This post is my annual self-reminder to support worthy causes financially.  If it encourages others to do so as well, so much the better.

Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving

In addition to tithe and offering to my home church, Sligo Seventh-Day Adventist Church, I gave an offering to Revision Church Atlanta. I only attend online, but gained enough from the sermons and worship see there nearly every week that it seemed appropriate to donate.  I gave to Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington also.  While I didn’t mention them in prior year-end charitable giving posts, the Helping Hands Sabbath School in Nashville, Tennessee is  Bible study conducted via Zoom that I attend most Saturdays and help facilitate monthly.  Along with donating my time as a facilitator, I contribute funds each month.  Some of them they used to help a church in Jamaica recover from damage caused by Hurricane Melissa.

Other Charitable Giving

World Central Kitchen is new to the list of donation recipients this year.  I donated to them in support of their efforts to feed starving people in the Gaza Strip.  I’ve admired their efforts to feed the hungry in disaster zones and war zones for years but hadn’t donated to them before now.  They’ve also been quite active domestically, providing clean water to families in Asheville, feeding firefighters in Los Angeles as they battled wildfires, and families recovering from floods in Texas.

Also new to the donor recipients list this year is ITSMF.  The purpose of this nonprofit is to prepare people you don’t typically see in executive roles (women & minorities) to become candidates for and to excel in such roles.  They’ve really helped me grow professionally, so I helped raise money from my Managment Academy cohort—Onyx 81—and contributed my own funds as well.  

When Trump and the GOP zeroed out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I increased my donations to both local and national public media.

Other Giving

What follows is a list of tip jars, Patreon memberships, Substack subscriptions, and other avenues I use to support worthy causes.

  • Flaming Hydra
    An independent collective of writers I began supporting this year, edited by Maria Bustillos. 
  • ContrabandCamp
    Another collective led by Michael Harriott, a writer whose work I’ve followed from his days at Very Smart Brothas, to The Root, to this latest venture.
  • Leah Sottile
    She’s a journalist whose work I first began following in 2019 with her Bundyville podcast.  She is the best and most prescient writer about right wing extremists in the western United States bar none.  When she posted on Bluesky that her latest investigative podcast, Hush, was cancelled by Oregon Public Broadcasting—taking away the vast majority of her income and all of her health insurance—I subscribed to her newsletter immediately. 
  • emptywheel
    The blog of independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, she's effectively become the ombudsman of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets. She doesn't just call out shortcomings and failings in their coverage, she clarifies issues that might otherwise be confusing. She's one of just two journalists I value enough to support directly.
  • The Contraband Wagon
    I initially met him through Twitter, and he's taken on the exceedingly difficult challenge of creating constructive conversations on the issue of race. I had the honor of being a panelist for one of the live conversations he moderated on the issue of race in the tech industry. You can find clips of his conversations on YouTube and join his Patreon to get the full-length conversations.
  • Mastodon
    I began supporting the Mastodon project through Patreon in November 2022 after Elon Musk took over Twitter. As we've watched Musk turn Twitter into a propaganda and disinformation platform to (unfortunately successfully) elect Donald Trump, those of us with the means putting money behind efforts to help decentralized social media networks succeed will only grow more important. They recently began selling merchandise which also helps support their operations, which gave me an excuse to buy a stuffed version of their mascot.
  • Hachyderm
    Hachyderm.io is the Mastodon server I moved to in 2023. I sponsor them with a small monthly contribution via GitHub.
  • Blacksky
    Created and maintained by Rudy Fraser, it is effectively its own social media network for black folks on Bluesky that leverages the AT Protocol. I began contributing to his work this month via Open Source Collective, a fiscal host for numerous open source projects I used back when I was still writing software full time including webpack, vue, ESLint, and thousands of others.

Beyond the individuals and collectives listed above, I’m currently donating my time as an assignment grader to a handful of students in the current Management Academy cohort.

I also donated time through my employer to a local charity A Wider Circle, and some peer training efforts for new hires.

Giving Plans for 2026

I expect my charitable giving plans next year to look a lot like this year’s plans.