Washington DC: Merry Charity, DC
Michelle Obama says, Thumbs up to volunteering over the holidays.
A reader recently emailed us asking about volunteer opportunities around the Christmas holidays in Washington DC. After sniffing around a bit, I learned an interesting fact. The DC Jewish Community Center has a monopoly on all Christmas Day volunteering opportunities. Wanna help feed a Christmas meal to a homeless guy? Gotta go through the JCC. Give presents to underprivileged children? JCC. From what I understand, you need to be cleared through some sort of background check, and even pay for the privileged of giving your time away for free. (Surely, to cover administrative costs.) So, if that’s how you want to spend Christmas Day, contact them now and get started.
The local GLBT volunteering organization, Burgundy Crescent, has non-D25 opportunities for the holiday season as well. I recently received a message from one of their volunteer coordinators:
The holidays are a time when many of us start thinking about giving back to the community. Christmas Day will be spent with family or friends, watching movies, or eating Chinese takeout but you still have a solid week to volunteer before you have to compete with all the “new year’s resolution do-gooders”.
DC’s award-winning GLBT social volunteer organization, Burgundy Crescent Volunteers, is finalizing volunteer opportunities for the holidays and they will be announced in their weekly email newsletter and on the website so the best way to find out how to participate is to send an email to eric@burgundycrescent.org or angela@burgundycrescent.org and they will subscribe you to that newsletter. You can also see the calendar at http://www.burgundycrescent.org/calendar.html.
Are you in a city other than DC and know of community service opportunities around the holidays? Post them as a comment or send them in to submit@thenewgay.net. Get cracking, though. Only 10 days left!
Editor’s note: The original offending image showing a Salvation Army volunteer moving boxes of food has been replaced by this hopefully unoffensive image of Michelle Obama volunteering in a DC soup kitchen.
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Really? A photo of the Salvation Army?
Heh, “Um…” beat me to it. Of all the charities… =P
Okay, other than refusing to take blood donations from gay men, how else is the Salvation Army evil?
You’ve mixed up the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Red Cross doesn’t accept blood donations from men who have had sex with men since 1981, although that is an FDA rule.
As for the Salvation Army, a brief overview from Wikipedia:
“The Salvation Army in the U.S. has been the topic of some controversial discussions about discrimination against homosexuals in their hiring practices.[22] According to lesbian/gay newsmagazine The Advocate, in 2001, the Bush administration was “willing to do whatever it takes to perpetuate, support, and defend discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals” in exchange for The Salvation Army’s lobby support for Faith-Based Initiatives, in what the publication described as a “secret arrangement.”[23] The New York Times reported that the Salvation Army believed it had a firm commitment from the White House to issue a regulation that would override local antidiscrimination laws. A disclosure of The Salvation Army’s request “outraged some civil rights groups and lawmakers,” and resulted in an immediate reversal of a previous promise to honor the request.
The Salvation Army maintains that they were “not trying to get permission to discriminate against hiring gays and lesbians for the majority of its roughly 55,000 jobs and merely wanted a federal regulation that made clear that the charity did not have to ordain sexually active gay ministers and did not have to provide medical benefits to the same-sex partners of employees.”[24]
The Salvation Army’s position is that because it is a church, Section VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly guarantees its right to discriminate on the basis of its religious beliefs in its hiring. To reinforce its position, it threatened to close all soup kitchens in New York City when the city government proposed legislation that would require all organizations doing business with it to provide equal benefits to unmarried domestic partners.[25]”
The part about closing the soup kitchen hits especially close to home, given Catholic Charities’ threats to end services if the DC marriage bill passes.
Um, yeah, I’m an idiot. Sorry.
I didn’t think anyone said the Salvation Army photo was offensive, just a poor choice given the Salvation Army’s history with LGBT issues.
And a small correction to my previous comment: the FDA rule applies to men who have had sex with men since 1977, not 1981.
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