Giving Back

Been a pretty charitable couple of weeks here at HQ.

First, I was tagged in a work-related blog series that required I discuss what sort of charitable activities I typically support. My answer?

I'll support pretty much anything that means something to me and mine (and for charity, I typically cast my net pretty large for who counts as "mine"). My two big pushes this month (from people in our larger community) are the charity which gave their data to Developer Wars at SBOUC and SBOUC organizer Nicole's Diabetes Ride. Never to early to save money on your taxes by making a donation.

As an extension of that, I got pulled into a couple of different charity events this last weekend.

On Saturday morning I dragged the family out of bed to participate in a walk to support a friend of the family who is diabetic.Due to some procrastination on our part we only started gathering donations about a week before but were still able to help raise some money for the JDRF (some from as far away as England). In fact the larger team we were part of ended up raising over $2,500. Best part, aside, obviously, from the altruism? The event was collocated with an Oktoberfest so after the event we got to take in a parade and a couple of beers with some of our teammates.

You can't see it in the picture, but we're standing on a mountain of candy.
Leftover from the parade.
From right after the Diabetes Walk.

That evening the wife and I went to a Trivia Party to support some Micro-financing work going on in Africa. We didn't win the Trivia Contest, but I won the raffle for a tailgating kit which is probably better because I'd have no doubt gotten jobbed out of my fair share of any cash winnings from the team.

For those of you unfamiliar with a Trivia Party fundraiser, they are really common in St. Louis and typically involve buying a table for 8-10 people (usually around $200/table) and competing with other tables to get the best score out of 100 trivia questions. The beer is usually free because they have other cash-gobbling opportunities throughout the night for 50/50 drawings, raffles, heads-or-tails or dead-or-alive type games, and "just throw whatever money you've got left into a bucket at the end of the night" contests. Always a good time, especially when someone who has provided stupid answer after stupid answer all night get painfully upset that you didn't trust them the one time they knew the answer (didn't happen this night, but it isn't uncommon).

In the end it was a fun (albeit exhausting) day and one that really will help to make a difference in some people's lives. Even if that's because we don't have any money left to feed our kids.