Contribute Fridays: Giving Back
No matter how rich you get freelancing (or how poor lol) you’ll never be fully satisfied until you give something back to something you care about deeply.
What do I care about? Well, I have an awesome secretary (photo of him on his desk at right). He’s the best secretary in the whole world (and if you don’t agree with me, we can no longer be friends, sorry). Unfortunately, not every snuggly secretary has such a cool job as mine. Especially with the recession and major flooding in Nashville, many of these secretaries have found themselves homeless and jobless!
Long story short, I’m an animal lover. I drove myself down to PetSmart yesterday to purchase $300 of food, blankets, toys, food bowls and chew bones and donated it all to the Maury County Animal Shelter (the secretary wants to note that he was disappointed he didn’t get anything).
Sorry for the long Contribute Friday post, but it felt so awesome to be able to help even a few homeless animals. Giving almost seems like more of a gift to the giver than the receiver.
Your Charity
Have you given to charity before? What kinds of charities do you like to give to? Share your stories! 
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
I love the microlending that http://www.Kiva.org does in third world countries. Not really charity, I suppose, as 99% of the time the money forwarded as a loan is paid back by the borrower. Check it out. It’s a way to help others who need money for their business but cannot access loans in a more traditional format.
I love this post, Amber. Animals often become the forgotten victims of natural disasters and the recession. Our local animal shelter has had to cut its staff and hours over the past year, resulting in the animals being euthanized sooner than they would have been previously. My husband and I recently helped organize a local pet parade and festival to raise money for the shelter, and we are planning to make it an annual event.
Great focus on charity Amber! In addition to a few of charities that I donate money to (either a monthly donation or sporadic donations), I’ve recently started donating design work. I’ve donated design in the past but have recently made it official by adding this service on my website. My first project was donating a simple website to my friend who is a comedian and was in need of one. I hope to be able to do this more often, just have to make more time for it. I also make it a point to donate to opensource apps and plugins that I use regularly.
I love you secretary btw, what’s his name? So adorable.