How to make a donation

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Someone has graciously kicked off Holiday Fare with a generous donation of five books of transit tickets, so I've decided to just GET STARTED. I know momentum when I see it!

Here's how to donate:

- Trimet's web site has a list of places to buy tickets. Many grocery stores carry transit tickets, as do some workplaces. You can get them at TriMet's Pioneer Courthouse Square location, too. You can also buy books of tickets online and have them mailed directly from Trimet.

- Once you get your hands on a book of tickets (if you're new at this, just ask for "a book of adult fare tickets"), all that's left is to send them my way! Mail them to Holiday Fare, c/o Jeff Guardalabene, 1130 NE 108th Ave., Portland 97220. I'm even willing to come by and pick them up if that's the only way you're going to give them, but don't expect same-day service on that one. :)

- I will post updates on how we're doing. Honestly, my expectations are low. I will be tickled just to help a few people out at holiday time.

- If you represent an organization or group that needs tickets, please let me know. As I give tickets away, I will post about that, too. The only way this is going to work is by being as transparent as possible. As I said in a previous post, I'm really hoping to NOT complicate this - you mail me the tickets, I figure out who needs them, everyone's happy.

- If you're worried about the process, or if you feel that this is not "above board" somehow, PLEASE DO NOT DONATE. I can't stress this enough. This process is about one guy collecting some tickets and giving them to some other people. If that's not the kind of process you need to make you feel okay about your donation, then please find one of the zillions of other worthy causes out there, and more power to you!

- I'm not going to set a goal. Let's just do this with gratitude and love and see where it takes us. Give if you can, spread the word if nothing else, and let's help a few people get some rides.

- Thanks!

Where are the tickets going? Part One.

To contact us Click HERE
Running a one-person "charity" is an interesting experience. One of the high points is unilateral decision-making, with no board of directors full of business types to muck things up.

I've decided that the first ten books of tickets, if I get that many, will go to Yolanda House, a domestic violence shelter. Read the link - it looks like a pretty amazing place. As a therapist, I've worked with some incredibly courageous domestic violence survivors. With your help, this first donation will honor them.

Oh, and check out the list of needed items on their site. Bus tickets are their second most needed item, right after toilet paper.

What I'm saying, folks, is that it's not a bad idea to buy some extra TP on your next shopping trip and drop it off at the Y downtown!

Here's how to make a ticket donation.

If you've got an idea for the next ten books of tickets, especially if it's somewhere you've got some personal experience with, please let me know at drjeff@gmail.com.

Thank you!

Picking up momentum!

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I've really been looking forward to getting my mail these days... each delivery brings more books of transit tickets! We're almost up to our first ten, which means it's almost time to donate to Yolanda House. What a wonderful thing! That's over two hundred dollars in bus and train rides that YOU are helping make available. Please help us get over the top - here's how to donate.

Another way that you can help is by clicking the Facebook, Twitter, and G+ links at the bottom of this post. Getting the word out is so important to collecting as many rides as possible!

Thank you so much for all your help so far. Stay tuned!

Exciting!

To contact us Click HERE
Joe Rose, AKA @pdxcommute on Twitter, AKA the "Hard Drive" guy for the Oregonian, rode with me on my commute yesterday. He's going to profile me in his column in this coming Saturday's Oregonian - I'll be sure to link it when it hits the stands (and the nets). I'm excited to get more exposure for the Holiday Fare project!

In the meantime, take a few minutes, log in to trimet.org, and send a book of transit tickets! Here's how to donate.

I'm getting realllllllly close to being able to give tickets to Yolanda House. Maybe your donation will put me over the top!

VOA's Family Relief Nursery is our next recipient

To contact us Click HERE
The next donation for the Holiday Fare project is 15 books of tickets to VOA's Family Relief Nursery.

Here's how Katie from FRN describes the need:

The Family Relief Nursery is an intervention/prevention program for families with children six weeks to five years old. We work to strengthen fragile families at serious risk of abusing or neglecting their children or of permanently losing custody of their children. The Nursery offers a holistic, positive intervention with both children and parents. All services are provided at no charge to families. The FRN now serves up to 90 families per year.

One of the barriers our families face is transportation. We do have a small school bus that picks kids up and drops them off each day, but the bus can only accommodate so many children. Many times a family will remain on our waitlist until a bus and a classroom spot are both open. When possible, we do provide bus tickets to our families so they can utilize public transportation to bring their children to and from FRN. As well, bus tickets are especially helpful when we have Family Nights or Open Houses at FRN. For parents whose kids are picked up by the FRN bus (and do not have a car themselves) they often never get to see where their kids go each day. The Family Nights and Open Houses are a time when the parents can come by and see the site and meet their children’s teachers (we do home visiting as well with most of our families, so they are intimately involved with our interventionists otherwise). Bus tickets are also sometimes used to allow our families to go out to VOA’s resale store, so they can pick up clothing or other items for their children (we provide them with vouchers for the resale store).

In the past, we have been able to provide bus tickets to our families, as needed. Unfortunately this year, we with downturn in the economy, one of our funders had us cut our budget by 4.5% and another funder cut our budget by 12%. In order to maintain our level of services, and because the State requires us to have so much direct service personnel per child, one of the things we had to cut this year was direct client assistance funds, which includes items like bus tickets.

Sorry for the long quote, but I couldn't find anything to leave out. Again, the need is so great. I wish we could give more to this program and all the others that we've helped so far. The only way we can do that is if more of you donate. Here's how!

Please spread the word and post this link everywhere, including those things where you make a sign out of a piece of printer paper and then let people tear little pieces off the bottom. :) Facebook, Twitter, and blanketing everyone in the world with emails works, too! Thanks!

Article of the Week - Penal Colony

A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. Although the term can be used to refer to a correctional facility located in a remote location it is more commonly used to refer to communities of prisoners overseen by wardens or governors having absolute authority.

The British used North America as a penal colony through a system of indentured servitude. Convicts would be transported by merchants and auctioned off to plantation owners upon arrival in the colonies. It is estimated that some 50,000 British convicts were sent to colonial America, representing perhaps one-quarter of all British emigrants during the 18th century. When that avenue closed in the 1780s after the American Revolution, Britain began using parts of what is now known in Australia as penal settlements.

Devil's Island (French: île du Diable) is the third largest island of the ÃŽles du Salut island group in the Atlantic Ocean. It is located approximately 14 km (9 mi) off the coast of French Guiana in South America just north of the town of Kourou. It has an area of 14 ha (34.6 acres). The island was a part of the notorious French penal colony of French Guiana for 101 years, from 1852 to 1953.^[1] The island was used primarily to house political prisoners. 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Devil's Island"

Article of the Week - Water Lillies

Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.

The paintings are on display at museums all over the world, including the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

On 19 June 2007, one of Monet's water lily paintings sold for £18.5 million at a Sotheby's auction in London. On 24 June 2008 another of Monet's water lily paintings, Le bassin aux nymphéas, sold for almost £41 million at Christie's in London, almost double the estimate of £18 to £24 million.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Devil's Island"