All of my music is available for listening and downloading for free on my music site. My main goal with making music is to share my ideas with people. It recently occurred to me that this attention, however small, to my music could be an opportunity to point people to charities that I think are doing good in the world. As someone who has the privilege to not use my music as a means to make money this is the least I can do.
Since I’m not taking any payment from folks I figure I can point people to these charities and ask them to consider donating any amount of money they would use to buy my music to them instead. Kind of like setting a release on Bandcamp to “pay what you want” for it, but folks give the money to help a cause.
The charities I have chosen to highlight are currently listed on my music site. I picked four in total. Two are doing work on a larger or global scale and two are focused on the Seattle area, where I live. Thanks to the awesomeness of the internet anyone could come across my music and if I am going to offer up this idea of donating I want there to be something that might resonate with folks. I also want to highlight groups that I think are doing good in Seattle and do something to help my local community.
The groups I have chosen focus on things in the realms of healthcare, homelessness, and equity. These are all things that resonate with me and I see the need for groups doing this work in the news and my local community every day. I also chose them because they are, for the most part, run by people who are members of the communities they serve and look to help.
My process for choosing them was a combination of knowing of them already (this mostly applied to the Seattle based ones as I have heard of them from their work), looking at their Charity Navigator reviews, and researching as best I could to see if their past actions stand up to what they say they do.
For the two groups who aren’t specifically working in the Seattle area they have some of the highest ratings on Charity Navigator and other charity review sites, especially when it comes to how much of the money that is given to them is actually focused on doing the work to help people instead of things like paying their CEO a massive salary.
For the Seattle based groups I have seen the impacts of what they do in my local community directly and along with online research I have heard from people in the Seattle area that these groups are doing good work.
I am setting up a page on my site here where I can direct people to learn more about these groups. This also gives me the option to switch them out over time if I want to highlight other causes.
The groups I chose are:
I invite you to check out their sites and learn more about what they are doing. If their work resonates with you I would ask you to lease consider making a donation.
Regardless of where, if you do make a donation I would love to hear about it! You can leave a comment here, reach out on my contact page, or connect on Mastodon.
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