This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide.
These may feel like grim times. Perhaps you feel powerless, even paralyzed. But we’re not at all helpless. Each of us has almost miraculous powers to save or transform lives, and this column is a guide to exercising those powers this holiday season.
What if you could save someone in West Africa from developing river blindness, caused by a parasite that can destroy the optic nerve, for 75 cents? Or keep a child from dying of hunger in Sudan’s civil war and famine for $14 a week? Or help a first grader here in the United States get glasses to finally see the board and read a book, for $150?
That is what you can accomplish by supporting the nonprofits I feature in my holiday giving guide this year.
To donate, visit KristofImpact.org. As in the past, generous supporters are matching donations to each of the nonprofits I recommend. Even better, this year all of the resulting total will be matched again by Bloomberg Philanthropies, so that each $1 from you generates $4 for the nonprofit.
The three nonprofits I’ve chosen will also share my $1.15 million Holiday Impact Prize, with this prize money donated by supporters.
So here are my recommendations:
The Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition supports 26,000 Sudanese volunteers in grass roots efforts called Emergency Response Rooms that are saving lives in Sudan as it endures what is probably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
I’ve seen the need while reporting on the massacres, mass rape, atrocities and starvation in that country. “We don’t want to see any Black people,” a militia leader said as he lined up all males over the age of 10 in a village of Black Africans, a female survivor told me last year. She said that the militia massacred the men and boys and then raped the women and girls, calling them slaves. These racist massacres are an echo of the Darfur genocide 20 years ago, but this time there is far less global interest or response.
Some 400,000 people have died in Sudan since a civil war started two and a half years ago and led to famine as well. But one of the things I’ve learned in a career covering atrocities is that side by side with the worst of humanity you usually find the best — and that’s the Emergency Response Rooms.
These are community kitchens or other local initiatives to help neighbors with food, medical care or other assistance. In contrast to most humanitarian aid, which is top down, this is a model of bottom-up assistance by local volunteers and thus particularly cost-effective. And even when warfare forces most aid groups to evacuate, these heroic people stay. Nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, they are particularly crucial for the three million children under 5 years old in Sudan who are acutely malnourished.
Even before the four-time multiplier of the match, a $15 donation will pay to evacuate someone from a crisis area and provide a temporary shelter and five meals. Or $100 can provide emergency food baskets for 60 people in need. The rest of the world may be averting its eyes, but we can step up.
Helen Keller Intl is one of my favorite nonprofits because it is dazzlingly cost-effective in fighting blindness and malnutrition. I’ve seen it operate in many countries in Africa and Asia, and in my view it offers a return on investment that no hedge fund could ever match.
One of the scenes that has pained me the most while covering the demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development was of a warehouse in West Africa stocked with millions of doses of medicines to prevent river blindness, to deworm children and to cure a debilitating parasitic ailment called schistosomiasis. The medicines in the warehouse had been provided free by pharmaceutical companies, but the United States then canceled funding for the mass drug administrations that are crucial to defeating these neglected tropical diseases at scale.
Helen Keller will use much of the money raised in this giving campaign to address that need and distribute donated drugs across a number of countries in Africa. We may not be able to do anything about the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. But this is a way each of us can fill a gap, preventing hideous diseases for only 75 cents per person reached.
Vision To Learn operates here in the United States, getting glasses in the hands of children — and thus giving them a better chance to succeed in school.
Up to one-quarter of children need glasses. But kids in low-income households often don’t get glasses, or they break or lose their glasses and can’t afford replacements.
“In the cities in which we operate, roughly 95 percent of the kids who need glasses don’t have them,” said Austin Beutner, founder of Vision To Learn.
So these children struggle to see the blackboard, may fidget in class and be viewed as troublemakers — and then live up to this reputation. A study published this year found that young people in the criminal justice system are twice as likely as others to have impaired vision; if they’d been able to get glasses in elementary school, I suspect, many of those lives might have gone in a better direction.
I’ve written about my old classmates in rural Oregon who have died after struggles with addiction, criminality and homelessness. If we had invested more in educating them, we wouldn’t have needed to spend so much incarcerating them — and glasses are a crucial educational investment. A careful Johns Hopkins study found that for low-achieving children, Vision To Learn glasses did even more to raise reading scores than one-on-one tutoring or an extended school day, and at a far lower cost per child.
Vision To Learn has provided 600,000 pairs of glasses to students around the country over the last decade, and the cost is just $150 per child — and when kids break glasses or lose them, they get free replacements.
I heard earlier this year of a little boy in Oregon who was completely unmanageable and disrupting his entire class — and then he got glasses from Vision To Learn and was transformed overnight into a well-behaved and much more successful student.
Donations to all three of these charities are tax-deductible, and if you donate through my KristofImpact.org website the credit card fees are covered by my partner in this effort, Focusing Philanthropy. That means 100 cents of the dollar will reach the nonprofit you select. Except that this year, because of the double matches, it’s 400 cents.
Last year readers contributed more than $17 million through this giving guide, and this year with the Bloomberg match we hope to beat that record. Here’s our chance to reclaim our values and push back at the darkness. Check out the giving options at KristofImpact.org and together we can create some hope — for the many who will benefit, and perhaps for ourselves as well.
This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned.
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