Lost money...for a good cause: the ninth annual found money charity report!

Cash. It makes the world go 'round. 

Even though the Federal Reserve reports that cash usage is on a steady decline, it's still the method for 26% of payments in total, 35% of in-person payments, and 49% of payments under $10.

Inevitably, when transacting with paper bills or coins--or just carrying them around--there are bits and pieces that end up on the floor, on the ground, or lost in the seams of your sofa.

For many years, I've made it my mission to reclaim this random moolah, set it aside, and tabulate it at the beginning of the new year so I can donate the total amount to my preferred charity.

This is the ninth year that I've been posting the results here, and encouraging friends and family to make a matching gift to the Sean McGrath Fund at Princeton Area Community Foundation, which I co-founded in memory of a dear friend and colleague, and which has given almost $50,000 in grants to a wonderful array of health and humanitarian nonprofits over the past fifteen years.

Let's start with the tally of good ol' American dollars and cents that I rescued from sidewalks, store floors, Amtrak stations, airports, subway cars, and taxi cabs throughout the year (209 separate pieces):

5.00 x 1 = $5.00

1.00 x 2 (paper) = $2.00
1.00 x 3 (coin) = $3.00

.25 x 11 = $2.75

.10 x 29 = $2.90

.05 x 12 = $0.60

.01 x 151 - $1.51

That comes to a very American $17.76 of U.S. currency!

But then there's also foreign currency, of which I found six different varieties last year, listed here alongside their U.S. exchange rates on New Year's Day:

11 Euro cents = $0.12

1 Israeli sheqel = $0.29

1 Barbados cent = $0.0049

50 UK pence = $0.665

5 Canadian dollars = $3.85

33.5 Turkish lira = $5.63

Since the Barbados penny is worth less than half a penny, but the 50p coin from the British isles is technically worth 66 and a half pennies, I'm combining them to throw a full $0.01 into the mix.

Now for a non-cash way to find money...

If you've been to New York City, you've probably purchased and used a MetroCard to pay for your subway rides...and noticed that the cards litter the train stations and nearby sidewalks once they've been discarded. 

Some of those discards still have a little bit of value, which is easily transferred to any other pay-as-you-go MetroCard, so I always check the balance on random cards I run across (especially if they're not actually near a subway station, which sometimes means somebody lost a full value card). 

This year's MetroCard value hunt was less fruitful than usual, with only two cards that had remaining value, contributing $1.42 to the tally...

...which brings the grand total for 2019 to $25.34, on par with 2017's number, but a steep decline from 2018's haul.

Here's a historical perspective, with links to each year's blog posts containing the requisite breakdowns:

2011 - $49.23       2012 - $45.65       2013 - $17.55       2014 - $63.13
2015 - $113.51     2016 - $43.38       2017 - $23.58       2018 - $69.31

While $25.34 is not an astounding number, I still think it's a pretty impressive sum, averaging almost fifty cents each week of the year (about seven cents per day). And for the nonprofits who receive grants from the Sean McGrath Fund, those twenty-five bucks will be very much appreciated!

Now here's where you come in: I hope you'll join me by pitching in some of your own dough with a matching donation of $25.34 (or more) to help the Fund continue giving grants to great organizations in the coming year. 

All you have to do to make your donation is click the fourth button on the PACF site ("Support a specific fund") and make sure you specify "Sean McGrath Fund" in the notes section.

I also welcome you to join me in tracking your own found money this year and donating it to your favorite charity at the dawn of 2020! I'd love to hear about your own results next year.

Thank you for reading, for donating, and for all the little things you do to help change the world!

Why haven't I had a haircut since May 1 of last year? So I could ask for your help fighting pediatric cancers!

Hey buddies,

As you’ve surely noticed, I’ve been sporting an increasingly unruly mane over the past twelve months. As of today, I haven’t had a haircut in one full calendar year.

That all ends on Monday, May 13, when I will be shaving it off as part of a “Brave the Shave” event in Manchester, Vermont, benefiting the St. Baldrick’s Foundation for pediatric cancer research. I hope I can count on your sponsorship!

According to the American Cancer Society, over 10,000 children under the age of 15 are diagnosed with cancer each year, and troublingly, that number has been on the rise in recent decades.

We only have the medical know-how to cure 80% of those kids, though: about 2,000 won’t pull through…like the “St. Baldrick’s Kid” I’m honoring on my page, Cameron Fahey, a Chicago teenager who shared my passions for punk rock, politics, and pro-social action, but ultimately lost his battle with lymphoma in 2014.

I can’t fathom what it’s like for a parent to hear that their child has cancer, let alone to lose them to it; even the thought of one of my nephews getting diagnosed makes my blood run cold.

It makes me want to do something to help prevent another family having to go through that horror. And growing hair is one thing that I do pretty damn well.

You might not know — I didn’t myself until recently — that most childhood cancers develop differently than adult cancers, requiring an entirely separate field of scientific research.

Currently, childhood cancer research only receives 4% of federal cancer research funding. That's not a typo: just four percent goes to pediatric research!

The St. Baldrick's Foundation funds cooperative research through the Children’s Oncology Group, to the tune of $19 million in 2018. That's impressive, but still not even two-thirds of the $30.1 million in promising research that they would have liked to underwrite.

With your generous help, hopefully we can get them closer to being able to fund every penny in 2019!

I’ve set the lofty goal of raising $2000 for this event, but think of how quickly I could meet that goal if just twenty people donated $100 each…or if forty people were willing to part with $50…or if eighty people threw in just $25!

But even a bunch of small dollar donations help fund the fight, so I hope you’ll hit up my donation page and spend whatever you can. Remember, you’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for the kids.

Thank you so much for reading this, and hopefully for taking action to help fund this important, life-saving research. It genuinely means a lot to me!

Hirsutely yours,

Bruce McD.

https://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/BruceMcD

-- 

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

"Finders keepers?" No, Finders GIVERS: 2018's Found Money Charity Report!

Unless you live a strictly cashless life, you've probably got a small jar or jug (maybe even an actual actual piggy bank) where you chuck your pocket change at the end of the day. If, like me, you rely on coin-operated laundry machines, you probably have two: one for quarters, and one for the rest.

I, on the other hand, have three: for the past twenty-odd years I've kept an additional receptacle, dedicated entirely to money that I unexpectedly come across while stumbling my way through life, which I tabulate at the dawn of the new year and donate to charity.

Since 2011, I've been posting the results here, and encouraging friends and family to make a matching donation to the Sean McGrath Fund at Princeton Area Community Foundation, a memorial that I co-founded, and which has distributed nearly $50,000 to a wide range of health and humanitarian nonprofits over the past fifteen years. 

This year I'm making a found money donation of $69.31--and hoping you will do the same (see donation details below)!

So how did I come across almost seventy free bucks this year? Found money comes in a several varieties, but let's start with the obvious; actual U.S. currency that I plucked from sidewalks, subway platforms, and floors throughout the year, 231 pieces in all:

10.00 x 1 = $10.00

1.00 x 2 = $2.00

.25 x 9 = $2.25

.10 x 29 = $2.90

.05 x 20 = $1.00

.01 x 170 - $1.70

There's also foreign currency, which I used to find quite frequently here in New York City, but which has been pretty rare the past few years. In years past, I've come across moolah from over a dozen countries, but all I found this year was a five Euro piece (worth $0.06). However, that's an improvement over the previous year, when found bupkes (which, in case you're unfamiliar with Yiddish, isn't a currency; it's an expression).

Another common way to come across lost dollars and cents in NYC is by unlocking the value of forfeited MetroCards. Whether lost or discarded for having less than a ride's worth of value, I adopted eight cards totaling $11.46 this year (easily transferred to my main pay-as-you-go transit card), as well as one unlimited ride card, which I was able to use for six subway trips before it expired, equating to $16.50 in found value. Add to that two disused cards worth a combined $19.48 that my friend Greg donated when I visited him in Philly, and this year's value of found MetroCards comes to $47.44.

And a new addition to this year's found money charity tally actually comes from nonprofit organizations: for many years, some have sent direct mail appeals which include a self-addressed stamped envelope, which renders the stamp useless if I chose to make an online donation, or opted not to donate at all. This year, perhaps for just that reason, I noticed a new trend, with some groups paper clipping a stamp to the return envelope instead of affixing it. Receiving four of those in over the course of the year adds another $1.96 to the kitty...

...which brings 2018's total to the aforementioned $69.31, the second-highest total since I've been tracking detailed results, and nearly triple the size of last year's pool!

2011 - $49.23       2012 - $45.65       2013 - $17.55
2014 - $63.13       2015 - $113.51     2016 - $43.38       2017 - $23.58

Over the eight years listed above, this little annual hobby has resulted in over $400 in pre-matched dollars; with matches from friends, that has been boosted to well over $1000, which has supported charity initiatives across the country and around the world.

I hope you'll join me by pitching in some of your own virtual coin and cash! All you have to do is click the fourth button on the PACF site ("Support a specific fund") and make sure you specify "Sean McGrath Fund" in your note.

Before I wrap up, I'll leave you with a look at some of the more battle scarred coins, weathered either by time, or--for those that spent winter beneath snow and salts--literally by weather.

Whether or not you contribute a few dollars to the Sean McGrath Fund, I hope you've been inspired to track the spare change that you find throughout 2019, and to donate the total to your favorite charity next year! You might be surprised at what you'll find.

Thank you for reading, for donating, and for all the little things you do to help change the world!

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime (or 500 of them)?": Found Change Charity Fund 2017 Results!

As usual, I meant to post this blog shortly after new year, but it took me a couple of weeks to get around to tallying up the lost (or discarded) loot that made its way from someone else's pocket into my own throughout last year before finally making its way to a charitable end! 

For those of you new to the concept, for many moons (at least 150 moons by my rough count) I've been pocketing money I come across on floors and sidewalks, and adding it to my annual Found Change Charity Fund and donating the total each January to the Sean McGrath Fund. And then I've been asking you to follow suit with a matching donation, as I will once again later in this post! 

So let's do away with the intrigue and get right down to the tally, shall we? Here's the breakdown, both numerically and visually:

20.00 x 0 = $0.00

5.00 = $0.00

1.00 x 0 = $0.00

.25 x 6 = $1.50
.10 x 44 = $4.40
.05 x 14 = $0.70
.01 x 300 - $3.00

At first I was shocked that I didn't encounter a single piece of lost paper money this year, but then I realized that as we increasingly become a cashless society, it makes perfect sense that actual lost currency would face a similar decline. Unfortunately, this doesn't bode well for the long-term success of the FCCF (Found Change Charity Fund...did you forget already?).

Also extraordinary this year is the total lack of any foreign currency, since in years past, I've found shekels and pence from places as far afield as Peru, Hong Kong, the UAE, Britain, Canada, Israel, Switzerland, Aruba, and the Euro zone. Although once again, upon further reflection, this probably shouldn't be such a shock, as foreign travel to the United States has dropped considerably since last January 20, resulting in millions fewer visitors to our shores, and billions fewer overseas dollars spent here.

Well, one thing that hasn't changed is that every subway rider needs a MetroCard (at least for now...though increasingly less so leading up to the 2023 phaseout), and I ran across five abandoned cards this year which still held a combined value of $13.09 in subway fare. That bought me five rides for which I didn't pay a cent, so that amount goes into the hopper too!

That means that this year, the not-so-grand total is the comparatively paltry sum of $23.58, the second-lowest year since I've been tracking results on this space:

2011 - $49.23       2012 - $45.65       2013 - $17.55
2014 - $63.13      2015 - $113.51     2016 - $43.38

Part of this annual tradition has been to separate out some of the coins that time has treated most roughly, and to thank them for their service before they're returned to the U.S. Mint and destroyed. Here are a couple of shots of this year's graduating class.

So now we find ourselves at the portion of the blog where I ask YOU, dear reader, to make a matching gift to the Sean McGrath Fund...except this year having been such a low amount, I'm asking you to make a donation at least double the amount that I found. To save you precious calculation time, that comes to $47.16.

If I've convinced you to make a donation, just hit the orange button on the PACF site and make sure you specify "Sean McGrath Fund" in your note.

And whether or not you choose to make a financial gift, I hope you'll consider setting aside your own canister to track the spare change you find throughout 2018, and to donate the total to your favorite charity next year!

Thanks for reading, and for all the little things you do to help change the world.

Got unwanted paper calendars? Donate them to prison book programs!

 

Returning from an extended trip recently, I was greeted by a sizable pile of mail, including several large envelopes from some of the nonprofits I support. Even though it's only midway through the year, the inevitable onslaught of complimentary calendars has begun!

 

If you haven't already received one or two 2018 calendars, you'll likely start seeing them come your way soon, either from charities or with magazine subscriptions (and then eventually from a whole bevy of sources as we get closer to year's end).

In years past, I only held onto one from the barrage for my kitchen wall and left the rest in communal areas at work. However, now that I've been volunteering for a couple of years at my local books-to-prisoners collective, I know that wall calendars are actually a hotly requested item among incarcerated people around the turn of the year. Now I funnel any and all excess calendars to my service group, Books Through Bars NYC.

If you're also starting to see a trickle of 2018 calendars and datebooks coming your way, I encourage you to pass them along to an inmate service organization near you. If you live near one, you can likely drop them off in person at a volunteer packing session; if you don't live near one, perhaps you could start building a stack and mail it off to one of the service groups on this list for distribution to a segment of our population that doesn't have access to electronic date keeping.

As the dawn of a new year slowly draws nigh, keep an eye out for more calendars you can pass along, from doctors, elected officials, banks, accountants, auto mechanics, gas stations, fuel delivery companies, dry cleaners, car washes, plumbers, takeout restaurants, and--of course--well intentioned but unnecessary holiday gifts.

 

As always, thanks for reading--and for all the little things you do to help change the world!
 

#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

- Vests

- Sweaters

- Sport Coats

- Dress Shirts

- Dress Shoes

- Casual Pants

- Ties + Accessories
- Jackets + Outerwear
- Women's Professional Attire

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!

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: 

- Wash bowl and spoon

 - Rinse and recycle can

- 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.]