April Food Day - No Joke

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold,

it would be a merrier world."

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

Today is the first April Food Day; as I posted on Monday, this is a very important effort among bloggers to help raise hunger awareness and raise money for Feeding America. Please take a minute to visit Feeding America's website to learn about the good work they do to feed as many as 4 million hungry Americans each and every week.

My challenge remains, for every comment posted on these two April Food Day posts, I will donate an additional dollar to my already planned gift. Please leave a comment then visit Feeding America at the link below to make a donation, even if it's only a dollar.

April Food Day

The wonderful authors of Pigtown*Design and Easy & Elegant Life have set into motion a brilliant plan to help raise awareness and dollars for Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), a national food bank with 200 member banks across the country. They're calling April 1, 2009 April Food Day and asking bloggers to post on the great work that Feeding America is doing during these difficult times.

This is a cause that I started with in kindergarten and have never stopped giving. I posted on the struggles facing foodbanks in December and asked readers then to help Feeding America and/or their local foodbanks at that time. Needless to say not much has improved since the holidays for many Americans and the December donations are long gone. It's time for bloggers to unite in this effort to donate what we can to help fill the shelves of these very important resources.

Feeding America is very efficient (we should all do so well with our grocery shopping) with every dollar you contribute providing seven meals or 10 pounds of food. A $25 gift provides 75 meals. In fact Feeding America has a 4 star rating from Charity Navigator with nearly $0.98 of every dollar given spent on doing the good work of getting food into the hands fo those who need it.

In addition to my planned donation I will donate an additional dollar for every visitor who comments on this post between now and April 2nd up to an additional $100.

An Update on Two National Treasures

"The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background."
Edith Wharton

Last year I posted about the financial troubles at both The Mount, Edith Wharton's historic mansion as well as the Mark Twain House. There's reason to be optimistic on both fronts.

The Mount in snow, from The Mount's website.

The Mount's website is reporting that they have received over $1.3 million in gifts and pledges from around the world. These gifts have given the administrators of The Mount the ability to work with their creditors to reduce their debt and continue to work to draw more visitors to The Mount by expanding their mission to not only focus Edith Wharton as author, decorator, and gardner, but also focus on the broader topic of literature. As an added bonus they've added some new photos of The Mount at various seasons and showing things not previously covered on their website like this photo of the stables.

The Mark Twain House was struggling last September with dropping donations and visitors, caused in part by high gas prices, and the weight of over $20 million in debt taken on to build a beautiful (and modern) new visitor's center. Due in large part to the media attention the State of Connecticut donated $50,000 followed by a $500,000 gift from the Annenberg Foundation in addition to numerous gifts from individuals.

The Mark Twain House celebrated Christmas with Victorian Decorations and themed activities. If I was a bit closer this year I would have loved to have made a visit.

Victorian Christmas Tree at The Mark Twain House, from The Hartford Current.

I wish both of these house museums the best and urge you to contribute to these or another small museum in your area as they're really struggling during these difficult financial times. It's important to preserve these homes and the collections therein for future generations.

Hungry at the Holidays

"When a man's stomach is full it makes no difference whether he is rich or poor."
Euripides (BC 480-BC 406)

Picture of an amazing can sculputre from Canstruction Calgary

Like many I started with can drives as a child in elementary school competing against other classrooms to gather up the most food for the less fortunate (and to earn a pizza party, we were only 6). The habit stuck and over the years I have donated both cans and my time to help stock shelves and deliver food, and have always found it to be a rewarding experience.

As you've probably heard in the news media that donations are falling at the same time as needs are increasing. As many of us prepare for one feast after another this holiday season if we can just buy a few extra non-parishable food items and drop them off at a foodbank or at one of the many drop-off points that are set up this time of year we can help eliminate hunger.

To find a foodbank near you visit: Feeding America, formerly America's Second Harvest.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is more than a part of your elementary school education or taking the SATs, it's the mark of a true lady or gentleman. It's rare that I run across a word I don't know, unless I go looking for one, but it's always fun to add a word that's inevitably more descriptive of something than the word I had previously used for it. So when I find a fun way to accumulate a few new words I like to share it. I heard about FreeRice.com on NPR some time ago. It started as a way for a father to help his children prepare for the SAT, then he decided to use his tool to help do some good in the world. That's where the name came from. For each vocabulary word you get right a 20 grains of rice are donated to hungry people throughout the world. I know you're thinking what's a few grains of rice really do, but it really adds up if enough people use the site. It's fun to rack up some rice and maybe learn a thing or two.

Here's what FreeRice.com has to say about their mission:

"FreeRice is a sister site of Poverty.com. Our partners are the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the United Nations World Food Program.

FreeRice has two goals:

Provide education to everyone for free.

Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on this site.
Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your education can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you."

I find it's an enjoyable way to take a quick 2 minute break between tasks at work and feel good about it. Give FreeRice.com a try and do some good for yourself and for some very hungry people.

Historic Homes Struggling with the Economy

"The lack of money is the root of all evil." ~ Mark Twain

CBS Sunday Morning had an excellent story this morning on the plight of house museums all over the country struggling with large debt and decreasing donations and visitors. I've posted in the past about The Mount (previous post), Edith Wharton's historic home which was again featured in this story along with several other notable homes.

In this post I wanted to call your attention to The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, CT. Financial problems are nothing new for the home. Twain had to sell it in 1903 due in large part to his own financial problems.

The Mark Twain House and Museum was the home of Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens) from 1874 to 1891 in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. The architecture of the 19-room house is Victorian Gothic. Twain wrote The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, A Tramp Abroad and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court all while living in the home.

Here's an abbreviated history of the house after the Clemens sold it from the homes' website:
The house was privately owned until 1929 when the "Mark Twain Memorial and Library Commission" was chartered to restore and manage the Twain House.

In 1955, the mortgage was paid in full and the trustees began a 20 year restoration of the house to its former glory during the Clemens 17–year residency.

The Mark Twain House was given a National Historic Landmark designation in 1963.
A visitor's center and museum adjacet to the hosue was completed in 2003 at great expense, and is largely responsible for the current financial problems facing the museum, though the Robert A.M. Stern designed museum looks like a great building in its own right. It also has the distinction of being the first LEED certified museum in the country.


Please consider making a donation to this historic home, or one closer to where you live as they need our help.

A National Treasure Facing Foreclosure

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope. ~ Edith Wharton

I came across a story on Luxist about the fate of Edith Wharton's home The Mount back in March. The home was facing foreclosure and a future that likely involved it becoming private property no longer open to the public. The fact that this Historic Landmark might be yet another victim of the mortgage meltdown was quite frightening.


I immediately went to their website and pledged what I could and was told that they wouldn't ask for any of the donor's to send in their pledges unless they were able to raise enough commitments to restructure their debt and keep The Mount open to the public.


On August 15th I received a letter asking that I submit my pledge as they received over $1 million in donations. They're still working on suring up the future of this great house museum, but for 2008 at least they are open and it appears that if they can continue to raise funds this can be at least one happy foreclosure story. They're still hoping to reach their goal of $3 million by the end of October, so please do what you can to not only give a little but raise awareness.


Please visit The Mount website and make a donation.


Wharton, the author of Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, designed and built the house in 1902. She wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture and gardens and was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Mount is one of the five percent of National Historic Landmarks dedicated to women. It only gets around 30,000 visitors a year but is a lovely and significant reminder of a more gracious era.



Wharton designed The Mount, built in 1902, and put into practice many of the principles she espoused in The Decoration of Houses, including an enormous first floor gallery and a bedroom suite that accommodated her writing. As a Wharton fan, I’ve wanted to visit The Mount, especially as it has been substantially restored to Wharton’s original plans. Below are a few picture's from The Mount's website.