Critters for Critters

Much has and will continue to be written in the blogosphere about the recovery of the Hurricane Katrina area and how we can help. From Shelley Powers at Burningbird comes this out of box thinking!

Over a thousand homes in the St. Louis area have volunteered to be ‘foster’ homes for pets from the region, but the Society is still overwhelmed with the magnitude of the rescue operation. Unlike human-related charities, those devoted to animals don’t always have a lot of extra cash on hand.

This led to an idea. I don’t have a lot of extra cash, but I do have some photos of critters, including those of my own cat, Zoë. I checked out eBay’s GivingWorks program and according to the FAQ, if I sell an item and donate 100% of the monies collected to the charity of my choice, it will donate the list and sellers fees. The money is collected by MissionFish, an organization eBay brought in to manage the charitable contributions. They charge a one time 3.00 fee to help run their service, and subtracting the credit card fee, all the money goes to the one charity.

So I decided to try and put together an auction: Critters for Critters. What I’m hoping to do is get people to contribute one or more of their favorite critter photos that can be printed out at 8 x 10 (or close to it in size). I’ll add my own photos to the mix. We’ll then auction off the entire set of weblog-related critter photos in one big sale, and all money will be donated to the Humane Society, The Best Friends Society, and other organizations helping with the critters impacted by Katrina.

If you’re interested in participating, put a link to your photo in comments or send me an email. I’ll then add a link to your weblog post/photo at the bottom of this post, and into to the eBay auction when we start.

Note that the posting you should send the picture links to, is Shelley's post. I will help by contributing during the auction, but I do not want to complicate her process, just help advertise this effort.

Go Shelley!