12 Days of Charitable Giving: Rural Development Institute

It’s the tenth day of my 12 Days of Charitable Giving. To recap, I’ve asked a panel of judges to review a number of deserving charities as suggested by my readers. I’ll be posting one a day for – well, 12 days (I’m clever that way).

I encourage you to check out the charities voted “most deserving” by my readers and judges. Remember that these are just suggestions and, in most cases, we can’t personally vouch for the good work that these folks do. So be smart. And be generous.

Today’s featured charity was submitted by Shalni. Shalni writes:

I’m a big supporter of Rural Development Institute – based here in Seattle. RDI was started by a University of Washington law professor named Roy Prosterman. RDI focuses on land rights for the poor in the developing world.

Here’s some info about what they’ve done from their website:
Over the past 40 years, RDI’s work in more than 40 developing countries has proved to be a great social investment, bringing huge returns on each dollar contributed.

During that time, each dollar invested in RDI has, on average, produced new land rights for six families.

More than 100 million farm families worldwide — representing well over 400 million people — have received land rights.

That means that nearly one out of every sixteen people on the planet has been helped by RDI.

This change—from land insecurity to land ownership—has boosted agricultural productivity in the developing world by billions of dollars per year, and placed scores of billions of dollars in new land wealth in the hands of the rural poor.

A search at irs.gov (which I highly recommend any time you are considering making a donation) was puzzling. I couldn’t find RDI at first but finally did – there’s a typo in the name (an extra “e” in development). Make sure that you check alternate spellings when doing a search!

You can read about our prior 12 Days’ picks here:

Thanks to our guest judge, Anne Wayman, for choosing RDI. Anne writes a number of sites including the brilliant About Freelance Writing. Anne has been freelance writing for over thirty years and has been fully self-supporting through freelance writing for a number of years.