Side job

Posted at 2:38 PM on November 15, 2007 by Julie Siple (3 Comments)

We’re just hours away from our show about charity (want to come? There are a few free tickets left).

We’ve been swimming in numbers for days now, fact-checking all sorts of statistics about how and why and where Americans give their money. Frankly, my brain burns.

Sometimes, when I’m flashing back to Calc II, I take a break and give some rice.

You can, too. It's at Freerice, this nifty Web game that’s raising money for the United Nations World Food Program. (Jon Gordon’s Future Tense featured it this week.) The UN says the site has generated enough rice to feed 50,000 hungry people around the world for one day.

And here’s the thing – the way you contribute money is by taking a vocab quiz. You see a word; you guess what it means. If you’re right, a random slew of advertisers will donate money to the UN. Comes out to ten grains of rice per word.

It’s like the GRE, but fun. You get smarter, the UN gets richer, and hungry people get rice.

Course, far as my boss knows, I’m fact-checking.

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Comments (3)

While FreeRice may indeed be noble, it isn't a registered charity and it might be profiting $150,000 per day.

Posted by Jeremy P | November 15, 2007 3:54 PM

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Hey Julie, I attended the show last night and I was wondering if you guys could post all the statistics that were thrown out during the show. I want to talk to people about the show and I want to get the stistics correct.

Thank you,

JP

Posted by Jonpaul | November 16, 2007 9:35 AM

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Great show, while the facts and figures were great, I think I learned more last night about charity from the audience participation than I have learned from any study.

If you would like some more facts check out this recent study we did about giving in Minnesota at the Charities Review Council: http://smartgivers.org/Survey.html.

Posted by Paul Verrette | November 16, 2007 2:37 PM

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