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There's no point in even talking about people's perceptions. I'm always amazed at what people think about me, just a dumb singer in a rock band, let alone some important topic. People are really involved, and rightfully so, in their own lives. You can't say anything negative about people not being informed, because they don't have time to be informed. It's a hard world to get a break in.
— John Mellencamp, "Ain't That America?", Salon, 2003-06-30
To be included in the following list, I must have contributed to the charity or non-profit organization and be planning on doing so again. This is not a comprehensive list, but is a list of organizations that I recommend others support as well. Some of these are local to me.
Amnesty International is the most ethical, reliable, and worthwhile political charity that I know, and they aren't even political. AI is possibly the world's second most effective human rights organization behind the International Red Cross, and in some ways is even more worthwhile. Their specialty is drawing attention to human rights violations and prisoners of conscience and raising public awareness and the pressure of public opinion until something is done about the situation, and they have been surprisingly effective.
I highly recommend both supporting and listening to these people, even about things you disagree with. They're reliable, consistent, and honest, which is vanishingly rare in this area of political organizations.
The EFF is the best-known and most influential organization devoted to on-line free speech, electronic intellectual property issues, and related matters. They've led the charge against such things as the Communication Decency Act and the completely pointless US cryptography export restrictions. You can think of them as the ACLU for on-line issues; they have a similar problem with having gotten rather large and less personal, but they also have the funding base to be really effective.
Whatever you think of Richard Stallman's way of presenting his ideas, the Free Software Foundation is one of the most effective advocates of free software both in terms of mindshare and in terms of producing good software that works and that people use. I tend to be somewhat ambivalent about the GPL and am willing to use closed-source software when it's the best available alternative, but I've never regretted supporting the FSF. Even if they're idealists, and they are, they're idealists that we need.
I believe in always supporting my local library. I practically grew up in libraries and spent much of my childhood reading voraciously through the children and then adult fiction sections of my local library, and I want libraries to always be there for others to do the same. Libraries are an excellent example of a non-profit charity that everyone feels is worthwhile, that's often chronically underfunded, and that has essentially no drawbacks. If you have any money free for charity, please give some of it to your local library system.
You simply can't go wrong supporting public television in the United States as far as I'm concerned. I personally support it largely for Frontline and Frontline/World, which are my two favorite news programs, but others watch the nature programming, educational science programming, or even the childrens shows. I'm personally not a fan of the entertainment programming on public television, but their news programs are unparalleled in the United States for delivering real, less-biased news.
I support KTEH as one of the several local stations near me. You will likely want to support whatever station is local to you.
Long before ebooks, electronic readers, digital copy protection, or he web, there was Project Gutenberg, the first and oldest project devoted to making available to the entire world as much of the public domain literature ever written as possible. Now that electronic publication has become more popular, there are numerous other efforts like this and web sites cropping up all over the place, but Project Gutenberg is continuing to plug away, following the same mission it has been pursuing since 1971.
Public Knowledge is a fairly new organization devoted to preserving a healthy information commons, which means that they support the public domain, fight harmful extensions of copyright law by corporations for their own private benefit, and educate people about the nature of intellectual property. This is an area where I have a lot of interest and a lot of concerns, and the more people working to support a sane governmental policy on copyright, trademark, and patent law, the better.
SPI is the non-profit organization behind the little bit of central organization that the Debian GNU/Linux distribution has. As an avid user and supporter of Debian, I'm also a supporter of SPI, since any large organized effort needs some degree of central managing organization to handle hardware donations, provide a legal contact point, and so forth. SPI also supports a few other free software and open source projects.
I am a very strong believer in community colleges. Having attended one myself before transferring to Stanford, I've seen first-hand the wide range of people they serve, handling everything from patching up deficient high school educations, retraining people who have to change careers, helping single mothers find a career that will let them get off welfare, and providing a local college with a solid introductory education for people who aren't ready to go away to a four-year school. They tend to often be chronically underfunded, and they also often have scholarship programs for low-income students or for students transferring to four-year schools that can use donations.
I support Yuba College in particular because I'm an alumnus. They can use your support, of course, but you may want to look for a community college near you and support it instead if you're not near Yuba.
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