For Those Who Care About Fighting Hunger; A good site where you can help & have fun

Learn, fight hunger, kill time all at once at FreeRice.com


By Maria Puente, USA TODAY
Feeling guilty about wasting time at work on computer solitaire? Join the growing guilt-free multitude at FreeRice.com, an online game with redeeming social value.
The game presents a word and four choices of definition. Pick right, and the cash equivalent of 20 grains of rice is donated by site advertisers to the U.N.'s World Food Program.

If it sounds like an SAT vocabulary test, it sort of is. John Breen, a Bloomington, Ind., computer programmer and anti-poverty activist, created the game last year to prep his teenage son for the SAT and to help spread awareness of global hunger.

"It took me four months to load 10,200 words," says Breen, 50, who consulted multiple dictionaries.

FreeRice launched in October as a sister site to Poverty.com, Breen's hunger-awareness site. Within three months, there were 500,000 visitors a day.

"I'm fairly amazed myself," he says.

Now Breen has hired professional lexicographers to add 1,000 more words and five more levels of difficulty. "People are breezing through (the hardest words) and writing in for even harder ones," he says.

By mid-January, players had donated more than 15 billion grains of rice — enough to feed more than 700,000 people for one day, says Jennifer Parmelee of the World Food Program. The agency gets the donations in cash — $258,000 thus far — and buys the rice locally.

"This (game) was an act of creative genius," Parmelee says. "We can't even measure the impact of what this level of public awareness can lead to."

Players have spread the word virally. On Facebook alone, nearly 300 groups support FreeRice, with memberships as high as 127,000.

But why? After all, who likes the SAT? Breen says it's because the site allows ordinary schmoes to do something, however small, about world hunger.

"If you give people a chance to do something easily, everybody wants to do it. That urge is in us."

FreeRice.com's site: http://www.freerice.com/

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Link to article: http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2008-01-23-freerice_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Very good. Thanks.

was from Bloomington. :D

:applause: -> John!

If anyone thinks that just a little contribution isn't meaningful, I encourage you to think about the fact that once people take a little action to help others - even a tiny one - then they've created a connection between themselves and the people they've helped and will be more likely to help in the future in even bigger ways.

Right now it seems to me that most Americans are living in stunned, delusional, isolated passivity and anything that gets people taking action again is good.