CHARITY
Love With Food – Gourmet Bites for a cause
You know how Birchbox delivers monthly luxe beauty samples (of which you have the option of buying the full sized items on their site if you can’t live without)? Well, Love With Food is a similar idea only with food and a feel-good edge. You pay $10 a month to get a curated selection of gourmet bites, and for every box you get, a meal is donated to a hungry child. Totally brilliant.
Love With Food
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If you realize that you devoured some of the snacks a little too fast, you can buy the full-sized versions on Love With Food’s website for a discounted price (and free shipping). There’s a new theme every month, so for example, this month’s was Classics with a Twist which included:
Classics with a Twist snacks
- Kids 50 Fruit & Veggie Juice – apple, carrot, and acerola berry juices with 50% less calories
- Ola! Foods Granola – oats, pure vanilla, and maple syrup
- Chocwasabi Chocolate Covered Wasabi
- Cosmos Creations Salted Caramel Baked Corn
- Revolution Tea Green Tea – an antioxidant-rich green tea with acai
- Mary’s Gone Crackers – organic, vegan, and gluten-free crunch snacks made with whole grains
- Wacky Apple Wild Berry Flat Fruit - Organic apple and blackberries mashed into fruit leather
- Emily’s Chocolates Dark Chocolate Orange Good Fortune Cookie, which provides you fortunes like so:
;)
The more you purchase from their site and feedback you leave on items you’ve tasted, the more points you rack up towards free food. ALSO, if you’re feeling extra generous, you have the option to gift a friend with an 8-month subscription, and the same rule applies — for every box they get, a child in need also gets a meal donated. Wins all around.
Check them out at lovewithfood.com.
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Shy
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Thaakat Love Campaign: A better way to show you care
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This Valentines’ Day, donate to the L.O.V.E campaign in honor of a loved one! Thaakat Foundation’s L.O.V.E. Campaign aims to bring awareness to the increasing instance of violence against women worldwide. It is estimated that 1 in 4 women will experience violent abuse in their lifetime. There are three different levels of donation:
1) For a donation under $25, an e-card will be sent to your loved one.
Birthday beginnings…
I’m so sorry for the dead air on here. First it was the holidays, then I fell deathly sick with the flu (it got me bad) and after being away for so long, it’s so hard to figure out where to begin. I felt like my birthday might be most appropriate 
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First, thank you all for the tweets, texts, calls, fb messages on my birthday. I’m always overwhelmed and so touched by the people who reach out and make the day more special. Whereas last year, I had similar reflections but felt like I embraced my birthday in a very different way, I wanted to make this one count in a more selfless way. On a serious note, there was so much negativity going on in this world towards the end of the year — the shootings, the rapes, the violence — that I started reflecting on how I can do something on my birthday to ‘give back’ in whatever little way. Mostly because I was feeling grateful…when normally it’s so easy to get caught up in what’s not going right to ignore all that you have, I was feeling spoiled. There are so many tremendous people in my life, all thanks to God…this was a time I didn’t want to lose sight of all of those things.
A couple weeks before my birthday, I came up with an idea to use my wall of the normal ‘happy birthday’ facebook posts and translate that to how much I’d donate to charity. It’s a small gesture, but the point was every single person is in my life for a reason and every single person i come across inspires me in some way. I wanted some sort of measured way to show how grateful I am. And quite simply, fb was just the easiest place to track where people come together so that’s why I decided to go that route.
1:Face Watch for Cancer
Pantene x Seventeen Magazine hosts National Donate Your Hair Day on 4/27
Get a free cut and style with a top stylist while doing a good deed: Pantene and Seventeen Magazine have teamed up to host the first-ever National Donate Your Hair Day on April 27, benefiting the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program. This will be the first annual day of giving where people nationwide are encouraged to cut and donate their hair to Pantene Beautiful Lengths.
Photo source: Seventeen.com
About Beautiful Lengths: Created in 2006, Pantene Beautiful Lengths inspires people to grow, cut and donate their healthy hair to create free, real-hair wigs for women who have lost their hair due to cancer treatments. To date, Pantene Beautiful Lengths has received more than 311,000 hair donations from generous men, women, and children and more than 18,000 real-hair wigs have been provided to female cancer patients.
In celebration of the inaugural National Donate Your Hair Day, Pantene and Seventeen Magazine will host an event on April 27 at the Rita Hazan Salon in New York City. Pantene Celebrity Hair Stylist Danilo will also be at the salon to support the hair donors and lend his voice to the program.
East Africa food crisis: Donate now
I just hope to bring a little more attention in some small way to the gripping food and healthcare crisis in East Africa. The biggest drought they’ve experienced in 60 years has left millions (the latest estimate is about 12 million) desperately short of food and clean water.
Drought, famine, and conflict are affecting about 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Photo credit: UNICEF
“Every day of delay in assistance is literally a matter of life or death for children and their families in the famine-affected areas,” says Mark Bowden, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia.
I’m looking at some of the full plates of food in the pictures I post (not to mention the trays of food that can practically tipping off the table when it’s time to break fast this month), and it’s really hard to fathom not having any of it after a whole day of not eating. But that’s the reality of the people there right now. I urge anyone who has the means, even if it’s a few dollars, to donate to the cause. HERE ARE SOME WAYS TO HELP:
Butter Lane partners up with Divanee for Ramadan cupcakes!
Butter Lane cupcakes for Divanee
Here’s one way to get into the Ramadan spirit (and for a good cause too!): South Asian webzine, Divanee, has partnered up with NYC-bakery, Butter Lane Cupcakes, to create these Ramadan-inspired treats (available from now until August 29th). They cost $4 each of which $1 will go straight to benefiting Save A Mother, a nonprofit dedicated to maternal health.
Hope you consider ordering some for those iftar (fast breaking) dinners you may be hosting — or for your favorite fasting friend (pick me!). Trust me, after a 16-hour fast, it’d be considered one exceptionally sweet gesture.
