We need your help to prepare for next week's DU Fund Drive -- Nominate your favorite charity!

[Skinner]

As you may know, next week is the Democratic Underground fourth quarter 2009 fund drive. With Thanksgiving coming up soon, we have decided to do something different for the DU fund drive this year -- in the spirit of giving thanks and giving back.

During next week's fund drive Democratic Underground is going to donate 10% of the funds we receive to a selected group of charities. Here's how it's going to work:

This week, with the help of the DU membership, we are going to select six charities to support. Each of the charities will be assigned a day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday/Sunday. Each day of the fund drive, 10% of funds donated to Democratic Underground will be donated to that day's assigned charity. A list of charities will be made available to DU members who wish to donate so you can plan your donation to benefit the charity of your choice.

The process to select the six charities is going to be fairly casual. If you are interested in suggesting a charity, you should do so in this thread. If you like someone else's suggestion in this thread, please feel free to reply to their post to say so. If necessary, we will open additional threads throughout the week in order to solicit more suggestions and narrow down the choices to the final six.

Our intent is to come up with a list of six charities that, taken together, broadly represent this community and its values. Obviously, we will not be able to accommodate everyone's favorite charity. But we hope that everyone will find at least one charity that you want to help support (while you support DU). With this in mind, we intend to select the charities so their missions do not overlap. In other words: We're not going to select multiple charities that do basically the same thing. So, for example, if we have an environmental charity on the list, we're not going to select two or three of them -- there will just be one.

One more thing: The charity CANNOT be political. No political parties or candidates or PACs or other organizations intended to influence campaigns. It is against the law for Democratic Underground (a corporation) to donate money to political organizations.

So, let's get started... Tell us your favorite charities!