Displaced Beachbums

For the last seven years, I’ve used the site IGIVE to shop on-line. It’s a great way to shop AND earn money for a chosen charity. My charity is ‘Guam Animals in Need’.  It works like this: you go into the IGIVE site, click on ‘The Mall’ for a listing of all the stores on the site, chose the store you want to shop at, then shop as usual. The store donates a percentage of your purchase to a charity of choice. The Igive mall has an extensive list of stores. I used this site weekly when I lived in Germany and still use it often here in Guam.

The other guiltless shopping I’ve been doing is here on the Air Force base. The spouses’ club runs a Gift Shop and a percentage of the revenue goes to either Guam or Military  charities. A lot of people think the community clubs are all social but having been on the Welfare Committees of both the Würzburg Club and now the Andersen Club, I can appreciate how much money is distributed back into the community. It’s heartwarming. Every military base has a spouse or community club and they have several fund raising projects. All the Army bases have thrift shops which I can say is no where near as fun as volunteering at this gift shop.

The shop here contracts spouses (3 of them) to be buyers and they travel to Hong Kong, Korea, Philippines, Bali, etc. to purchase items for sale. What a fun job! Also, the items in the store are priced VERY reasonably. When I first started volunteering, I was told the more volunteer hours I put in, the higher I would be on the “pre-shop” list. The pre-shop is for volunteers to shop prior to opening to the general public. I thought this was a little strange and couldn’t imagine things selling out so quickly, but some items FLY off the shelf. I had my first “pre-shop” this month and a couple items I bought sold out within a half hour of the store opening to the public.

The photo of FG is an example of one of the items going quickly. It’s a children’s all silk kimono from Hong Kong and it costs $4.80! I priced a couple of the wood items (made from Acacia wood) on line and all the items were at least twice the cost!

How’s that for feeling good about shopping!