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:

International Rescue Committee
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HiTOPS
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"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:

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:

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

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.