Gift Giving to the Planet and Its People
Looking for last-minute Christmas gift ideas? How about a flock of chickens for a family in Thailand, a night of shelter for a homeless mother and children or a box of rain-forest cereal? Or maybe a Navajo necklace, a contemporary art lunch box or a Japanese paper fan to help your favorite museum?
Environmental and charity groups and museum officials nationwide report brisk business this year as consumers “seem to want their money to go to the best possible source or cause they support,” says Edie Tyler, a member of Heal the Bay, the organization dedicated to cleaning up Santa Monica Bay.
“Alternative gift giving is a good and growing concept, especially in this recession,” says Jennifer DeVoll, who runs the Alternative Christmas Market at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. “These days you almost feel immoral going out and buying some junky product.”
Since the early 1980s, All Saints has operated its market each Christmas, working with groups that offer products and services to benefit the needy in the United States and many Third World countries. The effort is coordinated through Alternative Gift Markets Inc.
For example, Heifer Project International offers gifts of livestock that can be sent to families in Third World countries. You can purchase one chicken for a dollar or a flock for $20. Then you receive a gift card to present to the person in whose name you have purchased the gift.
DeVoll says the project gives “the chickens to a family to provide them a way of supporting themselves. Then that family gives some of the chicken offspring back so they can go to another needy family.”
Among other organizations operating through All Saints:
* Hunger USA, which supports soup kitchens and food banks nationwide
* Maternal Child Care, which raises money for educational programs for young pregnant women in Honduras
* Habitat for Humanity, the organization assisted by former President Jimmy Carter, which helps in building houses for the poor, collecting donations of money for a door, a room or an entire house
* Union Station in Pasadena, which provides shelter for the homeless
* Young and Healthy, a Pasadena program of volunteer pediatricians treating children whose parents cannot afford health care, which accepts donations for prescriptions, blood tests, X-rays, etc.
Last week at the daylong market, All Saints raised about $20,000 for the charity groups. No contributions go to the church, says DeVoll. All Saints gives $500 to the market for overhead and for printing costs of the shopping list. DeVoll will be at the church, on Euclid Avenue, Sunday between 9:45 and 11:15 a.m. to distribute shopping lists to last-minute buyers.
This year, the Los Angeles chapter of the Volunteers of America has set up a program called Caring Gifts, modeled after a Denver program. The organization publishes a catalogue that can be picked up at McDonald’s or Ralphs, or ordered by calling (800) 777-GIFT.
Gifts include: Two weeks of home-delivered meals for an elderly person ($34); one night of shelter for a homeless mother and children ($21); one day of care for the child of a low-income working mother ($16); school supplies for the child of a low-income working mother ($9); one day of in-home care for a frail elderly person or a handicapped child ($33); 10-day supply of baby food for an infant of a needy family ($23); Santa for a Year, a donation of $250 to the Volunteers of America to help care for needy children and the frail elderly throughout the year.
The nonprofit Heal the Bay operates a gift store each Christmas season to raise money for its many programs. All the products are either donated or bought at cost, Tyler says. This year, space for the Heal the Bay store was donated by the Century City Shopping Center.
“We try to sell what’s in the bay,” says Tyler, pointing out such gifts as plush toy seals, fish pins, earrings and necklaces, fish clocks and clothing with the Heal the Bay logo. Prices range from 25-cent dolphin erasers to Donjo dolphin and whale sculptures starting at $75. The only item in the store that is not fish-oriented is Rainforest Crunch, the nut brittle made by Rainforest Products in Mill Valley.
The candy and two new cereals, Rainforest Crisp and Rainforest Granola, are sold by many environmental organizations and in most health food stores. The nuts in the cereals and candy come from the Brazilian rain forest.
Both the Rainforest Action Network in San Franciso and the Massachusetts-based Cultural Survival organization receive money from the sales. Rainforest Products buys the nuts for its candy and cereals from Cultural Survival, a nonprofit human rights group founded in 1972 by a group of social scientists from Harvard.
“Cultural Survival is helping forest residents increase their income from harvesting nuts, so if enough nuts are sold, the Brazil nut trees in the rain forest will become too valuable to be cut down,” says Jim Dobson, a Rainforest Products spokesman.
Museums also benefit from alternative gift giving. Of the 8,000 museums across the country, nearly 3,000 operate gift shops, where consumers can find unusual items ranging in price from $1 to thousands of dollars. Proceeds help museum programs and exhibits.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, opened in 1870, is undoubtedly the leader in merchandising museum art, with six catalogues published each year and 10 outlets across the country in addition to its on-site store.
The Met generates “around $5 million a year” from its retail sales, according to spokesman John Ross. “To a large degree the whole retail business is an extension of our educational mission,” Ross says. “The most popular things we sell are what we call ‘flat art,’ our posters and postcards.”
Posters, postcards and books are also big sellers at three Los Angeles museums: the County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Southwest Museum.
“Our most popular are the books on Native American culture,” says Jan Posson, manager of the Southwest Museum gift shop.
“Buying a gift here directly affects the programs we’ll be able to bring to the public. It’s kind of like a double gift, one for a friend or relative and one for the museum.”
