Do-Gooder Suggestions

Looking to start the year on a high note and make a positive contribution to the planet?

Here are some green-minded organizations that will put your money to good use, as recommended by Charity Navigator, a respected evaluator of charities.

Yikes! Some really well-known and esteemed organizations received low rankings, but in my first post of the year I'm staying positive by listing only selected 4-star earners working in a diversity of causes--all worthy of your consideration.

Rocky Mountain Institute
Its vision is a world thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, forever. Its mission is to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources. Its style is non-adversarial and trans-ideological, emphasizing integrative design, advanced technologies, and mindful markets. Its strategic focus is to map and drive the transition from coal and oil to efficiency and renewables...working extensively with the private sector, as well as with civil society and government, to create abundance by design and to apply the framework of natural capitalism.

Environmental Working Group
Its mission is to use the power of public information to protect public health and the environment by exposing threats to our health and the environment; to find solution; to bring to light unsettling facts that we have a right to know; to shame and shake up polluters and their lobbyists; and to rattle politicians and shape policy.

Natural Resources Defense Council
Its purpose is to safeguard the Earth: its people, its plants and animals and the natural systems on which all life depends; to restore the integrity of the elements that sustain life; to defend endangered natural places; and to establish sustainability and good stewardship of the Earth as central ethical imperatives of human society.

The Sierra Club Foundation
As the charitable arm of The Sierra Club, The Foundation funds a range of environmental projects which fall into the three general categories of public education, litigation, and training. Its work reflects the core values of people everywhere: that we all have a right to a safe and healthy environment, clean air, clean water, open space, wild lands, and a healthy and diverse ecosystem.

Ceres
A national network of investors, environmental organizations, and other public interest groups working with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change, its mission is to integrate sustainability into capital markets for the health of the planet and its people. Its vision is of a world in which business and capital markets promote the well being of human society and the protection of the earth's biological systems and resources.

You may also want to consider a donation to Charity Navigator to help it help you find worthy charities to support.

(All mission/purpose statements excerpted from Charity Navigator.)