www.thehungersite.com
The daddy of the current crop of social conscience sites. The premise is very simple: go to the site, look at its sponsors' logos and these companies will donate a quarter of a cup of food each on your behalf to the starving people around the world. As the site says, every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger and 75 per cent of these are children. Only one click per person is counted each day, so visit The Hunger Site regularly and you can make a difference. Making it your homepage would help you to remember.
www.therainforestsite.com
The Rainforest Site was founded last May to help protect the world's environment - almost two acres of tropical rainforest disappear every second. It works on the same basis as The Hunger Site; visitors can help save an area of rainforest with the click of a button. These donations, distributed by the Nature Conservancy, are paid for by The Rainforest Site's sponsors. A typical donation helps save a not inconsiderable 14.4 sq ft of rain forest. The fact that it has more sponsors than The Hunger Site is a little sad though.
www.thechildsurvivalsite.com
Founded just six weeks ago, www.thechildsurvivalsite.com's homepage reveals the shocking fact that 1,270 children die each hour from preventable diseases such as measles and malaria. Each day, visitors to the site help over 4,000 children fight blindness and common childhood diseases by donating vitamin A capsules. Worldwide, over 100 million children and mothers are vitamin A deficient. One capsule helps boost the immune system of a child for six months. Visit this site today.
www.greatergood.com
GreaterGood.com, which runs all of the above sites, is dedicated to making it free and easy to support good causes through everyday Internet use. Visitors to this site do what they already do online - shop, search, make travel arrangements etc - but with the crucial difference that each action automatically generates revenue for a cause they select at no extra cost to them. By the end of this year they will have generated over $5 million for organisations such as the Special Olympics and Save The Children.
www.corporatewatch.org
The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those that are killing it have names and addresses - so says the homepage of Corporate Watch. Based in Oxford, England, Corporate Watch is a radical research and publishing group. It was set up four years ago to support activism against large corporations, particularly multinationals. It specialises in a particularly rabid brand of conspiracy theorising, but it is always worth reading about issues from different angles so as to better understand people's feelings.
