If you’ve watched TV or listened to the radio at all these past couple of days, you’re probably aware of several ways in which you can do something to help (bearing in mind that donating to the Red Cross is still tops on the list). You can also volunteer with the Harris County Citizen Corps, as noted here. Kevin has some other suggestions as well.
I’ve gotten about a half dozen email solicitations for giving to relief efforts, from Richard Morrison, Nick Lampson, Chris Bell (who’s also been touting the Houston Food Bank), the Texas Democratic Party, Jay Aiyer, and Constable May Walker, in whose Precinct 7 the Astrodome lies. There are certainly many other such pleas out there as well.
Finally, frequent commenter ttyler5 has set up this blog as an “effort to integrate the blogosphere into our local emergency and relief operations”. Galveston County Tax Assessor-Collector Cheryl E. Johnson has contributed this post with information about donation dropoff points down there.
UPDATE: Add Mike Fjetland to the list – he was actually one of the first to send out an email promising to give al his donations for a period to Katrina relief.
UPDATE: And Brian Cweren, and Carol Alvarado, and David Harris, and undoubtedly many more.
Do you or any of your readers know of places that are matching donations? 37signals was matching donations up to $5000, but they hit their limit before I could forward a copy of my Red Cross donation. Perhaps there are other organizations out there with deeper pockets than 37signals that are also matching donations; if so, I could make my little donation count double, triple, or even more.
Appreciate the mention above, the idea is to create a permanent blog link center for emergency info for our area.
Right now, the info is spread out everywhere, and citizens as well as bloggers don’t have a place to go to get to all the links.
Bloggers should be able to copy and paste any links they need for their sites directly from the page.
As one of the many thousands of people who tried to volunteer for the dome relief effort, I spent about 4 hours just finding out that I could not join the dome team, and needed to call one of the other local relief efforts to volunteer.
I’ve been adding links and posts, and I’ve set the blog up to accept link and bulletin posts as comments under the first entry at the page.
All are welcome to ad info, links and posts, as well as suggestions for better organization of the info, etc.
In a few minutes I will be adding the OfftheKuff posts on Katrina to the page, in the blog section.
Anyway, it’s a permanent project, and we’ve only begun to collect all the links that should be there.