Thank you! 
Our local foodbank is the first on our list for giving. Second is our local library which is suffering budget cuts.
I’ll drop a good word in here for the Shriners.
Smile Train. It’s an organization that does surgery which repairs cleft palates and cleft lips on children. It changes lives, and, as I understand it, one hundred percent of donations go to help these children.
One of the two local animal rescue organizations. :> For the kittens!
A lot of worthy causes already listed, but I’ll add USO.
Phoenix Children’s Crisis center. http://www.crisisnurseryphx.org/index.htm They have an Amazon wish list so if you end up splitting your contribution among different charities, you can buy some needy children diapers.
My job takes me out to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation quite often, and every time I visit I am distressed at the sheer number of stray dogs and cats (most with with visible mange and other illnesses) that are scavenging around stores and gas stations, or hit by cars along side the road. There are no vets on the reservation, and animal life is not valued very highly. Spaying and neutering is rare, and most animals are left to run free outdoors.
Fortunately, there is a program, Lakota Animal Care program, that is hoping to change attitudes towards animals via education. Please consider making a small donation to this group. Thank you.
Me, too! $18.
Thank you! 
I’d say if you don;t know of a local children’s charity, give to St. Jude’s.
I’m a fan of the Peace Corps Partnership. This program funds individual community level projects designed by Peace Corps volunteers. After a rigorous proposal process, which incudes accounting for sustainability, the projects are posted on the website. You can look at the projects and choose anything from helping to fund a reading program in Benin to a water system in Vanuatu. Some projects are big, some are very micro-level. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, I used this program to fund a summer camp for at-risk youth that used creative arts to teach HIV/AIDS prevention and life skills. A complete stranger anonymously funded this project.
I find the advantages for the Peace Corps partnership to be this:
[ul]
[li]100% of the money goes directly to the prject you fund. There is no overhead and extremely little opportunity for corruption. All of the funds are relseased to the Peace Corps volunteer, and that volunteer is responsible for documenting how those funds are used. This means very little chance for money to disappear or get into the wrong hands. [/li][li]You know that the project is wanted and needed by the community. Typically, Peace Corps volunteers live at least a year as a member of the communty before implimenting a project, and they use various methods to figure out what the community’s biggest needs are. The community is also required to chip in at least 10% of the budget- which may be given in land or labor. This shows that they are also committed to the project. Most charities design projects based on one or two weeks of “needs assessment,” but Peace Corps volunteers know their communities up and down. [/li][/ul]
It’s just a really neat way to fund something concrete. I think you also get a project report when the project is done, so you can really see how your contribution worked out.
There is also http://charitynavigator.org/
Though there are a lot of unrated charities, and the site mostly (only?) rates economic efficiency, whcih is a good thing, but not everything.
I plan on giving to one international org (probably Direct Relief Intl), and one local (probably a food bank)
Brian
Amnesty International
MSF (Doctors without Borders)
Getty Owl Foundation (d’oh)
Planned Parenthood
Outreach Moldova is an Irish charity that was founded by a former classmate of mine.
She went to Moldova on an elective in medical school to work in an orphanage. Horrified by the appalling treatment of the kids, and the high mortality rates, she couldn’t leave without doing something, and so set up this charity which works to improve the lives of these kids and give them a future.
She’s now married a Moldovan and continues to live there with him and the 2 beautiful children they have adopted, working in an orphanage as their medical director.
This charity has literally worked miracles.
Systemic scleroderma is an incurable autoimmune disease that kills 50% of patients within five years. It causes unimaginable pain and disfigurement before death, but because so few people have it, pharmaceutical companies won’t fund research into drugs to cure it, and insurance companies won’t pay for experimental treatments. I get very discouraged when corporate charities suck up hundreds of millions of donor dollars a year for high visibility diseases, but scleroderma research limps by on a million a year.
UMCOR … the United Methodist Committee on Relief. 100% of donations go directly to the project or emergency. Administrative costs are paid from a different fund, so Every Dollar Works. And we don’t try to convert anyone.
If you like Heifer International (and I do too, for all the reasons you mention) then you should check out Worldbuilders every holiday season.
Worldbuilders is run by author Patrick Rothfuss (whose books are great, IMHO), and he basically collects donations, matches them 50% (i.e., your $10 donation becomes $15), donates that to Heifer, and, for every $10 you donate, enters you into a raffle for some wonderful prizes (mostly autographed SF/F books).
Other than Heifer/Worldbuilders, I also love Kiva and DonorsChoose.org. And others, of course, like the Red Cross and City of Hope, but those are the big three.