When I interviewed my mother, she had told me she hadn’t gotten to much into philanthropy. Not because she doesn’t want to, but when growing up she was never very wealthy. She was in a family of 7 children. It was a bit of a struggle for them growing up. Also when becoming a mother at a young age, she was working a lot to maintain the wellness of us. Throughout the years, she has become a member at our church and began donating money to the church that will give it away to others in need. She has been doing this for a couple of years now. She also gives a lot of our clothes that we no longer use and is in good condition and sends it to people in need of them in Mexico. We have been doing this for many years. We give them to family members that are in contact with organizations helping the poor and even orphanages over in Mexico, and other places in need of clothing as well.

I have learned that some organizations are very willing and appealing to people who are interested in taking time to learn about their organization. But there are also some organizations that wont even bother to make contact with you. Both of these actions really show if the organization Is trustworthy or not. We had a fundraiser hosted by me and my group here at Clairemont high school. We had a water war day here at school, teachers vs. students. I thought it went absolutely great. We had many people come out and support. We had math teachers which we knew students would like to throw water ballons at and the teachers ended up getting drenched. It was a great/ fun experience here at our school. Unfortunately, we had to cut the fundraiser off towards the last eight minutes we had left at lunch due to a peer who didn’t want to get wet at the fundraiser. But overall,  we made a good profit that day that will be going towards helping animals very soon! 🙂

Making contact with organizations for me hasn’t been so bad. The organizations I’ve personally got had people that were really interested in answering my questions I had for them. They are extremely informative and really get into detail on what their organization mainly focuses on. I have gotten one organization that I had to call back when they had called me back and unfortunately they had not picked up nor bothered to return the call. It had showed me that they don’t really care on providing information, leaving me to think that they wouldn’t use the money donated to them too wisely. At first I did find evaluating organizations taxes a bit difficult, but I now have the hang of it :).

When taking a look at San Diego’s animal support foundation taxes I learned how with the money that they receive from people donating, they use it to support animal shelters and provide animals basic needs as in food and water. They divide the money given to them based on what and why they are giving it away. It is important to look at where your money is going when you are donating to a charity/organization. They may just be focusing on things they may not be very beneficial to what you wanted to make a difference for in the first place. not every charity/organization may be doing what they say they do, there may be occasions where the workers are getting the most money that is being donated to them. Its important to take a look are tell the charity/organization where you want your money to go.

So far, we have decided on what we will do to begin to raise money for our fundraiser. We are going to all meet up and go to one of our houses and bake many goods to sell. I feel like its going to be so much fun baking all of our goods, and being able to hang out with my group! I think that looking for organizations will go great. I feel like they would be able to answer any questions we have and it should be fairly easy finding our organization we feel would do its best helping animals with the money we plan on donating.