The mission: To provide college scholarships and financial aid to U.S. students and help grassroots groups set up their own tuition-assistance programs
Your money at work: A $50 donation buys an annual bus pass so that a community-college student can commute to campus.
Action Against Hunger
The mission: To feed malnourished children around the world and help communities grow their own food sources.
Your money at work: A $45 donation provides 45 days of special energy-dense food for a severely malnourished child.
Conservation International
The mission: To protect human well-being by ensuring healthy oceans, fresh water, and a stable climate.
Your money at work: A $15 donation helps protect an acre of tropical rainforest.
GlobalGiving Foundation
The mission: To connect benefactors with people who seek to make significant improvements in their communities or around the world.
Your money at work: A $50 donation trains two women in Nepal in sustainable-farming methods, such as seed saving and composting.
Save the Children
The mission: To eliminate the most dire problems—poverty, disease, illiteracy, and hunger—that children face in the United States and internationally.
Your money at work: A $70 donation provides education to a girl in Afghanistan for one year, paying for a year’s worth of school fees, uniforms, books, and other supplies
Humane Society of the United States
The mission: To care for animals and protect them from cruelty.
Your money at work: A $100 donation provides an abused cat or dog with medical care and shelter while it awaits adoption.
Partners in Health
The mission: To provide health-care services to the poor.
Your money at work: A $120 donation supplies a cholera-treatment site in Haiti with three days’ worth of disinfectant.
Charity: Water
The mission: To ensure that the 800 million people in developing countries have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Your money at work: A $64 donation provides a filter—and therefore clean water—to one Southeast Asian family.
Smithsonian Institution
The mission: To protect and create awareness of the nation’s cultural, historical, and scientific heritage and to conduct pioneering research.
Your money at work: The Smithsonian says donations help keep museum admission free of charge, but it will not release specific donation breakdowns.
Direct Relief International
The mission: To provide medical assistance to international victims of poverty, natural disasters, and civil unrest.
Your money at work: A $250 donation provides equipment and supplies for a midwife to safely deliver 10 babies in a war-torn region of Africa.
