Two main ones get my money and my time:

1. Center for Early Intevention on Deafness - a school and outreach program for hearing-impaired children ages birth through 5 and their familes, located in Berkeley CA but serving the entire Bay Area. I've been on the board for abouyt five years and served as President for about a year and a half. This is absolutel top-drawer program and get excellent results maximizing these kids' potential. BTW, every child identifed as hearing impaired by age 6 months means an average of $1 million saved in social welfare costs over identifying the same child later, not to mention increasing our societal talent pool. I think that's a pretty damn good investment of energy and resources.

2. Rotary. I've been a Rotarian for almost 8 years now, and I am my club's President this year. In terms of rasing money and doing good things in the world, Rotary is probably the best kept secret in the world, and that is too bad. All 32,000 local Clubs around the world do service projects in their communities, Clubs in various regions and around the world team up for larger projects, and Rotary International has taken on major, international-level programs. The biggest one (but certainly not the only one) is Polio Plus, which Rotary started a little over 20 years ago to eradicate polio in the world. Rotary has put up $600 million and organized countless people around the world (and has worked with the CDC and the UN, among others, to make this work) to go out and administer the vaccine to children. We had hoped to wipe out polio by 2005, but haven't been able to get that last little bit. But the number of new polio cases this year is less than one-half of one percent of the number of new cases in 1985.

By the way, Rotary does all this and tons more and still uses every single penny that comes in for charitable purposes. How? At the club and District level, everyone is a volunteer, and all the money we raise for charitable purposes actually goes toward charitable purposes. Rotary International and the Rotary Foundation do have paid staffers and do have offices in Evanston, Illinois. Money that comes into the Rotary Foundation is invested for three years. The income from those investments pays for the overhead. Thus, for example, all of the money that came in in 2002-03 is being spent in 2005-06, and the income helped pay the salaries and other internal expenses over those three years. Works pretty well, I'd say.

If you are looking for a good group of people to get to know and want to do something valuable for your community and world, check out your local Rotary Club. If you need help finding out where and when a Club meets near you, PM me and I'll track one or two (and maybe a personal contact or two) for you.