Need Charity Suggestions guys!

[Ravenlunasong aka GuerillaStar]

Hey y'all!

I've missed talking to everyone here sooo much! C'mon you guys, let's get this placeup and active again!

Anywho, I need to ask you guys for some help.

A couple years back, I did a project in honour of the music group Il Divo. They're my fave group and I was on their forum and got a message from a woman on the site who'd seen that I'm very interested in charity work, asking if I wanted to help her with a project she was planning to help a charity in honour of the group.

Basically, what we did was to contact as many people as we could through Private Messaging on the site, as we weren't allowed to publicly request help for charities that weren't officially endorsed by the group on the site. We asked them if they would be interested in donating to our chosen recipient, St Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, and also gave each donor the chance to include a message in a set of handmade books I put together for the group to wish them a Merry Christmas.

In the end, we got over 100 messages (a lot of people didn't submit messages, just donated) and managed to raise well over $3,000 for the hospital.

It was such a big success, and everyone, donors, myself and the original planner, enjoyed it so much, that we've decided to do a similar thing again, 'just because', rather than for Christmas.

This year though, we'd like to pick a different charity, so that we can give another one the chance to benefit, and that's where you guys come in. We need suggestions of charities to give the money to, and are drawing a blank. It's one of those situations where you hear names all the time but can't think of any when you want to!

What we're looking for is basically charities, organisations, or essentially any needy group that you know of that *doesn't* get the media attention it deserves or needs. In other words, while I know groups like Oxfam, the Red Cross etc need money, they get a lot of publicity and thus lots of donations, at the expense of other groups who aren't able to spend money on publicity. The only other criteria, as far as we see it at the moment, is that we're looking for human-oriented groups, meaning ones aimed at helping humans. This is because, while we do know of the need to help animals, Il Divo support charities for Third World aid, especially for children (one of the members is a patron for Assistance Medicale Toit du Monde) and we have a number of members on the forum suffering from terminal illnesses, so for both reasons, we have personal reasons to make it a human-oriented aim.

Besides that, anything's open, so put yer thinking caps on guys! We'll be starting to publicize it on the forum around Christmas and hopefully starting donations in the New Year so we need to come up with something before then :)

Thanks all!

Nikki/ Star
xxx