Friday, November 4, 2005

What does $200 buy?

Yesterday, I was at a workshop and in the afternoon, several people left to go get coffee (well, really, to get Starbucks, because evidently, there's something wrong with the regular neighborhood coffeeshops that they passed on their drive to the Starbucks--is their coffee really that different?! Maybe there's something in it.....). I was reflecting on how many dollars walked back into the room, and counted in my head how many people brough their lattes in the morning, too. I totalled up that a minimum of $200 had been spent on 'outside coffee' by the participants; that's an average in a room of 67 people of $2.99 a head.

And then I started thinking about what a community agency might do with $200. Some things came to mind:

-Replace all of the lightbulbs in an elderly widow's house with compact flourescents, saving her $240 annually in electric costs.
-Supply more than enough copy paper for a medium-sized non-profit to copy to their heart's content for a year.
-Put linoleum in a kitchen, or buy a toilet AND a sink for a new home.
-Buy a comprehensive collection of books about Martin Luther King for an elementary school library--and, no, NOT 20 of the same book for a classoom library.

So, then I thought before I took this idea any further, I'd ask YOU:

What might $200 buy for your favorite non-profit?

2 comments:

codown2earth said...

there is some sort of tobacco industry- starbucks tie that I have read about so there is likely an addictive element.... but at least they are blue: Starbucks Corporation | BuyBlue.org

InfoChef said...

And if I weren't a blogger, I wouldn't have known about this fascinating political contributions website!