#donation advice

[algrenion]

i'm recieving a lot of personal requests to donate to individual peoples' GoFundMe's for Gaza, or to signal boost their fundraisers

i've been a little hesitant to post these asks though as i've been warned that many of them have not, and cannot be verified and that a handful of absolute monsters are actively scamming Pro-Palestine bloggers by pretending to be Gazan refugees

i feel like now is not the time to be overly-scrutinizing given the scale of Palestine's suffering and the probable inability for many people to verify their refugee status, but if anyone has tips on how to go about recognizing legitimate fundraisers from false ones, i'd be very grateful

for now i'm going to stick to promoting GazaFunds as it seems like the most mobile and trustworthy source to donate to and i've heard repeatedly that they have been vetting all their fundraisers

but it would feel wrong to leave someone behind in my inbox who is genuinely in need

any tips?

[hellyeahscarleteen]

Funding update: We're still short

Co-director Jacob here, with an update on our current fundraising efforts. We sure appreciate your understanding this interruption to the award-winning sex and relationships education programming we’d much rather be spending our time providing for you! Just over 200 wonderful folks have made a donation or become a recurring donor since we started, but we are still short of our goal! We’re still 171 new recurring donors and 5K short of 15K we need to pay our most basic bills through the end of 2024 to help us avoid cuts to our staffing and services in 2025. We'll need just around as many people as have already pitched in to close the economic gaps we're up against, and help from people who value what we do to close them. You know the drill! If you can pitch in financially, and especially as a recurring donor, we’d love and appreciate your help at any level. If you can’t, or you already have and want to help some more, making your own posts about us, why you value us, and directing your circles to our work and where to donate to support it can go such a long way. Thank you for keeping us trucking, especially to those of you who have donated now or in the past, and those of you loudly banging this drum for us out here! Here's the link to donate for yourself or to direct others to:

[bunabi]

Sabine update: she is very small and her eyes are clear 🥰

[quasisnipr1048]

Listen, when I was using the internet for the first time, there was a lot of DO's and a lot of DONT's drilled into my head. The two that always sit at the forefront of my mind when I'm using Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are:

Do not click any link you do not recognize.

Do not give any amount of money to strangers you meet on the internet.

Unfortunately, modern internet interactions (and a general lack of education and awareness) seem to have made a frighteningly large group of users forget these two rules.

Look, man, I get it. There's bad shit happening in the world, and sometimes the only way you can feel like you're doing some good is donating. Be it through GoFundMe, Patreon, a nonprofit, whatever. And yes, there's people and organizations out there whose entire purpose for being is verifying all these donation links to make sure the money really is going to a good cause. I applaud those groups, everyone donating, and everyone in between.

But you can't fault someone for being suspicious when it was beat into an entire generation's head not to click on unfamiliar links to give money to people you don't know. You can't fault someone for wondering how this sort of thing gets verified and if they can trust the verification process. Your first line of defense on the internet is to assume every user is lying and/or trying to take advantage of you. It's Social Engineering 101. I feel like this should be common sense, but as I've come to learn in my line of work, common sense is anything but. And I feel some of you really need to reevaluate why you feel so strongly about skepticism towards donation links/posts. That and start being more mindful rather than mindlessly reblogging said posts.

You should trust that people are out here trying to do good.

Trust, but verify.

[mysticdragon3md3]

Source:

[fuckyeah-bears]

Havent been on tumblr much lately, been running around helping students with their encampments

[gardening-guy]

i plan on attempting to grow garlic this fall so that when i harvest it, i can keep a bit of it and donate all the rest to the free community fridges that we have scattered around my city! 🧄🌇

for context: there's this nonprofit org, kinda like food not bombs, who have set up and maintain locations at small businesses or friendly areas that have a fridge + a pantry where you take what you need, leave what you can!

last time i visited one, i dropped off a bunch of teas, coffee filters, canned fruit & veggies, and frozen blueberries! bc you don't often get nice things like coffee & tea & frozen foods at community food pantries bc some people believe they're "luxury goods." maybe they are supposedly "luxury goods," but the food insecure people also deserve luxury!!!

please lmk if there are other easy, beginner-friendly things i can grow in the fall to harvest in big batches to donate that people can use in the kitchen! i also will really appreciate tips on growing garlic!!

[maxkirin]

Someone was asking me about white-noise generators for writing and I can't recommend mynoise.net enough!!

🎶 It's Ad Free 🎶 It has SO MANY generators 🎶 It's Fully Customizable

My current fave is "Now Loading…" an ever-changing soundscape similar to video game loading screens 🎧💯

[artemis-pendragon]

Good morning Tumblr Dot Com! So I've been spreading the word about my friend Haya Orouq's fundraiser to evacuate her family, including her 10 year old sister and very sick mother, from Gaza before the expected assault on Rafah and the indefinite closing of the Egypt-Gaza border that could happen as soon as this week.

Over the weekend, donations slowed down a lot when she was getting thousands of dollars a day last week. Does anyone have any tricks or tips on how to get a stalling GoFundMe moving again? We're quickly running out of time so I thought I'd reach out for advice! 🥰

For reference and in case you have the funds to help, here is Haya's GoFundMe:

GOFUNDME

[lokigodofaces]

i'm annoyed so i'm going to ask. anyone have good ideas for snacks with protein that i can eat on plasma donation days? i always am so hungry after donating plasma & get hungry hours later. i'm guessing i'm not replenishing my protein enough after donation, but i don't want to eat full on meals. I already have to eat a meal pre-donation and immediately post-donation, I can't eat six meals in a day like I want to, I don't have the time to cook that much. So I think I want to try having tons of protein snacks.

[fluttershyes]

i opened a kofi and im going to setup commissions thru it soon...

[mxjackparker]

Tip for people who want to donate money to people in need but don't have much to spare:

Save a link to where you can donate to someone, whether it's a GoFundMe to get a family out of Palestine or the payment info for someone who can't afford food right now, and make it visible to you. Turn it into an icon on your desktop or keep it in your bookmarks bar.

If you get any unexpected money or have more left at the end of the month than you expect, you've planned in advance where you can donate some to and you'll think of that first, instead of buying something else and only remembering after.

Right now the link I have saved is this GoFundMe to help Amal and her family to evacuate Gaza. They're less than 5,000 euros from their goal, and I just made a small donation because I got an unexpected payment and had some to spare. I remembered as my first impulse because the GoFundMe was in my bookmarks bar.

[tj-crochets]

Hey, can I pick your brain about troubleshooting satin stitch? I'm working on some choly knight patterns and the applique bit is destroying me. I have notes of the sizes and tensions that worked well before for her patterns, but now my machine is casually going oops, not gonna do that and my lovely smooth satin stitch is randomly swapping to a looser half ass looking zig zag. I have an old machine (singer stylist 776, so like 70s era) but it gets more regular health checkups than me and is generally in better shape.

I've tried tweaking the tension, tweaking stitch size, swapping needles, swapping bobbin, changing the thread, rethreading just in case, cleaning under the plate with compressed air... I'm finding trouble shooting resources online for older and newer machines but not under vintage.

Hey! I've never machine satin stitched before, but hopefully someone reading this will chime in with some troubleshooting? Machine applique has always intimidated me so I hand applique pretty much all the appliques I do

[national-hockey-gay]

do you have any poetry collection recommendations/poet recommendations in general just to like Read?

boy do i ever!!!

okay i have two all time top favorite poets (not ranked in a particular order):

1. Louise Glück: There was actually an anthology published of all the books so published from the start of her career to 2012.

(Poems 1962-2012 is 600+ pages of incredible poetry and relatively cheap, especially for its size and considering poetry tends to cost more than fiction books)

Glück’s poetry is actually the reason I started reading more poetry in the first place. She writes both long form and short form poetry (with her more recent working being longer than a lot of her previous poems), and her language level tends to be pretty accessible.

She writes about hundreds of different topics, but reading from the anthology you get a large mix of themes about motherhood, love, and nature and she also has collections that focus on greek mythology as well as jewish religion.

She has won a Nobel Prize for her poetry, which I consider to be a pretty good way to gauge the caliber of her work!

Highly, highly recommend her work!!

2. Ocean Vuong.

I’ve read his three most recent works: Night Sky With Exit Wounds, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Time is a Mother.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is actually a novel rather than a poetry collection but it reads a lot like poetry and I consider it to be an must-read.

A lot of his works center around his his experience as a queer, Vietnamese American and his relationship with his own intrapersonal identity as well as with his mother. I cant think of a single poem of his that isn’t absolutely incredible, and I think if you’re going to talk about the best poets of our age he’s a crucial mention.

I highly recommend reading his works in publishing order (which is the way I listed them above). His poetry is genuinely life-changing and I cannot stress how much I recommend his writing.

Outside of my two favorite authors I also recommend:

–Amanda Gorman, who is the youngest inaugural poet in U. S. history and is shaping the voice of modern poetry.

You can watch her recite her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb” here!

She also has published a collection of her poetry, Call Us What We Carry, which I read all in the same day I bought it because it’s brilliant and captivating.

—The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, which is a fiction novel but the main character narrates the story through her own poetry, making it a poetry collection and a novel all in one. I read this for the first time when I was 13 and I pick it up again every single year.

(I do also highly recommend looking up trigger warnings for this book before you read it, because there are a couple scenes that can be intense!)

—The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi. It’s likely you’re familiar with this quote from it (which i see circulating tumblr and pinterest all the time):

“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.

I want an excuse to change my life.”

And I can guarantee the rest of this poetry collection is just as poignant and beautiful! Highly recommend, 10/10 stars always.

—Pablo Neruda is also one of my favorite poets! I own a large collection of his poetry, The Poems of Pablo Neruda, which places the original poem, written in Spanish, next to the English translation, which I enjoy a lot. He also has a lot of well-known quotes that float around tumblr a lot, so that sense of familiarity can be fun, especially when you’re not expecting it!

Hope you enjoy these recommendations!

[quasisnipr1048]

Guilt-tripping is a form of social engineering.

Please get that through your head before you start clicking donation links.

Yes, scammers absolutely can and will emotionally manipulate you into giving them money. No, it's not racist to question if a donation link is legitimate.

I'm tired of seeing this shit play out on my timeline today. But I guess this is par for the course for the pissing-on-the-poor reading comprehension website.

Please for the love of all that is holy practice some good internet habits.

You should always be suspicious of links you don't recognize or users asking for money. Even if it's for a good cause that aligns with your beliefs or politics...actually, especially if it aligns with your beliefs and politics.

And quite frankly, you shouldn't be so trusting of other users, regardless of how long they've been here.

[mxamericanblue]

i'm thinking of starting a side blog exclusively for Palestine go fund me's, it's hard to gain any traction with my little personal blog, and so many people need help. is this a good idea?