Environment leads in Give!Local donations

Posted on by Jeff Fobes

If dollars were votes, the environment would be the winner at the halfway point in this year’s Give!Local campaign — in large measure due to strong outreach efforts by The Collider and Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Mountain Xpress is sponsoring Give!Local, a two-month, end-of-year giving campaign that allows local WNC residents to donate to any of 37 locally focused nonprofits via one wesite. One hundred percent of all donated funds go to the designated nonprofits.

However, no matter where donors opt to target their Give!Local donation — the environment, kids, community, animals, arts or social justice — they’re arguably all voting to make WNC a better place to live, says Give!Local Director Susan Hutchinson.

“When you donate through the GiveLocalGuide.org platform, you don’t just give — you also get,” Hutchinson adds. “For a $20 donation (or more), Mountain Xpress will send you a book of vouchers for things like tacos, pizza and ice cream,” she explains. Donors giving $250 or more, receive an additional set of gift certificates and vouchers for area businesses. Or vouchers can be sent to donors’ friends or relatives as gifts.

And a note to next week’s donors: People giving during Big Give Week, which starts Dec. 3, will be entered in a drawing for an assortment goods and services from area businesses.

Give Week Dec3-9

SHARE

Thanks for reading through to the end…

We share your inclination to get the whole story. For the past 25 years, Xpress has been committed to in-depth, balanced reporting about the greater Asheville area. We want everyone to have access to our stories. That’s a big part of why we've never charged for the paper or put up a paywall.

We’re pretty sure that you know journalism faces big challenges these days. Advertising no longer pays the whole cost. Media outlets around the country are asking their readers to chip in. Xpress needs help, too. We hope you’ll consider signing up to be a member of Xpress. For as little as $5 a month — the cost of a craft beer or kombucha — you can help keep local journalism strong. It only takes a moment.

About Jeff Fobes
As a long-time proponent of media for social change, my early activities included coordinating the creation of a small community FM radio station to serve a poor section of St. Louis, Mo. In the 1980s I served as the editor of the "futurist" newsletter of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, a professional/academic group with a global focus and a mandate to act locally. During that time, I was impressed by a journalism experiment in Mississippi, in which a newspaper reporter spent a year in a small town covering how global activities impacted local events (e.g., literacy programs in Asia drove up the price of pulpwood; soybean demand in China impacted local soybean prices). Taking a cue from the Mississippi journalism experiment, I offered to help the local Green Party in western North Carolina start its own newspaper, which published under the name Green Line. Eventually the local party turned Green Line over to me, giving Asheville-area readers an independent, locally focused news source that was driven by global concerns. Over the years the monthly grew, until it morphed into the weekly Mountain Xpress in 1994. I've been its publisher since the beginning. Mountain Xpress' mission is to promote grassroots democracy (of any political persuasion) by serving the area's most active, thoughtful readers. Consider Xpress as an experiment to see if such a media operation can promote a healthy, democratic and wise community. In addition to print, today's rapidly evolving Web technosphere offers a grand opportunity to see how an interactive global information network impacts a local community when the network includes a locally focused media outlet whose aim is promote thoughtful citizen activism. Follow me @fobes
View all posts by Jeff Fobes →

Before you comment

The comments section is here to provide a platform for civil dialogue on the issues we face together as a local community. Xpress is committed to offering this platform for all voices, but when the tone of the discussion gets nasty or strays off topic, we believe many people choose not to participate. Xpress editors are determined to moderate comments to ensure a constructive interchange is maintained. All comments judged not to be in keeping with the spirit of civil discourse will be removed and repeat violators will be banned. See here for our terms of service. Thank you for being part of this effort to promote respectful discussion.

2 thoughts on “Environment leads in Give!Local donations”

  1. Alan Ditmore

    This is why contraception funding should be part of environment rather than health care, which didn’t even make the giving list. Really contraception should be ALL of environmental giving, not just part, since the rest is useless to the environment.

  2. Alan Ditmore

    Helpmate, Out Voice, WNCAP and Verner all might do contraception and if so, would be inadvertently doing far more for the environment than any of the environmental charities are doing on purpose.

Leave a Reply

To leave a reply you may Login with your Mountain Xpress account, connect socially or enter your name and e-mail. Your e-mail address will not be published. All fields are required.