(This post was updated at 9:33 a.m. on Tuesday with yet another way to give.)
Black Friday is gone. Cyber Monday is almost over. Time to put the pocketbook away? Almost! But not before Giving Tuesday tomorrow.
What’s Giving Tuesday? It’s sort of like the charitable equivalent of your average consumerist holiday spending spree. Held on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, the event is meant to kick off the charitable season for nonprofits across the globe.
Cool, but how do I donate? There are plenty of national charities you can donate to, many of which are mentioned on the Giving Tuesday website. Additionally, there are tons of local good causes worth supporting. Here are 13 ways to give back without leaving your neighborhood:
- Attend a Collective Action For Safe Spaces happy hour at Right Proper Brewing (624 T St NW). The happy hour will help support the organization’s safe bars program.
- Contribute to the Sitar Arts Center. Each donation will be matched one-for-one up to $1,000 by the Wise Owl Club.
- Buy shoes and dance classes for kids at the Dance Institute of Washington.
- Give to the D.C. Center for the LGBTQ Community.
- Help beautify the Dupont Circle neighborhood by contributing to Dupont Circle Main Streets.
- Kids need to read and write real good. Help ’em do that at 826DC.
- Donate to Green Door, a program that “prepares women and men with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses to work, live and thrive in the District of Columbia.”
- Help The Starfish Foundation educate 150 at-risk youth in Guayaquil, Ecuador by buying drinks at Johnny Pistolas (2333 18th St. NW) in Adams Morgan.
- Give to Martha’s Table or Bread for the City to help feed the hungry.
- 86 cents of every donation to Thrive D.C. goes toward helping the homeless.
- Seasonal food hub Common Good City Farm accepts donations year-round.
- Columbia Heights performance and art nonprofit BloomBars is entirely community-funded.
- Ride a bike near Dupont Circle in honor of World AIDS Day tomorrow and help donate to Whitman-Walker.
- Help families with SNAP access fresh fruits and veggies by donating to the Columbia Heights Farmers Market Bonus Bucks campaign.
- Through the Heart, a nonprofit dedicated to pregnancy loss support and education, is also accepting donations.
Photo courtesy of Giving Tuesday
Visitors to the 14th Street corridor will be steps away from reading and writing workshops hosted by members of the local LGBT writing community this weekend.
The fifth annual OutWrite Book Festival starts with a keynote speech from celebrated novelist James Earl Hardy tomorrow evening. Hardy will speak about his book series “B-Boy Blues” at the D.C. Center (2000 14th Street NW) from 6-9 p.m.
The festival will then host 37 vendors, workshops and authors from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. the following day.
David Mariner, Executive Director for the D.C. Center, says the festival’s exhibitors and speakers were selected by their interest or involvement within the LGBT community.
“While some LGBT voices are not kind of represented in mainstream media, those things are still few and far between and don’t necessarily reflect the diversity that’s within D.C.’s LGBT community,” Mariner says. “We have a wide variety of folks telling their stories. It’s a way to affirm and celebrate who we are.”
Outwrite will coincide with another popular 14th and U street festival, MidCity Dog Days.
But Mariner says that’s purposeful. He adds that he hopes Dog Days attendees will visit the book festival and that visiting LGBT publishing companies and authors will visit the surrounding neighborhood.
The book festival is free and open to the public. Used books will also be sold on site; paperbacks will cost $1 and hardbacks will cost $2.
Image via Facebook.com/OutWriteDC
From Cody Telep. Follow him on Twitter @codywt, email him at cody[AT]borderstan.com.
The man who allegedly shot a security guard Wednesday morning at the Family Research Council (FRC) headquarters volunteered for The DC Center for the LGBT Community for the past six months, according to reports from BuzzFeed and other sources, including NBC-4 TV. FRC is at 8th and G Streets NW.
The shooting occurred at about 10:45 am at 801 G Street NW when the suspect entered the FRC’s headquarters and argued with a guard before shooting him in the arm. The suspect was tackled and the guard’s injuries were not life threatening, according to reports.
The suspect has been identified as Floyd Corkins II, a 28-year-old man from Herndon, VA, and is in FBI custody. He has been volunteering some weekends at the front desk of The DC Center at 1318 U Street NW, according to Executive Director David Mariner in a Huffington Post report.
The mission of The DC Center is to “celebrate, strengthen, and support community among the LGBT residents and organizations of Metropolitan Washington, DC.” The FRC is committed to “advancing faith, family and freedom” according to its website, and advocates for a definition of marriage as “a union of one man and one woman.”
For more information on Wednesday morning’s event at the FRC, read the articles on the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and the NBC-4 website.
