I thought I’d share this website with you. Purportedly all you have to do is go to this website, click a bar once, and a certain amount of food will be allocated to the starving people of the world.
In full, the website is http://www.hungersite.com and it seems to be legitimate. I got the advertising for if from a local Kinkos (I am not in any way alleging it is connected with Kinkos though). The advertising itself was a “xerox” of an article in a very reputable local paper. This article says once you go to this site and click the bar, a local sponsor has promised to give a certain amount of food to feed the world. There is absolutely no cost to you. Supposedly the only “drawback” is that you will be taken to a page where you will see some small advertisements from the sponsors. The article and website recommend you go there once a day and click.
I am not necessarily suggesting people from SDMB go to this website and do this. I just thought I would share this interesting story and info with you.
Massive advertising website. I mean, that’s all it is, is ads, both for charitable organizations like Save The Children and Second Harvest, and for “Buy this stuff!” consumer goods and weight loss diets.
So yeah, I suppose it’s legit, but it’s a little dizzying to see so much “Buy this stuff!” advertising clumped together in one spot.
The site is legit - the food is distributed through established, credible aid agencies and is paid for by the advertisers.
Unfortunately, thehungersite spawned a lot of similar sites (donating pencils to children in poor countries, donating condoms for AIDS prevention, etc) whose integrity is less certain.
I don’t know that adding other organisations to the hungersite was a great idea, but what it has done is extend the credibility of thehungersite to those organisations and allow people to visit a single website and have advertisers donate to a range of causes.
thehungersite FAQ is extensive and addresses most of the question people might have - including what percentage of donations goes to the beneficicary organisations.
You know the neatest part about this site is that there are links there to other sites, ranging from breast cancer funding, to rain forest protection, to even food for destitute animals. I go there every day now and click on each of the charities. That was actually the original point of this thread. I wanted to tell other people on these boards about this cool site so they could take part too. But I didn’t know if soliciting for charities was allowed on SDMB, so I just decided to mention it briefly. I think people who viewed my thread got the idea though;).
We normally require people to ask first before they start promoting a charity. However, this site is so well known (and it’s been mentioned before a lot, too) that we’ll let it slide this time.
