Members of the gay community, such as celebrity trainer Jackie Warner, Drag Diva Momma, and John A. Perez,  California’s first openly gay Assembly Speaker, came together to kick off the celebration, which was created to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion that took place in New York. Celebrity Chef Gary Arabia of Global Cuisine was honored to be a part of the event and created a delectable “Summer-fare” menu which included Wild Mushroom Tarts with Caramelized Goat Cheese, Veggie Samosas, French Macaroons and more scrumptious items. All of the food was cooked on site (“…from pan to plate,” Arabia said), the produce was organic and any chicken used was free range, as well.

LA PRIDE takes place this weekend, Saturday, June 12 – Sunday, June 13. For more details please go to http://lapride.org.

Images via: Brian Putnam and Jay Lawton

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Projects come from a whole range of individuals wanting to do something they love and something they feel passion for.  These stories unfold through blog posts, pics and videos as people bring their ideas to life and you can stay along for the journey.

To give, you simply make a financial pledge on projects you want to support.  It can range from urban vertical farming to documentaries on humanitarian issues.

When it comes to getting the funding, it is all or nothing.  Projects need to reach their full funding amount, or else they’ll get nothing (so if you really want a project to succeed, share it with your friends).  For each level of funding, you’ll get something from the project, whether it is weekly updates, sneak peak videos of the project or a DVD.

There are three days left to support this project, on January 7th the deadline is closed and they are currently about 30% shy of the total need (about $3,000 left to go).  If you want to learn more about this project, check out the page and inspiring video, and if you’re so inclined, share it with your friends.

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Online

TreePeople Dedication: If you’re looking to contribute to nature, but can’t find the time to get outdoors, consider dedicated a holiday tree through TreePeople.  You can dedicate a tree for $25 and it will be planted in the Los Angeles area during a volunteer day.

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Locally:

Music For Relief: This locally based organization has a partnership with Habitat for Humanity of Los Angeles and works to aid victims of natural disasters and to reduce global warming.  Its current project is working on a green home with the band Linkin Park.  For just $5 you can help contribute to the home (or you can earn points for the house on Social Vibe).  Learn more at www.musicforrelief.org.

Los Angeles Regional Food Bank:  Food banks across the country are experiencing unprecedented demands this year, especially this holiday season.  In fact one out of every seven people in Los Angeles County is at risk of hunger and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank needs donations to help feed them.  You can drop off food (local & organic if you possible) at a center or local supermarkets near you or host your own Viral Food Drive online.  Learn more at www.lafightshunger.org.

Midnight Mission: Tonight, Monday December 14^th, the Midnight Mission (based in downtown) is hosting a holiday party and gift drive from 6:30 to 9 pm.  You’ll have to RSVP at 213.624.4106 to attend.    On Christmas day they will be serving a holiday brunch and creating a Santa’s Village as well.  To learn more and volunteer visit www.midnightmission.org

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Even though times have changed, bake sales haven’t gone out of style.  In fact they’re now happening online.  Meet Baking For Good, a Hermosa Beach-based business that started the never-ending online bake sale. This sweet site allows you to buy your favorite treats and donate 15% of the purchase to your favorite non-profit or community fundraising cause.

Baking For Good uses organic and locally sourced ingredients and each batch is made fresh to order.  It also uses minimal, eco-friendly packaging and delivers to most locations in two to three days.

So, take your pick of brownies, cookies, iced cookies and even specialized holiday goodies (peppermint brownies anyone?).

Best of there’s an awesome section of environmental non-profits to choose from like Keep America Beautiful and Kitchen Gardeners International. If you’re interested in supporting more humanitarian efforts or other specific issues check out the list of sponsored non- profits here.  You can support community causes as well.

So if you’re in a jam about what to find for your special someone, a group of friends/co-workers or just want to make anyone smile—check out Baking For Good and see how sweet sugar can be.

Visit Baking for Good at www.bakingforgood.com

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In addition, YDT will be devoting this week to Fair Trade topics so be sure to check in to see how you can find Fair Trade goods around you.

While we’ve covered Fair Trade extensively on YDT, we’ve included a mini refresher below incase you’re new or have forgotten a few things.  Be sure to check out our “Best of Fair Trade on YDT” post as well.

What is Fair Trade?

The Short of it: Fair Trade means that the people who made the product you are buying were paid “fairly” and generally treated with dignity.

The Long of it:
1. Payment of a fair price to the artist, as defined by the local context.

For more information on World Fair Trade Organization.

Images Via:  Fair Trade Month, Fair Trade the White House, Transfair and Autonomieproject

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What would the climate have to say if it were happy and healthy and had a voice? What message would it send from its bright future? Now you have a chance to speak for the trees!

Lend your voice to the environment and let senators know what a healthy and protected environment has to say. Encourage and motivate them to support a greener future.

Now that senators are back to work, join in our “Love, The Climate” Giveaway before the Climate Bill goes to the floor of the Senate.

What would the climate have to say if it were happy and healthy and had a voice? What message would it send from its bright future? Now you have a chance to speak for the trees!

Lend your voice to the environment and let senators know what a healthy and protected environment has to say. Encourage and motivate them to support a greener future.

Ways to Participate:

• Leave a voicemail thanking a senator for improving the world and letting everyone know how much you love the climate.  Call 347-422-6392 to leave your message on the Live Earth message line (this is not a toll-free number) or go to liveearth.org/lovetheclimate and they’ll call you!  Live Earth will highlight the best voicemails on their website and forward the best ones to the senators that have been addressed.

• Add to the “Love, The Climate” Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/LoveTheClimate with a note, message, a photo or link to content that shows how fantastic the climate will be after senators have taken action by passing the Climate Bill.

• Make a video for the climate demonstrating to senators how amazing life has become in a future where the environment is protected.  Sing them a song, read a love sonnet, speak for the trees in costume, or let the whales do the talking!  Submit your video to video.liveearth.org.  Live Earth will promote the most creative entries and forward the best videos to the senators to whom they’ve addressed.  Check out the annoucnement video here:  http://video.liveearth.org/video/Love-the-climate-giveaway and view Shira Lazar’s inspired contribution here:  http://video.liveearth.org/video/shira-and-her-sunflower

Your creative can help you as well as the climate: All participants who register for the campaign will be entered into random drawings to win a “Climate Love Pack” or the grand prize of a Schwinn 2010World NX7 (these amazing prizes wereproured by YDT’s Co-Founder Tracy Hepler, so you know they’ve got to be good).  Please join in from September 15th through September 25th, 2009.  In order to be eligible for the prize drawings, you must submit an entry form to Live Earth at http://joinliveearth.org/page/s/lovetheclimate.

What are you waiting for…go Love, The Climate.

*Contest rules available here: liveearth.org/en/LoveTheClimateRules

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Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.

You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.

You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.

Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)
The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)
LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)
WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.

Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.

In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.

Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code “SOSG”to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there’s no risk.

About the “10 Ways” Series

The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.

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If you’re ready to move to action, either with permission from the city or without, become a guerilla gardener and take matters into your own hands. Begun in London circa 2004, the Guerilla Gardening movement, as the organization’s website states, sprouted to life in an attempt to, “wage war against neglect and scarcity of public space.” Here in L.A., green-thumb revolutionaries as young as 10 and as old as 80 have come together to be a part of the L.A. Guerilla Gardeners-our local chapter-making a difference by getting down and dirty to transform barren or rundown spaces into thriving gardens.

Garden Before LA Guerilla Gardeners

Don’t worry, there are ways to contribute to this movement without potentially getting arrested for renegade, middle-of-the-night missions to rip out dead space and replace it with life. LAGG’s website talks of ways to make seed bombs for your private lands, tips and tricks on starting your own garden, ways and tools to donate and how to volunteer on one of their planned, not-so-illegal digs.

Animo Film and Theater Charter High School student, Blanca Perez, helped to organize LAGG’s Seed Bomb Workshop at her school. She thinks this type of radical environmental movement brings light to dark places in our cities. “Coming together to beautify our community brings us closer and makes a safer environment,” she said. Seems like a win-win situation…solidarity and beautification in the name of safety for our environment and our youth.

Join the army of gardeners in the Revolution of Consciousness by getting your hands in the dirt and filling your belly with home-grown food planted by Comrades in the fightto go green!

Here are some organizations walking the walk, ready for you to walk with them:

Los Angeles Food Not Bombs
http://www.lafoodnotbombs.org/

Images courtsey of LosAngelesGuerrillaGardners.org

Garden After Guerilla Gardeners

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