FEATURED CAUSE: 29 Gifts -- We're finally putting our own oxygen mask on first

[Cami Walker -- 29Gifts Founder]

For the months of July, August and September, we've decided to follow Mbali's advice about putting our own oxygen mask first. Our Featured Cause will be 29 Gifts.

This community has accomplished so many amazing things over the last year.

• We’ve helped California 29Giver Elysia Skye and breast cancer survivor raise $10,000 to fund a much needed surgery.

• We’ve raised $6000 to send Mbali, our 29 Gifts Spiritual Advisor, go on a humanitarian singing tour in South Africa, where she and her choir were invited to do a private performance for Nelson Mandela and raised lots of money for many worthy causes.

• We raised enough money to help Charity: Water provide a well that will give clean water for a village of hundreds of people in Africa for decades to come.

• We’ve even provided hundreds of pairs of garden gloves for the Seattle Youth Garden Club in Seattle, which helps under-served youth learn life skills and business concepts.

But as you know, right now, the 29 Gifts coffers are nearly empty, which hinders us from doing some larger projects we’ve been planning for the next twelve months. For example, we’d like to join Beauty Without Borders in Afghanistan to build beauty schools and give women a way to support themselves, thereby overcoming the oppression women living there have endured for centuries. We’d like to help Greg Mortenson’s mission to promote peace in the conflict plagued countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan by building schools for the communities’ children. We're looking into joining forces with women in Bahrain to overcome the societal stigmas they live under. We'd like to help Call+Response get the word out and END global slavery.

But all of planning and implementing all of these projects is time intensive for the few people who work for 29 Gifts and right now we're in danger of not even being able to cover payroll for these people past July.

We want to move forward in the world and raise our collective voice together to send out the positive energies and inspire the world wide change that was the original intention of the 29-Day Giving Challenge.

There are a couple of ways you can support 29 Gifts over the next three months:

1. Invite your friends to join the challenge and help us strengthen our collective voice..Our goal is to have 29,000 committed 29Givers by 9/29/09. We feel that there is strength in numbers and that the more members we have, the more power we have to bring about big changes in the world. We feel that by coming together and sending out our collective positive energy, we can help this world be a better place – but we need your help to make that voice louder and stronger.

Right now we have just over 4,400 members. That means we need to add 24,600 new committed 29Givers in the next three months! Please use this email invitation to encourage everyone you know to join us!

2. Chip in to our Operating Expense Fund and Play Gift Tag
The amount of support we saw in reaction to My plea for financial help in the last week left me speechless and humbled. I have been astounded at the number of donations that came in – proof of the incredible giving spirit that this community embodies. Thanks to all of you, the past due bills have been paid so the immediate stress is over.

However, we'd like to raise $4400 in the next three months, to help cover basic operating expenses like payroll, hosting fees, graphic design fees and web application fees. This will give us some breathing room until the book and our new line of 29 Gifts merchandise is released in October, which will finally give us a much-needed revenue stream. So please continue to play Gift Tag and chip in. Every dollar counts and every donation of $29 or more receives a set of 29 Gifts Gift Tags, which you can pass on to friends to spread the word about our movement.

[Cami Walker -- 29Gifts Founder]

I want to take time to say THANK YOU to each one of you who have given to help so far! Some have made contributions of $1... some $29 and a few even as large as $50 and $100. No matter what amount you've contributed, I want to stress that it makes a huge difference to us!