Be Santa to the world's hungry

With a simple click of your computer mouse, you can send a cup of staple food where it's most needed. This Santalike magic is available at the Hunger Site (www.thehungersite.com), one of the world's first “click-to-donate” Web sites.

It relies on corporate donors to buy staple foods following each click, and then divides this bounty among 3 hunger relief organizations: America's Second Harvest, Mercy Corps and the UN World Food Program. Current sponsors include American Express, L.L. Bean and Amazon.com. In the past 18 months more than 101 million visitors have donated more than 11 000 metric tonnes of food (almost 200 million cups) to the 3 organizations.

When you click on the “Donate Free Food” button, your donation (equivalent to 0.05 cents) is added to the day's total, and you automatically go to the Thanks page where names of the sponsors (with hot links) who have paid for your donation are displayed. All costs are paid by these sponsors.

The site received the 2000 Cool Site of the Year Award in the activism category at the prestigious Web Awards and was the People's Voice winner at the 2000 Webby Awards.

Worldwide, an estimated 800 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Each day, about 24 000 people die from hunger or hunger-related causes; 74% of them are children under age 5. This is down from 35 000 daily deaths a decade ago and 41 000 deaths 20 years ago.

Created in June 1999 by a resident of Indiana, the Hunger Site soon had more than 1 million visitors a month; GreaterGood.com, an early sponsor, took over in February 2000. In addition to running the Hunger Site, GreaterGood has a for-profit shopping site where 15% of every purchase goes to the cause you select.

These days, GreaterGood aims to generate 2.5 million cups of food per week, with visitors to the site able to donate one cup of food per day. —

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