Welcome to 2015, the year of our charity album Shine Together and our Seeds of Kindness program for the Against Malaria Foundation!
No teleportation needed. Since the launch of our fund-raiser in late December, we’ve received donations from smart and empathetic folks in Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Russia, Brazil, Poland, Italy, Spain, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Switzerland, and more—donations from all over the globe! Many thanks to all of you!
Distances are no hurdle anymore for us band together to do good in the world. Thus it’s all the more important today to make sure that we care about the struggles of people in far-off countries as much as we care about the people in our street.
In fact, there are great opportunities for us to help people in some of these countries, opportunities that, luckily, do not exist in Europe or in the US. Malaria is extremely easy to prevent. A mosquito net for just $3 greatly diminishes the risk for a person to contract malaria. Distributing just a few hundred of these nets will save the life of a person like us who would’ve otherwise succumbed to the disease!
Taking proper aim. The Disease Control Priorities Project found that there are differences of up to a factor of 1,000 between interventions in how much suffering they avert with the same donation. This means it’s usually much more important where you give rather than what you give!
The average donation to Seeds of Kindness so far is $40, which funds 13 potentially life-saving mosquito nets. Since we support the Against Malaria Foundation, one of the top cost-effective charities in the world, the suffering this donation can avert is equivalent to that of a donation of $4,000–$40,000 to a less effective charity.
We all have limited resources in time and money. Hence, such highly effective giving opportunities are the best way for us to invest these resources. Don’t save 1 life when you could save 1,000!
Sniping them mosquitoes. 2015 is going to be a big year for the fight against malaria. GiveWell—an organization that constantly looks for the best charities in the world—again recommends the Against Malaria Foundation as one of the four best giving opportunities in the world, and AMF is about to conduct a distribution of 730,000 mosquito nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with four more distributions hopefully launching later this year.
All donations to Seeds of Kindness go directly to AMF, who use them exclusively to buy nets. Donations are tax-deductible in the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe. Each donation will be publicly allocated to a specific distribution, and extensive distribution and follow-up reports will be published online.
For further motivation why you should donate to AMF, here a TED talk by Peter Singer and a TEDx talk by Toby Ord, explaining effective altruism.
All with musical accompaniment. The musicians who have opted to support his life-saving intervention have pooled their artistic talent in Shine Together, our Seeds of Kindness album for 2015. It features twenty-two tracks of folk, rock, alternative postrock, orchestral, and electronic jams recorded by our charity album veterans and new blood alike—over an hour of uplifting tunes in total.
To download the album, either donate directly to Seeds of Kindness or, if you can’t for whatever reason, pledge that you will. We trust that you know the necessity for alleviating the terrible suffering in the world, and we expect that Shine Together will make a significant positive impact—because every life saved is significant!
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