This column is part of Times Opinion’s 2024 Giving Guide.
Forget the necktie that will sit in Dad’s closet or the perfume that your sister Sue will soon regift, for I have some better ideas.
This is my annual holiday giving guide, and I think you’ll like the charities I recommend this year — and so will Dad and Sue if you contribute in their names. You can donate and find out more information through my Kristof Holiday Impact Prize website, KristofImpact.org, which I’ve used for the past six years to support nonprofits in my giving guide.
Here’s what your contributions can accomplish this year:
Give a woman her life back! One of the most heartbreaking conditions I’ve reported on is obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that happens in poor countries when a woman endures many hours of obstructed labor and no doctor is available to perform a C-section. The baby usually dies, and the woman is left with injuries affecting the vaginal wall and the bladder or rectum, so she continuously leaks bodily waste.
These women — sometimes just teenage girls — can feel stigmatized and humiliated, even that they have been cursed by God.
The good news is that together we can help them reclaim their lives, with a corrective surgery that costs just $619 per person. A nonprofit called the Fistula Foundation has financed more than 100,000 surgeries through a network of more than 150 hospitals in more than 30 countries. Yet need remains enormous.
In Ethiopia I once met a girl who was raped at 13 and suffered a fistula; villagers put her in a hut without a door so that hyenas would finish her off. She fought the animals off and the next day crawled away for help. Eventually she was taken to a hospital that repaired her injury.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a joy greater than that of a woman who after surgery is able to resume normal life. It’s exhilarating to be able to help someone so profoundly for such a modest sum.
Save a child’s life! One of the worst things that can happen to someone is to lose a child, and that is still far too common in poor countries. In the West African country Mali, for example, almost one in 10 children died before the age of 5 as of 2017.
An organization called Muso Health has figured out how to deploy community health workers in remote places and save large numbers of children. When Muso Health moved into Mali, child mortality in the areas where it worked fell an astonishing 95 percent over seven years, according to a published study. That’s because children were much more likely to be treated promptly for malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and other ailments.
One recently published study found that even in an area with escalating armed conflict, Muso reduced child deaths by 63 percent. In addition to Mali, Muso now works in five other African countries to help improve care, but resources remain scarce.
Led by Ari Johnson, a Harvard-trained doctor, Muso Health is a triumph of public health nerdiness, with programs designed by experts, tested in the field and then rigorously measured for impact. Community health workers — mostly local women who are trained and supervised — carry diagnostic tools and medicine and are guided by a smartphone app.
“We believe no one anywhere should die waiting for health care,” Johnson told me. “Every person deserves care with the speed and urgency we would want for our own children.”
All this is a bargain: The cost of bringing one more person into the Muso health care network is only $22 per year.
Help a child learn to read! Books were my childhood’s magic carpets that lifted me on the lifelong journey that now leads me to write this column. I owe so much to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and to Freddy the Pig. But too many kids in America today don’t have books, library cards or parents accustomed to reading to them.
That’s where Reach Out and Read comes in. It hands out children’s books to low-income American families — more than seven million books last year — but even more important, it piggybacks on well-child visits to pediatricians, who encourage parents to read to the child regularly.
The doctors give a book on each visit, from birth until the program ends at the age of 5. That amounts to 14 or 15 books for a child in the program.
In a sense, the doctors “prescribe” reading to the child, and studies show that parents take this very seriously and are significantly more likely to read aloud to their children. The aim is to cultivate the habit of family reading so that the children will be ready to thrive in school.
The prospect of receiving books also increases well-child visits by up to 40 percent, keeping children healthier and creating a virtuous circle in which parents also hear more about the importance of reading.
While the Fistula Foundation and Muso Health work abroad, Reach Out and Read operates across the United States. It now reaches one-fifth of children ages 5 and under in America and aims to reach half by 2030. Because it relies on doctors already seeing children in their offices, the cost is only about $30 per child per year, for a seat on that magic carpet of reading that transports a child to lifelong success.
These three nonprofits will share the $150,000 Kristof Holiday Impact Prize, an award underwritten, as in previous years, by three donors. Focusing Philanthropy, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that promotes high-impact giving, helps me run the impact prize and donation program; it also covers credit card fees when donations are made through KristofImpact.org, so that the nonprofit receives 100 cents of each dollar donated.
For those who don’t have money to donate but do have time, I also offer an option for volunteering:
Walk someone through a personal crisis! We’ve all heard about rising mental health problems and the loneliness epidemic, affecting young people in particular, and Crisis Text Line offers a way for you to help. It’s a 24/7 service in which trained volunteers provide free, confidential mental health support, all by text messages.
Why texts rather than voice calls? Young people are used to texting, and some people may find texting less embarrassing than a phone conversation. Crisis Text Line supports 3,500 text conversations each day with the help of about 15,000 active volunteers, handling everything from bullying concerns to suicidal feelings. To reach the service, people wanting help simply text “hello” to 741741.
Volunteers get training online for 15 to 20 hours, including practice with a conversation simulator, before they are connected to incoming texts. In an emergency, a volunteer can get help from staff supervisors who jump in to assist.
More than 90 percent of the volunteers report that their own mental health improves as a result of their participation.
These are nonprofits that change the world and give each of us the chance to help others in profound ways. Whether your priority is helping women and girls overcome a devastating gynecological condition or saving children’s lives or helping kids learn to love books, these are transformative causes, and each organization has an excellent record. As we prepare for the holidays, I’m betting your kids or siblings or friends would get more of a kick from a donation in their names to one of these nonprofits than from a fruit basket.
If you’re feeling dispirited by national or global events, remember the adage that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. It feels like a relief and privilege at this time to be able to do something so positive. So I hope you’ll visit KristofImpact.org to donate or volunteer; this is your chance to be a miracle worker.
This column is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned.
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