Little Ways to Help Yourself and the World Each Day

You may have noticed the addition of a “change the world” section in my links bar over there to the right, with some fancy new banners there.  I don’t want to clutter my list-o-links (which is already a bit long), but I found some important and fun things that anyone with internet can do each and every day to help the world….and yourself!

All of the following seem a bit too good to be true, but a quick glance at their FAQs shows that all the money they get to donate things comes from ad revenue, which pays by the number of views.

• Free Rice (freerice.com) is a vocabulary-building test where, for every answer you get right, they donate a certain amount of rice to countries that need it.  Developed by a man who was helping his son study vocabulary for the S.A.T., the same guy who invented the Hunger Site.  He supposedly entered in all of the definitions by hand.
• Free Poverty (freepoverty.com) does not donate poverty (as its name would lead you to believe), but clean drinking water.  The method?  A geography quiz, where you have to click on the location of different cities around the world, and your accuracy determines the number of cups donated.  So not only are you helping other countries, you’re helping yourself learn where they are!
• The Hunger Site, Rainforest Site, Breast Cancer Site, Child Health Site, Literacy Site, and Animal Rescue Site (all are located on tabs at thehungersite.com) were all invented by the same people who made the Free Rice game.  These are not games, but a click button that takes you to a page of ads (but they’re not annoying pop-ups or anything like that).  Clicking once a day helps generate ad revenue for the sites, which is donated to their respective charities.