Tag Archives: LAFTI

LAST CHANCE For the Passports With Purpose Glow

Building Lafti Houses

On my way home from shopping today, I heard an NPR segment on Marketplace about how giving to charity makes you feel as good as chocolate or sex. No kidding! Giving trips the same chemicals in your brain and gives you a glow.

And I gotta tell you that my participation in Passports with Purpose has been a real high. I hope that you will partake of this totally helpful feel-good opportunity, too.

Think how great you’ll feel to know that you have helped build a house in India through the charitable organization LAFTI, which strives to give independence to the poorest of the poor. If you have any doubts, think about what it would be like to live in this house, the normal housing for the Dalit, and click on the picture to read about the rough times they are having right now.

A Dalit family home before the new houses are built.

This is Why I’m Glowing

1.When I heard about travel bloggers using their travel contacts to round up prizes to be raffled for a good cause, I thought, “Now that’s a great example of the power of blogging.”

2. When I called Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, they quickly donated a two-night stay, plus breakfast and drinks in the famous Carousel Bar. And when I brazenly asked the manager of Rancho de Los Caballeros in Wickenburg, who had just hosted Ken and me for a weekend stay, if they would also like to donate to PWP, they volunteered a 3-night stay worth $1500.

I thought, “That’s the way a travel writer’ and her contacts are supposed to help each other out.”

3. When I first posted about this year’s efforts to build a village in India, one of my readers left the following comment:

What a worthwhile project. I had not heard of PwP or LAFTI before, but after reading up about both I put a note about (and a clickable image link to) PwP’s fundraiser in my blog’s sidebar. Thank you for blogging about this, pen4hire! Danielle, from Romantic Armchair Traveler.

She not only thanked me, but she put the PwP widget on her blog. And I thought, “Now that’s the way social networking is supposed to work.”

4. I sent e-mail blasts to friends and family members about the great prizes in Passports with Purpose.  A fellow women journalist offered to write about Passports with Purpose on her blog. When I thanked her, Linda Radke said, “It’s a small contribution to a worthwhile cause.” She has a fast growing publishing business in Phoenix, Arizona, and you can see her work at Five Star Publications.

I thought, “When you have a good cause, you just have to let people know about it, and that’s what networking is all about.”

So I’m letting you know about Passports With a Purpose one more time.  The deadline is Monday, December 13, midnight on the west coast of the U.S.  You put down a $10 bid on however many travel goodies you have your eye one, and when the drawing is done, you’ve won. Yes, everybody wins, because even if you don’t take home my recommended prizes of a two-night stay in New Orleans at the great Hotel Monteleone or a 3 night stay in Wickenburg at the luxurious Rancho de los Caballeros , you will have that Passports with Purpose GLOW.

P.S. Just keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off that Norway cruise, because although I’m ineligible to bid on the New Orleans and Wickenburg stays, I AM going to win the Norway cruise..or maybe the stay at Kimpton, or the one at Omni, or maybe Homewood Suites, or Home Away. Of course if I win the Nova Scotia B & B, I’ll have to go to Nova Scotia, but that’s a GOOD thing.

By the time you read this, I believe the original $50,000 goal will have been met, but why not build a few more houses for a few more families?  Why stop at only 25 families? Get glowing.