During one half year of my life, I volunteered to help latchkey kids learn to read at a local church for a program called Kids' Place. The program, invented by my minister mother and run by wide-eyed college students with dreams of changing the world one person at a time, does a great job teaching children how to interact, how to be better at school and how not to fall into the pit of desperation and despair that impoverished children with drug addicted, absentee parents often fall into. It's a cool program.
Of the seventeen volunteers there, I was one of three men. One was an octogenarian named Ollie who was of the generation that believed in community spirit. The other was a kid who grew up in the city and went through the Kids' Place program and therefore saw its validity and importance. The other was me, a half-drunk unemployed kid fresh out of college who was having trouble filling the hours. Men, as a rule, are not big volunteerers (I just made that word up). So the kids responded to us more than the women. They see female authority figures everywhere. They barely see men anywhere.
Now I ain't the kind of guy who's big on saving lives and helping people but well, I think it's kind of asshole-ish to disrespect those who do. And most charities and not for profit organizations are full of crap. They only have to (by law) spend sixty percent of their profits helping people and can spend the rest on company cars, bonuses and what not. The Red Cross, for example, is a resource-wasting communist organization that throws excessive money at its executives. It is very rare that any organization, even those who tout being not for profit, are actually not for profit.
Every dime they make goes to those kids. Every helper with the exception of the program director is a volunteer (note: I have been informed they can now afford to pay a few teachers as well). When they have extra money, the kids eat better food, get better books, etc. This is a program run in one community by members of that community for the overall benefit of said community.
Now, why am I bugging you with this?
Well, for a little over a year now, I have been donating to Kid's Place. But my current financial situation prohibits me from tossing money at needy children, which kind of sucks.
But hopefully you're doing better than that.
Because I cannot afford to donate to Kids' Place, I am asking you to. You can call them at 314-863-8055 or you can email them at donate@kidsplace-stl.org. You can do it because you read me for free and you want to pay me back, you can do it for my mother because she fought a male-oriented system for the right to help people, you can do it to help out the poorest kids of University City or you can do it for no reason whatsoever.
I don't really care why you do it just so long as you do.
And because I want you to get something out of this, here's what I promise you: Every one of you who donates $25 or more and mentions either my name or the name of this site will receive an autographed picture of me (or if you want, an autographed picture of my naked ass).
I thank you in advance for being an awesome group of people.