How You Can Help is a book for anyone who wants to help make the world a better place, but doesn't know how to take the first step. This is the book for anyone who's ready to get involved, to reach out to others, and to do some good. Whether you want to help make your neighborhood safer, to help local kids learn to read, to get involved with a woman's shelter, to make a donation to a national or international issue like AIDS, or to get your company to start a recycling program, How You Can Help will show you the limitless opportunities available, who to contact, and what stephs you can take to help make a difference. Directed at people of all ages, economic backgrounds, interests, and abilities, How You Can Help oulines over 60 basic principles for incorporating good works into your daily life. Equally accessible for the first-time volunteer looking for the right group to join as well as the veteran volunteer looking to found a new service organization. Each chapter contains profiles of well-known and not-so-well-known genuine do-gooders, simple suggestions on where and how to help, recommended readings, and contact information for local and national service organizations. How You Can Help provides specific advice on how to get involved for parents, neighbors, employees, consumers, investors, donors, retirees, students and alumni. This book is an indispensable resource that will give you the advice, the tools, the information, and the resources to help others.

Real kids make a real difference in their communities in this vibrantly photographed chronicle by George Ancona. George Ancona celebrates the joy of kids giving back. In one after-school program, middle-school students mentor and tutor younger children. Via a special partnership, schoolchildren help professionals train assistance dogs for people with disabilities. At a community farm, families plant, grow, and harvest produce for soup kitchens and charities. In these and other examples of volunteering, kids of all ages work together knitting hats and scarves for those who could use warm clothes, packing hot meals to deliver to housebound people, and keeping roadways clean. Young humanitarians reading these accounts may well be inspired to find ways that they can help, too.

Argues that for the first time in history we're in a position to end extreme poverty throughout the world, both because of our unprecedented wealth and advances in technology, therefore we can no longer consider ourselves good people unless we give more to the poor. Reprint.

You Can Help offers concrete tools to family and friends who wish to participate in the healing process of someone who has been sexually victimized. In Part One, the author chronicles her own journey to recovery while providing pragmatic advice and essential data from numerous experts in the field. Each chapter is followed by "Five Practical Tips." Part Two is comprised of inspirational stories by 19 other survivors of both abuse and assault (8 men and 11 women) who share what was most helpful and hurtful in their own recoveries. Besides empowering family and friends, You Can Help is a valuable asset for arming survivors in their battle against shame and is an important educational resource for professionals who work with trauma. You Can Help enables readers to: (1) BREAK THE SILENCE (silence is the biggest obstacle to recovery) (2) LEARN about the complex consequences of sexual trauma, including PTSD (3) ASSIST SURVIVORS in regaining trust, confidence, and joy.

Most of us want to make a difference. We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. How can we do better? While a researcher at Oxford, trying to figure out which career would allow him to have the greatest impact, William MacAskill confronted this problem head on. He discovered that much of the potential for change was being squandered by lack of information, bad data, and our own prejudice. As an antidote, he and his colleagues developed effective altruism, a practical, data-driven approach that allows each of us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists believe that it’s not enough to simply do good; we must do good better. At the core of this philosophy are five key questions that help guide our altruistic decisions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing I can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? By applying these questions to real-life scenarios, MacAskill shows how many of our assumptions about doing good are misguided. For instance, he argues one can potentially save more lives by becoming a plastic surgeon rather than a heart surgeon; measuring overhead costs is an inaccurate gauge of a charity’s effectiveness; and, it generally doesn’t make sense for individuals to donate to disaster relief. MacAskill urges us to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. When we do this—when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors—we find that each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.

Examines easy ways to reuse items and why it's important to do so.

Discover how giving of yourself can lead to some of the most joyous moments in your life—in a book that “deserves a special place on that shelf reserved for truly practical wisdom" (Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People). Not a day goes by without our being called upon to help one another--at home, at work, on the street, on the phone…. We do what we can. Yet so much comes up to complicate this natural response: "Will I have what it takes?" "How much is enough?" "How can I deal with suffering?" "And what really helps, anyway?" In this practical helper's companion, the authors explore a path through these confusions, and provide support and inspiration for us in our efforts as members of the helping professions, as volunteers, as community activists, or simply as friends and family trying to meet each other's needs. Here too are deeply moving personal accounts: A housewife brings zoo animals to lift the spirits of nursing home residents; a nun tends the wounded on the first night of the Nicaraguan revolution; a police officer talks a desperate father out of leaping from a roof with his child; a nurse allows an infant to spend its last moments of life in her arms rather than on a hospital machine. From many such stories and the authors' reflections, we can find strength, clarity, and wisdom for those times when we are called on to care for one another.