat villagers and then they could do a video call with a doctor in the city. Having these centers readily available has been life-changing for so many people.
They also have a manufacturing site where they make medical supplies and glasses frames so that they were able to bring down their costs a ton and also supply 10% of the worldās medical supplies at a low cost to other third world countries. Theyāre also constantly innovating and came up with a system so that a doctor performing cataract surgeries could do twice as many (it was some insane number like 16-18 per hour, but donāt quote me on that) by having two sets of nurses and two beds, so that once a patient was done the microscope can immediately be pivoted to the second bed while the first patient is discharged, so that thereās no delay. They literally do thousands of cataract surgeries a day and charge less than $10 for it! And if the patient canāt afford it there are subsidized programs.
The amount of innovation and optimization is just incredible, and you can tell that all the doctors and higher level staff who work there believe in the mission. They bring in over a thousand village girls every year to train them as medical technicians.
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We got a tour of the huge hospital and one of the women was demonstrating new technologies for blind people.
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They called up Marmaladeās high school friend who works in the research division and he took us on a tour of the research center where theyāre doing a ton of work on eye diseases. I learned that a donor eyeball can be reactive to experiments for 5 days if preserved correctly within 5 hours. They are doing a lot of amazing work to better peopleās lives!
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