israel Green charity

Israeli Donors Discover the Internet

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Online donations raised by nonprofit organizations using IsraelGives has increased by 400 percent in 2011 compared to 2010 – suggesting that 2011 is another watershed year for adoption and use of the Internet to accelerate giving in Israel. Aggregate data from 853 Israeli organizations using IsraelGives for online fundraising shows a sharp rise in the use of the Internet for fundraising in Israel. In 2011, nonprofit organizations have used IsraelGives to:
* Raise $2.5 million online (9.2 million NIS), a 306 percent increase compared to the amount raised online in 2010.
* Process over 33,000 donations, a rise of 400% over 2010.
* The number of organizations using IsraelGives for fundraising rose from 588 organizations in 2010 to 853 in 2011.
* The average online donation size processed through IsraelGives in 2011 was $68 (243 NIS).
* The most popular months for online giving in Israel were August, September, December.
To read the entire article

The Lower the Income, the Higher the Divorce Rate…

Posted by admin under Child Poverty, Children, Disposable Income, Divorce

No Kidding…

The divorce rate has stabilized among the middle class but is increasing among the poor, explaining why many separated fathers pay little or no child support.

Divorce

A new study reveals that financial hardship is a major cause of family breakdown. Low-income parents are more likely than others to break up – and they remain poor after the split.

Most of the 700,000 fathers registered with the Child Support Agency pay little child support because their incomes are very low, says the study published in People and Place, the journal of Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research.

More than 40 per cent of the separated fathers in 2001 had a taxable income of less than $15,600. Most were unemployed or in marginal jobs. Overall, despite general economic prosperity, nearly 68 per cent of the separated fathers had incomes of less than $32,000.

As a result, their former partners also experienced desperate financial circumstances. Three-quarters of the mothers were raising children on annual incomes of less than $15,600 plus $2000 to $3000 in family tax benefits.

The study says an estimated 90 per cent of separated parents are registered with the agency. Unless registered, women cannot get the federal government parenting payment.

The study says an estimated 90 per cent of separated parents are registered with the agency. Unless registered, women cannot get the federal government parenting payment. Continued…

A Cry in the Dark

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Until they moved into a slightly larger dwelling, Dina’s three room apartment was packed with ten children. Unfortunately, the move did little to lessen the suffering of this needy family.

In Dina’s attempt to save her children from starvation, a ten thousand shekel debt was accrued at the local grocery store. But the generosity of the grocery store owner wore thin and when he no longer allowed Dina to purchase food on credit, the cupboards were bare.
A cry is heard in the darkness – the electric company cut off the family’s electric supply. Pitifully, checks return regularly due to insufficient funds. One of the children suffers from a bent back due to severe malnutrition, and this little girl requires $100,000 corrective surgery. Who can Dina turn to in her time of anguish?

Karmey Chessed is the only organization that can lift this needy family out of the debts of thier despair. The exorbitant sums were immediately collected and food baskets and volunteers are sent regularly, continuing to help Dina and her children. Thanks to Karmei, Chessed Dina and her family has finally begun to see light in their lives.

Your generous donation will enable us to continue to help needy people like this across Israel

Until they moved into a slightly larger dwelling, Dina’s three room apartment was packed with ten children. Unfortunately, the move did little to lessen the suffering of this needy family.

In Dina’s attempt to save her children from starvation, a ten thousand shekel debt was accrued at the local grocery store. But the generosity of the grocery store owner wore thin and when he no longer allowed Dina to purchase food on credit, the cupboards were bare.
A cry is heard in the darkness – the electric company cut off the family’s electric supply. Pitifully, checks return regularly due to insufficient funds. One of the children suffers from a bent back due to severe malnutrition, and this little girl requires $100,000 corrective surgery. Who can Dina turn to in her time of anguish?

Karmey Chessed is the only organization that can lift this needy family out of the debts of thier despair. The exorbitant sums were immediately collected and food baskets and volunteers are sent regularly, continuing to help Dina and her children. Thanks to Karmei, Chessed Dina and her family has finally begun to see light in their lives.

Your generous donation will enable us to continue to help needy people like this across Israel

Until they moved into a slightly larger dwelling, Dina’s three room apartment was packed with ten children. Unfortunately, the move did little to lessen the suffering of this needy family.

In Dina’s attempt to save her children from starvation, a ten thousand shekel debt was accrued at the local grocery store. But the generosity of the grocery store owner wore thin and when he no longer allowed Dina to purchase food on credit, the cupboards were bare.
A cry is heard in the darkness – the electric company cut off the family’s electric supply. Pitifully, checks return regularly due to insufficient funds. One of the children suffers from a bent back due to severe malnutrition, and this little girl requires $100,000 corrective surgery. Who can Dina turn to in her time of anguish?

Karmey Chessed is the only organization that can lift this needy family out of the debts of thier despair. The exorbitant sums were immediately collected and food baskets and volunteers are sent regularly, continuing to help Dina and her children. Thanks to Karmei, Chessed Dina and her family has finally begun to see light in their lives.

Your generous donation will enable us to continue to help needy people like this across Israel

Until they moved into a slightly larger dwelling, Dina’s three room apartment was packed with ten children. Unfortunately, the move did little to lessen the suffering of this needy family.

In Dina’s attempt to save her children from starvation, a ten thousand shekel debt was accrued at the local grocery store. But the generosity of the grocery store owner wore thin and when he no longer allowed Dina to purchase food on credit, the cupboards were bare.
A cry is heard in the darkness – the electric company cut off the family’s electric supply. Pitifully, checks return regularly due to insufficient funds. One of the children suffers from a bent back due to severe malnutrition, and this little girl requires $100,000 corrective surgery. Who can Dina turn to in her time of anguish?

Karmey Chessed is the only organization that can lift this needy family out of the debts of thier despair. The exorbitant sums were immediately collected and food baskets and volunteers are sent regularly, continuing to help Dina and her children. Thanks to Karmei, Chessed Dina and her family has finally begun to see light in their lives.

Your generous donation will enable us to continue to help needy people like this across Israel

Until they moved into a slightly larger dwelling, Dina’s three room apartment was packed with ten children. Unfortunately, the move did little to lessen the suffering of this needy family.

In Dina’s attempt to save her children from starvation, a ten thousand shekel debt was accrued at the local grocery store. But the generosity of the grocery store owner wore thin and when he no longer allowed Dina to purchase food on credit, the cupboards were bare.
A cry is heard in the darkness – the electric company cut off the family’s electric supply. Pitifully, checks return regularly due to insufficient funds. One of the children suffers from a bent back due to severe malnutrition, and this little girl requires $100,000 corrective surgery. Who can Dina turn to in her time of anguish?

Karmey Chessed is the only organization that can lift this needy family out of the debts of thier despair. The exorbitant sums were immediately collected and food baskets and volunteers are sent regularly, continuing to help Dina and her children. Thanks to Karmei, Chessed Dina and her family has finally begun to see light in their lives.

Your generous donation will enable us to continue to help needy people like this across Israel

Karmey Chesed Needs You!

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Karmey Chesed

Our usual policy, we rarely if ever ask for your assistance. Yet today we choose to do just that.

Karmey Hesed is out there on the front lines every day helping families get by. Whether it’s connecting the electric supply by paying off the long-overdue bill, providing money to purchase critical medications, providing emotional support to families under the stress of severe poverty, or, something as simple as putting food on the table. Karmey Hesed is there!

Today we need you! As the recent studies have shown, 30% of Israeli children live under poverty. There was a recent study done that showed that all the charitable organizations in Israel put together, in the field of financial assistance such as Karmey Hesed’s, provide only 25% of the solution.

Please! Click here and donate generously. Your donation of only a few dollars can help feed a child.

A Family Stands on its Feet

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Chaim came on aliyah from North American with his wife and seven children in 1999. He was the successful CEO of a small hi-tech company till the economic upheavel in 2005 when business started to go downhill. Trying to keep afloat, Chaim took out several loans which he found himself unable to repay. Debts started piling up and there was no money to cover the bills. He was forced to sell his home. To make matters worse, one of the creditors started threatening him with physical harm. Chaim suffered a stroke and was bedridden for months.

Distraught and with nowhere else to turn, Chaim’s wife sought help from Karmey Chesed. Karmey Chesed assisted the family financially and intervened to calm down the threatening creditor, reconnect the utilities and slowly but surely help Chaim to emerge from his dire circumstances. After a long recuperation and physical rehabilitation, Chaim was able to find employment and return to work.

Karmey Chesed’s Green Charity Program is now in full swing. Unfortunately, we continue to face the difficulty of having more requests from people wishing to donate their items than we have funds to cover the costs of pick-up and delivery. Please watch our short clip about the Green Charity Program, at http://www.karmeyhesed.org/english/video.asp. Please give us the opportunity to help many more families. Your donations are vital to us. Please donate so via our website: www.karmeyhesed.org

We look forward to a continued relationship.
Thank you and all the best.

Karmey Chesed Goes Green!

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Karmey Chesed is active in avoiding waste and preserving our global environment! We relay donated items, appliances and furniture to the needy, thus avoiding unnecessary waste, trash and preserving our global resources. Our activities also ensure that the needy are not compelled to purchase new electrical items, which create added pollution in our atmosphere. Just another reason to donate to Karmey Chesed! Lots of people talk about ‘being green,’ but we do it good day

If Only it Were This Easy – Getting Out of Poverty

Posted by admin under Child Poverty, Children, Disposable Income, Getting By In Israel, Perspective, Poverty in Israel, Self Improvement, Social Justice, Solutions to Poverty, Tzedakah, What can "I" do, What can THEY do

Break the Cycle

The Brookings Institution came out out with a study a while back that suggests that its “easy” to get out of, or at least, avoid, poverty. Their suggestions might make sense in the USA, or other developed coutries where the concept of a “Disposable Income” exists. However, in a place like Israel, that is just not the case. Here is their article:

We’re a nation of bootstraps. Pull hard enough and you can pull yourself from rags to riches.

Or so we like to think. New research suggests we’re not as strapping as we might think when it comes to economic mobility.

New research from the Brookings Institution shows that economic mobility – the chance a child born into a poor family has to escape poverty – isn’t as robust as we might think.

If you’re born into a middle-class family, there’s a 76 percent chance you’ll end up middle class or even wealthier. Born into a poor family? Only a 35 percent chance. More here.

Alleviating Poverty – A must listen…

Posted by admin under Perspective, Self Improvement, Social Justice, What can "I" do, What can THEY do, World Poverty

Fanaticism and poverty

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Idealism vs Realism

I came across a family this week who simply could not understand that one parent’s religious fanaticism is the other’s financial nightmare. This family, in the most serious of financial crises, is strugling  to not only survive, but same an already sunken ship. They are at an impasse. The “idealism” of the one, not taking into account the “reality” of the other.

I include here an excerpt for an article written by Jonathan Rosenblum on some otehr examples of the “other side of the story” when striving for the “ideals” that the “idealism” is trying to reach:

Green opposition to “fracking” a technique for extracting natural gas from deep wells, would deprive the United States of access to the world’s largest national gas reserves, and with it, hundreds of thousands of new jobs, hundreds of billions in revenues, and a large degree of energy independence.

Meanwhile, a leaked European Commission report shows that a heavy reliance on renewable energy sources – wind and solar – would lead to a doubling of electricity prices by 2050. Even if Green-minded European bureaucrats could foist such hikes on European citizens, giant countries like China, India, and Brazil will never follow suit, making the rush to renewable energy, not only costly but futile in terms of reducing global carbon emissions.

FAIRNESS ENTAILS MENTION that idealism that blinds religious adherents to the human consequences of their actions is not unique to Islam. It has infected pockets of Orthodox Judaism as well. Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach, the late leader of the yeshiva world, used to say that the elevation of one mitzvah or one Torah value above all others inevitably leads to an utter distortion of the Torah and a loss of all balance. At the time, he was referring to the national religious movement’s emphasis on settlements and the mitzvah of settling the land.

But that is only one example. The anti-Zionism of certain elements within Neturei Karta, which has a basis in Torah sources, nevertheless has driven many of its adherents mad. What else could explain the use of microphones on Shabbos at anti-Israel demonstrations by those attired in the familiar Shabbos dress of Meah Shearim or their presence in Teheran at Holocaust-denial conferences sponsored by a regime openly pursuing nuclear weapons so that it can wipe every Jew in Israel off the face of the earth?

The demonstrations against the opening of the national religious girls Orot girls school in Ramat Beit Shemesh is another example. How could a grown man to shout the most vile names at seven-year-old girls or chase them down the street if a demented ideology had not rendered him oblivious to what he is doing?

What is so evident to me as an outsider to the zealot community is not, however, necessarily so to one dwelling within. That is why I was so heartened by a newspaper account sent just before the Yomim Noraim of how Rabbi Shmuel Chaim Pappenheim, a former editor of the Eidah Hachareidis newspaper and a resident of Beit Shemesh, publicly condemned the demonstrations against the school, apologized in print and sought forgiveness from Rabbi Dov Lipman, a leader of the defense of the Orot school, for previously written harsh words, and reached out to Rabbi Lipman for dialogue. Like Joachim Klein, the mechanic, he was able to step back in horror and see where ideology had lead.

Children Of Divorce More Likely To Live In Poverty: Census Report

Posted by admin under Child Poverty, Children, Disposable Income, Divorce, Unemployment

Children and Divorce

Children of divorce are more likely to be in poverty and to live with their mothers, according to a new Census report on marriage released today.

According to the report, three-quarters of children in divorced families lived with their mother in 2009 while some 28% of them were below the poverty rate, versus a 19% poverty rate among other children. The first-of-its kind Census report is a compendium of marriage trends and statistics cut by age, race and geography. Some stats:

1) In 2009, women who divorced in the previous 12 months were more likely to be in poverty and reported less household income than recently divorced men. Some 27% of recently divorced women had less than $25,000 in annual household income compared with 17% of recently divorced men. From the Huffington Post.