Giving Back to the Community

I own a lot of books, don't I?

I want to give back to my community. One of my original long term goals when I established SWAG was to do fund raising in order to start a local scholarship. That idea hasn't gone away, but it is something I'm putting on the back burner while I focus on other things in my life. This, however, does not mean I don't want to do any fund raising.

Recently, there has been a larger than normal outcry against the organization Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is an essential charity organization in our local communities. There is no shortage of need for the services that this group provides. Its critics believe that Planned Parenthood only provides a single service: abortion. The truth of the matter is that this service is only 3% of the services provided.

In 2010, this is the breakdown of services rendered:

38% - STD Testing/Treatment

33.5% - Contraception

14.5% - Cancer Screening

10.4% - Other Women's Health Services (mostly pregnancy testing)

3.0% - Abortion Services

0.6% - Other Services
(Source)

You need to remember that Planned Parenthood is providing services to people who cannot afford these services any other way.  Be it free condoms for healthy sexual activity or screening for breast cancer, these services are provided for free to people without the resources to take care of themselves. Cutting funding to Planned Parenthood is taking away from services that support low-income women.

In this post, I'm announcing my desire to give back to the community. I want to raise money for Planned Parenthood. I don't have much to offer, but I'll offer what I can. I have included a recent photo of me with this post. You'll note that my hair is getting long. Well, it's reaching the point where I can start having it styled. I was planning on doing a simple ponytail most of the time, but I'm going to let the public decide what happens to my hair based on how much I can raise.

$1 - If I get a SINGLE donation, I will find something that I can wear 24/7.  I don't know how long I'll wear it, but I'll wear it for at least a straight week.  I'm thinking that I'll wear it at least one day for every $1 raised.
$100 - I will have my hair done in a style of the top contributor's choice.  If it something I can handle myself, I'll do this for a month.  If it is something that requires a stylist, it will be for as long as I can maintain it.
$250 - In addition to the above, I will let the public pick out a hair color to dye my hair.

I honestly don't have enough subscribers to justify coming up with ideas for more than the $250 threshold.  If for some reason this proves to not be the case, I will try and do something epic.

Update:  As of 3/5/2012, I have raised $65 for Planned Parenthood.  At this point in time, I'm going to up my game.  For every $1 raised, I'm going to throw in $0.50 to match, up until $50 because I'm pretty broke.



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