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Want to Fight Famine in East Africa? Then Start Swearing

Wm Jas via Flickr/Creative Commons

Swear jars are designed to help you put the brakes on your potty mouth - every time you say a bad word, you put a quarter in, and I guess you throw yourself a profanity-free party with the results. The Twitter equivalent is Digital SwearJar, which scours your Twitter feed for cussing; users pledge to send a set amount per outburst to a charity that helps people affected by the famine in East Africa. So if you're an actor in a David Mamet film, you're golden

I've seen several clever twists on charitable giving lately; Fast Company wrote about charity:water, where users ask their Facebook friends to donate a little something toward clean water projects in developing countries. It uses a "pay it forward" psychology that encourages participants to essentially start a new round of giving - after all, no one likes to be the last link in the chain.

Another notable effort is Amit Gupta Needs You! Amit is a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco who needs a bone marrow donor to fight his recently-discovered leukemia. Trouble is, people of South Asian descent are underrepresented in bone marrow registries. So the entrepreneurial set on the web has mobilized to encourage South Asians to register.

There's even money in it, twenty grand if you match - and you could then use that money to donate to water projects or famine relief. Providing you swear a lot, of course.

[Mashable]

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