The giving season in a deranged year

I concede it’s unoriginal for a columnist to publish his holiday list of venerable charities. But since imitating a good idea yet remains the best way to flatter it, this Chanukah/Christmas I’m introducing my own take on what I intend to make an annual feature. Please join me in dedicating a few of your precious holiday dollars to support these worthy nonprofits!

There’s a functionally infinite number of causes which warrant financial backing, so in arriving at this year’s list I first had to pare down by “Category” the organizations to which I’ve donated in the past.  What follows are a few of my favorites with Medical, Occupational, Historical, Environmental, Veteran, and Journalistic missions.

Yet left on the cutting-room floor are countless laudable enterprises tackling hunger, enhancing education, spreading democracy, combating racism, supporting equality, advancing animal rights, reforming prisons, and defending our civil liberties. As such, while I encourage donations to the organizations recognized below, I’ll be equally grateful if my column inspires (reminds!) you to support the charitable causes important to your family.

After all, 2020 will go down in history as the year collectively regarded as the most deranged. So open your hearts — and your wallets — and let’s restore some sanity to this world.

Medical

First up is www.RIPMedicalDebt.com, one of the most creatively enterprising 501(c)(3)s out there. As the political effort to repair our nation’s shattered health-care system languishes, RIP Medical Debt has stepped into the void to give donors “the power to eradicate medical debt at pennies on the dollar.”

To date, it’s facilitated forgiveness of over $2.5 billion by leveraging donations to buy those debts from collection agencies (a single dollar can eliminate $100 in delinquent bills!) Founded by two former debt-collection executives, this not-for-profit offers a case study in atoning for capitalism’s excesses by hacking it.

After all, it’s not the quality of medical care in America that’s abysmal, it’s the cost — which is why a third of all Americans are plagued with medical debt. So, if you’re looking to help out your fellow country(wo)man, this may be the most tangible bang for your buck.

Next up are www.SmileTrain.org and www.OperationSmile.org, two organizations that facilitate completely free cleft-repair surgery for sufferers worldwide. A cleft afflicts the lip and roof of the mouth, the sides of which fail to fuse together during fetal development.

It’s a condition particularly prominent in developing countries. But for only $250, you can cover the cost of a full-scale cleft surgery, forever transforming a child’s life. So what’ll it be?  That limited-edition Baby Yoda doll, or an immediate end to one’s ostracizing stigmatization and debilitating physical difficulties eating, breathing, and speaking? You’re tracking that alien baby isn’t actually Yoda, right?

Occupational

I once dated a nurse, and thereby came face-to-face with what a terrible human being I was in comparison. She’d been drawn to the profession presumably because it was an effective outlet for her limitless empathy, compassion, and selflessness. 

The risks and demands were high, the pay and hours were lousy, but her personal impact was undeniable.  (At the time, she worked at a needle-exchange and opioid treatment clinic — I know, right?!) All across America, these agents of God’s love have bravely mobilized as humanity’s first line of defense against a fatal worldwide pandemic.

Fortunately, there exist organizations like www.NursesHouse.org, which assists with housing and medical expenses incurred by registered nurses who are seriously ill, injured, disabled, or facing other dire circumstances. 2020 is the Year of the First Responder, so I encourage you to honor the daily sacrifices made by those special men and women who’ve always worn masks without complaint.

And: Are you a nurse in need of even more opportunities to toil in the service of humankind? Then apply for a scholarship at www.OneNurseAtATime.org, which uses financial donations to send nurses across the planet to wherever medical help is desperately needed. (Who are these people?)

Historical

Do you fully appreciate what being a New Scot signifies? If you’re not a member of the www.NewScotlandHistoricalAssociation.org, the answer is likely “no,” given that so much of what it means to be a New Scot is wrapped up in the origins of our town and its rich historical landscape.

Since 1975, the New Scotland Historical Association has been a steward of the New Scottish identity, helping to plot a future course by probing, documenting, and honoring its past. For 45 years, the NSHA — a not-for-profit chartered by the New York State Education Department — has operated the New Scotland History Museum (partially comprised of the former one-room New Salem schoolhouse built in 1903) and orchestrated gripping lectures, exhibits, and events to explore upstate New York’s fascinating geography, genealogy, and archeology.

Once a quarter, the NSHA also publishes a newsletter that’s equal parts community bulletin, historical treatise, and call-to-action. Can’t get enough of Yours Truly?  Then consult pages 4 to 5 of The Sentinel’s Winter 2018 edition — available on the NSHA website — where you’ll find familiar prose in an essay entitled “The ‘New Scot.’ Defined: What It Means to Be New Scottish at This Moment in Time and Space” (as edited by my former seventh-grade English teacher, who reprised her role for the occasion as “Mistress of the Unforgiving Red Pen”).

NSHA membership costs as little as $15, and there are lots of ways to volunteer with this pulsing heartbeat of our community.

Environmental

I should probably extend honorable mention to www.ASPCA.org, because I’m about to beat this horse to death. Again. For those who weary of my tireless campaign to secure the beatification of Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy Executive Director Mark King, just skip this section — but be sure to make a quick donation at www.MohawkHudson.org before you do.

Because absent your financial support, the MHLC might never have been able to save the Bender Melon Farm, or Picard’s Grove, or the Heldeberg Workshop summer camp property, or the Lansing Farm, or Locust Knoll, or the more than 3,500 acres of the Helderberg Conservation Corridor, or the blah blah blah at this point even I’m bored by MHLC’s successes.

The point is that MHLC is the vehicle through which Albanites preserve the unrivaled natural beauty of our Capital Region, safeguarding its environment and farmlands from the unfettered development that ever threatens to irrevocably spoil them. Hats off to you, MHLC, for securing so many green pastures — on which frolic the very horses I’ll keep fatally beating as I continue to herald the patriotism of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy.

Veteran

The “thanks for [my] service” greetings come from all sides at all hours, and indeed there are scores of organizations that support the veterans whom all soldiers someday become. Yet the rate of suicide among servicemembers and veterans is still estimated to be 50 percent higher than the national average. 

According to the 2019 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, 17 veterans committed suicide every day in 2017; to put that in perspective, 17 U.S. servicemembers died in Afghanistan throughout the entire year of 2017.

That’s why www.StopSoldierSuicide.org — which “provides personalized care and continued case management” to servicemembers and veterans in desperate need of mental-health support, housing assistance, and other services — is such a critical player in this space.

So, too, is www.VeteransInc.org, which claims an 85-percent success rate in transitioning veterans out of homelessness. Veterans Inc. is the largest provider of support services to veterans and their families in New England; two years ago, it made headlines for opening the country’s first private in-patient treatment center designed specifically for veterans with substance abuse disorders.

For those of you still seething from the CBS News investigation which uncovered the Wounded Warrior Project’s unconscionably wasteful spending, give these complementary veteran-oriented 501(c)(3)s a look instead.

Journalistic

The last organization I’m highlighting isn’t a charity, but it’s no less deserving of your largesse. Because without it, it wouldn’t just be my voice that the community lost — it’d be yours, too. Of course I’m referring to The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County Post, the local media outfit which makes this year’s “Giving Season” installment possible in the first place. The Enterprise has been our hometown’s paper of record for 136 years, and still persists in the face of unrelenting assaults on its survival.

Back in October, The New York Times published a terrifying report about “a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country.”  The Times claimed that this network, entrenched in all 50 states, was built not on traditional journalism but rather on chilling propaganda by dozens of partisan think tanks, political operatives, and corporations.

Quote the Times: “The sites appear as ordinary local-news outlets, with names like Des Moines Sun, Ann Arbor Times and Empire State Today. They employ simple layouts and articles about local politics, community happenings and sometimes national issues, much like any local newspaper. But behind the scenes, many of the stories are directed by political groups and corporate P.R. firms to promote a ...  candidate or a company, or to smear their rivals.”

As if on cue, within days of that bombshell article, The Times published another devastating report: Salt Lake City was losing both of its major daily print newspapers, in operation for 150 and 170 years.  Consider the lurking digital disinformation poised to take their place in one of America’s major metropolises.

The same fate could befall Albany County, and we won’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. If we surrender The Altamont Enterprise, we’ll lose the one media outlet that’s for us, by us — binding Rensselaerville, the Hilltowns, Guilderland, New Scotland, and the most intimate corners of Albany-Schenectady-Troy to the common fates and causes of which we’d be oblivious without our County Post.

We’ll lose the one media outlet that’s been awarded the New York Press Association’s Sharon R. Fulmer Award for Community Leadership more times than any other newspaper throughout all of New York State.

And we’ll lose the only independently-owned free press watchdog we can count on to expose breaking news capable of galvanizing our community. Whether it’s the intended shotgun sale of Picard’s Grove in the heart of New Scotland, helping to save a medical practice in the Hilltowns, or giving a girl victimized by her Guilderland teacher a chance to tell  her story, The Altamont Enterprise has time and again courageously wielded grit and sunlight on behalf of the neighborhood its subscriber footprint defines. 

The Enterprise staff works tirelessly to chock each issue full of intrepid reporting, in exercise of the very freedom those soldiers I mentioned pledge to defend.

It’s true I’m often most concerned with how my Enterprise columns appear online. Yet it’s nonetheless vital that the Enterprise’s web edition remain a mere companion to its printed form. Because what makes the Enterprise authentic journalism — what distinguishes it from all the noise online as a credible record — is the fact that you can feel it. You can hold it in your hand. Without a print component, The Enterprise is just a blog.

And blogs make possible the inundation of fake news and political hit pieces, whose shadowy authors are spared the time and expense of ink, paper, and coordinating circulation. Algorithmic bots, Russian trolls, partisan hackers — these dystopian agents exist on social media precisely because such platforms afford misinformation an easy outlet. Not so through the printing press.

It’s because we have the luxury of trusting what lies within these real pages, intended as they are for a geographically aligned community, that there will always be at least one thing on which we can depend: a sense of who our neighbors truly are.

So this holiday season, give the gift of local journalism to one of your neighbors by visiting www.altamontenterprise.com/subscribe. Or, visit www.altamontenterprise.com/contribute to donate to The Altamont Enterprise, in support of its consistently award-winning brand of local news coverage.

That’s all I got, folks!  Have a wonderful holiday season. Stay safe, and thanks so, so much for reading — addressing you from these pages remains my favorite thing.

Captain Jesse Sommer is an active duty Army officer and lifelong resident of Albany County. He welcomes your thoughts at .