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NY Arts Magazine encourages its readers to donate this holiday season. The following charities need you help!
On Christmas day, 1911, Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, went out for a walk after a big turkey dinner and encountered a shabbily dressed man on the street. The man said he had just been given Christmas dinner at a Y.M.C.A. and had nowhere to sleep. The publisher looked him over, decided he looked respectable and gave him a few dollars and his card. “If you’re looking for a job,” he said, “come see me tomorrow.”
The encounter left the publisher thinking about out charity. Helping a stranger had given him a sense of satisfaction, and he wondered if one man’s feeling might be the basis for a city’s goodwill. The next year, he sent a reporter to several of the city’s private welfare agencies to collect stories about the poor. He had a plan: to publish stories about the Hundred Neediest Cases in New York. The appeal would be made not with a direct request for money but with the facts of their lives. These small chronicles, it turned out, sounded a powerful call.
The campaign began December 15, 1912. Soon other publishers in the United States and abroad adopted the idea that a newspaper could make a general appeal for the poor and thus help established welfare agencies solicit funds. Each year, more New York Times readers sent in more money. In 1912, 117 contributors sent in $3,630.88. In 2009-2010, 10,428 readers contributed $6.2 million. All told, the fund has raised over $250 million in its 99 years.
International Committee of the Red Cross
The work of the ICRC is based on the Geneva Conventions of 1949, their Additional Protocols, its Statutes – and those of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement – and the resolutions of the International Conferences of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. The ICRC is an independent, neutral organization ensuring humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of war and armed violence. It takes action in response to emergencies and at the same time promotes respect for international humanitarian law and its implementation in national law.Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971.
Today, MSF provides aid in nearly 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters. MSF provides independent, impartial assistance to those most in need. MSF reserves the right to speak out to bring attention to neglected crises, to challenge inadequacies or abuse of the aid system, and to advocate for improved medical treatments and protocols.
