I feel the need to say a little something.

[Doc]

I'm a part of a Norwegian Internet community affiliated with the Battlefield/Counter-strike-series. I post at their message board, and I am a server admin on their Counter-strike Source-servers. About two months ago, the guys running the site (private individuals like Bolty and Griselda, who do these sorts of things simply as a hobby) launched "Juledugnad". I'll translate the first couple of lines:


Doing something for others.
Battlefield.no is an internet gaming community based on good, old-fashioned collaboration. It's amazing what can be accomplished by working together, and it was perhaps with this thought in mind that our propagandhi-minister and contact person Ghandi (or "Jostein" as he is commonly called), made the following remark in one of our internal admin-forums.
With this idea as a starting point, we started talking about what we could do, and we quickly agreed that it was about time we did something for someone else. And thus, "Juledugnad" (roughly translated: Christmas Collaboration) was born. And what did we want to do this time? What about donating gaming consoles to the pediatric cancer wards at St. Olav's Hospital? With this in mind, we started working behind the scene. But little by little, we had to start going public. After all, what's the point in collaboration, if you've got no one to do it with And what's a better starting date than December 1st?

In bed sick, on Christmas Eve

Sadly, this is the reality many children know. Not only are they sick in bed on Christmas Eve, many of them are also suffering from cancer, a sneaking, awful illness, that harms too many; even sadder, when children are afflicted. What's even worse, is that there's not much we can do about it.

Our Contribution
What we *can* do, however, is to make sure that their hospital stay is a bit less tedious! Seeing as this Internet community is based on people (of all ages) with an interest in gaming, it comes perhaps as less of a surprise that we plan to do this by donating video game consoles and games.

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Basically, what we did was to advertise on our message board what we were doing and that we were going to collect and donate various gaming equipment to children who had to spend their Christmas holiday in a cold, sterile hospital. People sent in their Gamecubes, Playstations, X-boxes, Playstation Portables, Gameboys, etc to us, and we transported all the stuff by car to the hospitals (we got so many donations, we had to spread it out over two of Norway's largest hospitals, the one in Oslo and the one in Trondheim). After having talked this over with the various hospitals , we also learned that they needed DVDs and music CDs. Both private individuals as well as certain companies that distribute these things learned of our little project  and started sending in more stuff.

We also asked people to donate money, and people have been *very* generous. As of December 23rd, I'm not allowed to say how much we've managed to collect and donate. All I can say, is that I had to pick up my jaw from the floor when I saw the number of contributions people had made. I was floored.

Granted, this is a kind of support that's a bit "unorthodox". What we *could* have done was to ask people to donate money to some cancer fund, but we wanted to do something different; something that we *knew* would affect those poor children. Another concern was that this could *not* become a publicity stunt for our website. We couldn't have newspaper reporters storming down the doors eagerly wanting a photo-op of one of our guys handing a poor kid an X-box.

Although this project was not for us, I must say I feel mighty proud having been a part of it, and I'm even more proud of all the people who donated their stuff. There was a Counter-strike-clan that donated  4.200 NOK (almost $650 (!)).

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Somehow, I thought this story was relevant to the thread. If not, my sincere apologies.
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That is just about the most awesome thing I have read all day. Thank you, you have officially made my night bearable.

Money is quite often the very WORST thing you can donate. Money will ALWAYS wind up mired in some committee or some beaurocratic swamp debating the proper way to spend it on whatever. You NEVER want to give money when you have the option to give something else instead. Money gets tripped up by people with agendas. Some of those people with agendas would have never have bought those video game systems for those kids, because so many child professional types believe that videogames = bad. Cash donations might get turned in to idiot crap... Like cowboy wallpaper along the walls because some dolt thinks that the wallpaper would be "cheerful" and so much better than an actual distraction from the pain, like a nice Nintendo would be. Because that person that makes that decision is an idiotic #$%&tard that shouldn't be anywhere near kids.

Nice work. You did good. Real good.