Last days to give to Give!Local nonprofits

Posted on by Jeff Fobes
Anyone giving $20 or more to Give!Local nonprofits will receive a coupon book for free stuff like a free slice of pizza from Barley’s, a coffee from Izzy’s, a bag of cookies from Zuma and a taco from Sonora Cocina Mexicana.

Those wishing to help Give!Local nonprofits need to do so by midnight Dec. 31. Donors can choose any of 37 local nonprofits and give any amount, from $1 on up, doing so with just one online transaction at givelocalguide.org. The 37 nonprofits are organized according to their areas of focus: community, youth, animals, arts, environment, social justice.

Adding zest to the campaign’s final days, all donors who give between Dec. 19 and the end of the year are being entered to win one of three $50 gift certificates from Zappers Pizza.

With Give!Local donations currently hovering at $90,000, this year’s campaign will be providing substantial aid to participating nonprofits, especially since every penny donated goes to the nonprofits. Even the credit card transaction fees are being covered by Mountain Xpress and Give!Local advertisers! This year’s giving is now more than 50 percent higher than last year, counting donations and matching funds, according to Give!Local Director Susan Hutchinson.

Want to help with or be a part of next year’s Give!Local?

Numerous nonprofits are already asking about participating in next year’s campaign, according to Hutchinson. The application form for the 2018 program is now available online at forms.mountainx.com/give-local-2018/

For local businesses interested in learning about sponsoring, advertising, donating to or otherwise taking part in next year’s Give!Local campaign, please email givelocal@mountainx.com

The Give!Local project is designed to facilitate end-of-year giving, generate new donors and provide publicity for a select group of local nonprofits. “We’ve found we need at least 35 nonprofits to make the project robust, but we need to limit the group to 50 or less to keep the project manageable,” Hutchinson says. “We also make sure we include big, medium and little nonprofits, and that they focus on different sectors, such as the arts, environment, animals or social justice.”

“Naturally, we hope Give!Local will be a huge benefit for the nonprofits, but it should also help the local business community. We love doing Give!Local each year. It fits perfectly with Mountain Xpress’ mission of building community from the grassroots up,” Hutchinson says.

 

 

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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
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