Read This or I'm Switching to PHP

(If you don't live in the US, you can skip it.)

The US Census Bureau calculates that in 2008, 15% of US households were "food insecure". A slightly older version of that data is broken down by county and state in this excellent interactive map.

With continued high unemployment, that 15% figure has surely gone up since 2008. These are the households that may have to choose between food and heat this winter. If, like me, you can't even imagine what it must be like to have to make that choice, you're probably in a position to help.

Its just crazy that there's a major hunger problem in a country with huge food surpluses. That's why one of my favorite charities is Feeding America (you may have heard of them under their old name "America's Second Harvest). They're a national organization that collects surplus before it is thrown out and distributes it to a network of food banks that distribute it to people in need.

And they're very efficient at it: each dollar donated provides eight meals. And they've got very low administrative and fundraising overhead: 96% of their money goes to their hunger programs.

Please help, if you can.

And if you're going to donate money to Feeding America, a fun way to do it is to participate in the Mozilla Firefox Challenge as part of TeamJS: I'm challenging the US JavaScript and webdev community to donate more to this cause than a dozen Hollywood celebrities can raise for their causes. I think it would be great to see the bright yellow JS logo (and the Rhinoceros from my book because I think it is funny :-) in the middle of that pack of celebs. (Click on the Firefox Challenge link above for a visual of what I'm talking about.)

I've been flogging this pretty hard on Twitter (#teamjs and #fxchallenge), with fairly disappointing results. I'm not ready to give up, but I am feeling discouraged, and I could really use some help. If you think the challenge is a fun way to raise money for a good cause, please help publicize it. I don't use Facebook or Google+, so help with those networks would be especially great. If you sign up for an account on crowdrise.com, you can even join the TeamJS team.

Update: discouraged no more! Chris Williams and JSConf have made a big donation and a huge publicity push. TeamJS is now in 4th place!

And if you don't live in the US (but read this anyway) and would like to raise money for a cause that is not US-centric, you can create an account at crowdrise.com and then create your own team in the Firefox Challenge-maybe you can embarrass the US JavaScript community into giving more!