Sunday, August 13, 2017
Got unwanted paper calendars? Donate them to prison book programs!
Thursday, July 13, 2017
#GIVEASUIT, Change a Life: Men's Wearhouse July clothing drive!
It's become an annual tradition with me: shortly after I install and turn on the air conditioner, I do at least a little rearranging and a whole lot of closet cleaning. 'Tis the season.
Knowing that a) I've been wanting to buy a new suit, and b) that I had an ill-fitting old one I was willing to part with, a Men's Wearhouse advert caught my attention over the weekend, highlighting that July would be their tenth annual charity National Suit Drive. What timing!
In addition to suits, all 750+ of the chain's locations across the country will be accepting the following gently-used office-friendly articles of clothing until the end of the month:
- Suits
Yup, you read that right: MEN's Wearhouse is also accepting women's clothing!
All of the items gathered will be sorted based on quality and then distributed based on need to about 170 non-profits nationwide, each of which help provide people with the skills to transition into the workforce.
As they state in their press release about the campaign:
"Wearing the right suit not only enhances your outer appearance, it boosts your mindset as well," said Joseph Abboud, award-winning designer and Chief Creative Director of Tailored Brands, Inc. "That's what the National Suit Drive is about – helping people get that boost to feel their best, secure the job, and fulfill their dreams."
After doing a thorough browse through my closet and armoire, I've decided to part with one suit, one pair of dress shoes, four shirts, sixteen ties, and a belt. That's twenty-three toward their goal of 275,000 items. Maybe you can help continue the countdown from 274,977?
On top of the warm and fuzzies you'll get from knowing that your spiffy threads might help someone in need get a foothold in the working world, you'll also receive a coupon good for 50% off your next regularly priced purchase (with some restrictions, of course) from the Wearhouse. I wonder where I'm buying that new suit I've been thinking about?
Over the next few weeks, I hope you'll take some time to scan your own wardrobe for any unwanted professional duds that you might be able to donate. If you do, they're asking you to help spread the word by tagging @menswearhouse and using the hashtag #giveasuit.
As always, thanks for reading--and for all the little things you do to help change the world!
Knowing that a) I've been wanting to buy a new suit, and b) that I had an ill-fitting old one I was willing to part with, a Men's Wearhouse advert caught my attention over the weekend, highlighting that July would be their tenth annual charity National Suit Drive. What timing!
In addition to suits, all 750+ of the chain's locations across the country will be accepting the following gently-used office-friendly articles of clothing until the end of the month:
- Suits
- Vests
- Sweaters
- Sport Coats
- Dress Shirts
- Dress Shoes
- Casual Pants
- Ties + Accessories
- Jackets + Outerwear
- Women's Professional Attire
- Jackets + Outerwear
- Women's Professional Attire
Yup, you read that right: MEN's Wearhouse is also accepting women's clothing!
As they state in their press release about the campaign:
"Wearing the right suit not only enhances your outer appearance, it boosts your mindset as well," said Joseph Abboud, award-winning designer and Chief Creative Director of Tailored Brands, Inc. "That's what the National Suit Drive is about – helping people get that boost to feel their best, secure the job, and fulfill their dreams."
After doing a thorough browse through my closet and armoire, I've decided to part with one suit, one pair of dress shoes, four shirts, sixteen ties, and a belt. That's twenty-three toward their goal of 275,000 items. Maybe you can help continue the countdown from 274,977?
Over the next few weeks, I hope you'll take some time to scan your own wardrobe for any unwanted professional duds that you might be able to donate. If you do, they're asking you to help spread the word by tagging @menswearhouse and using the hashtag #giveasuit.
As always, thanks for reading--and for all the little things you do to help change the world!
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Put your school on top by putting Box Tops in your school!
Recently, after devouring my almost-daily can of Progresso minestrone soup* (over a bed of home cooked brown rice**), I performed my usual cleanup drill:
- Clip Box Top for Education from soup label
- Chuckle that a "box top" is on a "can side"
- Deposit Box Top into baggy on cork board
That's when I noticed that there was barely any room left in the bag, because it's been just over two years since I last tallied up those tiny coupons and put them into not-quite-as-tiny hands for educational use!
Quick background for any of you who've never noticed--let alone clipped--those colorful little pieces of packaging: for over twenty years, participating products in the Box Tops for Education program have encouraged their customers to save them and turn them in to their local public schools, which can exchange them for ten cents value in a catalog of educational and recreational supplies.
This is similar to the much older Campbell's Labels for Education program, which I was saddened to learn is in the process of closing up shop after more than forty years (at least that explains why I haven't been seeing them on products over the past few months). This is the message from their website which broke the bad news.
Anyway, back to the Box Tops: the nephew mentioned in the blog post linked above has since turned into a big, strapping middle school lad, but fortunately there's another young fella who calls me "Uncle," whose school is in the midst of a competition to see which classroom can box out all the others to become the top of the Box Tops heap.
Since I'm curious, I'm weird, and I like math, I had to count up and photograph my accumulated ducats. This is what $18.90 worth of FREE educational funding looks like.
Hopefully, one of those little tokens will be what edges Mrs. Sherman's first grade class into first place, resulting in pizza for my nephew Sam and all of his classmates!
Hey, speaking of pizza, that's one of the many edibles (and non-edibles) you can buy which are emblazoned with a Box Top worth a free dime for your favorite school. You can see the full list here, including a huge number of products from brands like Totino's, Annie's, Betty Crocker, Green Giant, Progresso, Old El Paso, Land O Lakes, Kleenex, Lysol, Hefty, Ziploc, and many more.
The grand tally of school funding that has resulted from the Box Tops program currently stands at over $719 million dollars. How amazing is that?!
Even if you don't have kids of your own, I'm sure there's a relative, neighbor, or coworker whose child would love for you to pass yours along, or a school in your area that would welcome your donation, so I sincerely encourage you save yours going forward.
In a shameful age where so many schoolteachers spend their own hard-earned money on supplies for their students (and many lawmakers want to keep cutting education funding), this is a free and easy way to help ease the burden on your local school. Just a little change in your routine can help make a big change in the world!
* [Full disclosure: this is NOT a sponsored post, but if the fine people at Progresso want to give me some cash and/or free soup, I'd be glad to amend this Editor's*** Note to reflect that it has become one. - Ed.]
** [I will also gladly accept free brown rice. - Ed.]
*** [The editor of this blog is also the author of this blog. - Ed./Auth.]
- Wash bowl and spoon
- Rinse and recycle can
That's when I noticed that there was barely any room left in the bag, because it's been just over two years since I last tallied up those tiny coupons and put them into not-quite-as-tiny hands for educational use!
Quick background for any of you who've never noticed--let alone clipped--those colorful little pieces of packaging: for over twenty years, participating products in the Box Tops for Education program have encouraged their customers to save them and turn them in to their local public schools, which can exchange them for ten cents value in a catalog of educational and recreational supplies.
This is similar to the much older Campbell's Labels for Education program, which I was saddened to learn is in the process of closing up shop after more than forty years (at least that explains why I haven't been seeing them on products over the past few months). This is the message from their website which broke the bad news.
Anyway, back to the Box Tops: the nephew mentioned in the blog post linked above has since turned into a big, strapping middle school lad, but fortunately there's another young fella who calls me "Uncle," whose school is in the midst of a competition to see which classroom can box out all the others to become the top of the Box Tops heap.
Since I'm curious, I'm weird, and I like math, I had to count up and photograph my accumulated ducats. This is what $18.90 worth of FREE educational funding looks like.
Hopefully, one of those little tokens will be what edges Mrs. Sherman's first grade class into first place, resulting in pizza for my nephew Sam and all of his classmates!
Hey, speaking of pizza, that's one of the many edibles (and non-edibles) you can buy which are emblazoned with a Box Top worth a free dime for your favorite school. You can see the full list here, including a huge number of products from brands like Totino's, Annie's, Betty Crocker, Green Giant, Progresso, Old El Paso, Land O Lakes, Kleenex, Lysol, Hefty, Ziploc, and many more.
The grand tally of school funding that has resulted from the Box Tops program currently stands at over $719 million dollars. How amazing is that?!
Even if you don't have kids of your own, I'm sure there's a relative, neighbor, or coworker whose child would love for you to pass yours along, or a school in your area that would welcome your donation, so I sincerely encourage you save yours going forward.
In a shameful age where so many schoolteachers spend their own hard-earned money on supplies for their students (and many lawmakers want to keep cutting education funding), this is a free and easy way to help ease the burden on your local school. Just a little change in your routine can help make a big change in the world!
* [Full disclosure: this is NOT a sponsored post, but if the fine people at Progresso want to give me some cash and/or free soup, I'd be glad to amend this Editor's*** Note to reflect that it has become one. - Ed.]
** [I will also gladly accept free brown rice. - Ed.]
*** [The editor of this blog is also the author of this blog. - Ed./Auth.]
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Instead of a Bouquet for Your Sweetie, Donate Live Flowers in Their Honor!
I've personally never understood the allure of cut flowers. Aside from epitomizing the veritable sin of cutting down beauty in its prime, they last at best about a week before decay sets in and they get tossed in the trash bin (or, hopefully, the compost heap).
Don't you think that giving a gift of living plant life is more romantic than recently deceased plant life? Me too!
That's why I hope that this Valentine's Day, you'll skip the overpriced corpse flowers and invest in a living, breathing, carbon dioxide-eating floral array that you can visit time and again in your local park or greenspace!
The superb group New Yorkers for Parks has been a champion of public parks and other open spaces for more than a century, and one of their most recognizable programs is the Daffodil Project, which has planted more than six million bulbs throughout the five boroughs since 2001 (500,000 last year alone).
I'll bet your sweetie would be thrilled if you added to that number in their honor this Valentine's Day. Click here to sponsor a set of bulbs for your loved one (or for yourself, if you're a swinging single).
Plus, daffodils are perennials, so instead of flowers that will wilt and fade in a few days' time, these beauties will sprout year after year in public spaces all around New York City: a proper expression of your everlasting love!
I hope you all have a terrific Valentine's Day, and as always, I thank you for all the little things you do to change the world.
Don't you think that giving a gift of living plant life is more romantic than recently deceased plant life? Me too!
Photo credit: New Yorkers for Parks
That's why I hope that this Valentine's Day, you'll skip the overpriced corpse flowers and invest in a living, breathing, carbon dioxide-eating floral array that you can visit time and again in your local park or greenspace!
The superb group New Yorkers for Parks has been a champion of public parks and other open spaces for more than a century, and one of their most recognizable programs is the Daffodil Project, which has planted more than six million bulbs throughout the five boroughs since 2001 (500,000 last year alone).
I'll bet your sweetie would be thrilled if you added to that number in their honor this Valentine's Day. Click here to sponsor a set of bulbs for your loved one (or for yourself, if you're a swinging single).
Photo credit: New Yorkers for Parks
Plus, daffodils are perennials, so instead of flowers that will wilt and fade in a few days' time, these beauties will sprout year after year in public spaces all around New York City: a proper expression of your everlasting love!
I hope you all have a terrific Valentine's Day, and as always, I thank you for all the little things you do to change the world.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Sean McGrath Fund announces Sean's birthday memorial grant recipients
Today, on what would have been Sean's
41st birthday, the Sean McGrath Fund is happy to announce our newest
round of grants: $500 each to International Rescue Committee and to
HiTOPS.
IRC has been providing direct relief in
zones of humanitarian crisis for over eighty years, and with the
ongoing demonization of refugees from war-torn countries, their work
certainly isn't getting any easier. We're glad to provide them
financial support for the second time in the Fund's history.
HiTOPS is a youth services agency in
southern New Jersey which provides age-appropriate, medically
accurate sexual health counseling, trans and gay youth support
services, relationship violence prevention, and peer-to-peer harm
reduction education in schools, juvenile detention centers, and other
community groups. This is the record-setting sixth grant they will
have received from the SMcGF.
If you'd like to honor Sean's life and
celebrate his birthday with a donation, it will help us continue
supporting important charities in his memory during this very
unpredictable year and beyond! Visit the site linked below, click the
orange button, and specify "Sean McGrath Fund" as your
designee fund.
Immense thanks for all of your
past--and future--support! We seriously couldn't do any of this
without the generosity of kind friends, family, members of the music
community, and even a few perfect strangers.
Follow our grant recipients on social
media for updates on all of their terrific work:
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
"I Found Some Ones" (plus a 20, a five, and a bunch of coin): the found money charity challenge!
Happy new year, doers of good! *
As I've previously detailed here, for well over a decade I've begun each year by counting up the jar into which I chuck any money I've found throughout the previous year, so as to donate it to the Sean McGrath Fund in January. Here's a little refresher on the Fund for those of you not familiar already (click to enlarge):
Back to the main subject, though: more than a few strangers (and even some friends) look askance at me when I take a knee to scoop up coins or bills on city sidewalks, in store checkout lines, or at subway turnstiles, but this little annual tradition proves that all those random finds add up to something substantial. "Chump" change, my eye!
Speaking of eyes, I tried to "zazz" up the photo of this year's booty by anthropomorphizing it, with admittedly minimal success. Let's call it folk art, yeah? At least we know it's worth something.
If you're bored, try to count up the bills (easy) and coinage (not so much) and make your own guesstimate before scrolling down for this breakdown:
On top of the domestic currency, I found a Canadian dime (worth $0.08), an Aruban dime ($0.06), and a two Euro cent piece ($0.02), as well as seven separate MetroCards (two in one day!) worth $17.09 in subway fare. Add it all up, and that brings this year's grand total to $43.38.
At first I was a little disappointed, since last year's tally was nearly three times that much, but then I looked through the past five blog posts and saw that it's not too out of line with some past years:
So '15 appears to be the outlier...let's just hope the year ahead doesn't mirror the fabled Found Change Crash of '13!
Because the bank will likely send some of these pennies to heaven, I wanted to give them one last moment in the sun. Many of them are so abraded that their dates are obscured, but that guy on the lower left has been hanging around since 1964, with his immediate neighbor minted in my birth year of 1972 (I like to think I've held up slightly better).
Farewell, little Lincolns!
Anyway, now that they check is in the mail for 2016's haul, I present my annual challenge: I beseech all of you to make a matching donation to the Sean McGrath Fund!
Any size of gift is much appreciated, but I'm hoping some of you reading this will embrace the true "matching" nature of the challenge and make a minimum gift of $43.38...but even if you can only afford ten or twenty dollars, your generosity will be genuinely appreciated, and will help us support great causes in the year ahead!
If you'd like to make a donation, hit the orange button on the PACF site and make sure you specify "Sean McGrath Fund" in your note.
Thanks for reading, for donating, and--I hope--for setting aside your own jar for found loot in 2017!
*Also, happy new year to any nefarious types who are just here to check out the opposition.
As I've previously detailed here, for well over a decade I've begun each year by counting up the jar into which I chuck any money I've found throughout the previous year, so as to donate it to the Sean McGrath Fund in January. Here's a little refresher on the Fund for those of you not familiar already (click to enlarge):
Speaking of eyes, I tried to "zazz" up the photo of this year's booty by anthropomorphizing it, with admittedly minimal success. Let's call it folk art, yeah? At least we know it's worth something.
If you're bored, try to count up the bills (easy) and coinage (not so much) and make your own guesstimate before scrolling down for this breakdown:
20.00 x 1 = $20
5.00 x 1 = $5
1.00 x 7 = $7.00
.25 x 20 = $5.00
.10 x 43 = $4.30
.05 x 15 = $0.75
.01 x 268 = $2.68
On top of the domestic currency, I found a Canadian dime (worth $0.08), an Aruban dime ($0.06), and a two Euro cent piece ($0.02), as well as seven separate MetroCards (two in one day!) worth $17.09 in subway fare. Add it all up, and that brings this year's grand total to $43.38.
At first I was a little disappointed, since last year's tally was nearly three times that much, but then I looked through the past five blog posts and saw that it's not too out of line with some past years:
So '15 appears to be the outlier...let's just hope the year ahead doesn't mirror the fabled Found Change Crash of '13!
Because the bank will likely send some of these pennies to heaven, I wanted to give them one last moment in the sun. Many of them are so abraded that their dates are obscured, but that guy on the lower left has been hanging around since 1964, with his immediate neighbor minted in my birth year of 1972 (I like to think I've held up slightly better).
Farewell, little Lincolns!
Anyway, now that they check is in the mail for 2016's haul, I present my annual challenge: I beseech all of you to make a matching donation to the Sean McGrath Fund!
Any size of gift is much appreciated, but I'm hoping some of you reading this will embrace the true "matching" nature of the challenge and make a minimum gift of $43.38...but even if you can only afford ten or twenty dollars, your generosity will be genuinely appreciated, and will help us support great causes in the year ahead!
If you'd like to make a donation, hit the orange button on the PACF site and make sure you specify "Sean McGrath Fund" in your note.
Thanks for reading, for donating, and--I hope--for setting aside your own jar for found loot in 2017!
*Also, happy new year to any nefarious types who are just here to check out the opposition.
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