For our Choose Charity event, Young Americans for Liberty @ El Camino College focused on fundraising for a local charity for four days on campus during the last week of November, as well as volunteering at a charity off-campus.

We selected Loaves and Fishes, a private charity in Torrance that holds a monthly banquet serving hot meals and clothing to the homeless. We chose this charity because a few of our club members have had previous experience volunteering there and have noticed over the years that more people are coming in to receive services because they are struggling to find work, feed their kids, and pay the bills.

So, the focus of our activity was also to raise awareness on the economy and the failure of our welfare programs. We wanted to show students that we should choose voluntary charity over being coerced to pay into a broken system that doesn't offer real morality, or more importantly, real security. By supporting our community voluntarily, we are setting example that will ideally influence our culture.

To attract students to the booth, we wore festive elf hats and chimed tin bells. Some curious students would come over from the other side of campus just to see what the bells were for. We also displayed a vinyl "Choose Charity" banner and a soup-can pyramid to indicate that canned goods, clothes, and blankets would be accepted throughout the four days of fundraising. 

We tied the theme together by setting up a tall gift-wrapped prop which was a visual representation of the donation gift that would go to the charity. Donors had the option of writing their name on a gift tag and placing it on the present along with a bow to show that they contributed. The prop was simply put together by recycling our 'Free Speech' wall (from our last event) by covering it in wrapping paper, velvet ribbon, and a large bow.

Some students donated whatever change they had in their pockets while others donated generous amounts. One student in particular donated a generous $20, reasoning that, "I know what it feels like to struggle and have nothing." The anonymous donor signed the prop present with, "To: Hope, From: Love".

At UCLA, we are all very disappointed that our country has been at war for over a decade with no end in sight. So, for our Choose Charity project, we decided to put the politics aside and help out those injured veterans coming back from the war zones. In the wake of our trillion dollar deficits and a terrible bureaucracy, we decided to help out where the government doesn't with a private charity.

Wounded Warriors is an organization that helps in assisting injured service members with direct programs and various services. We did a bake sale where all our proceeds went to the Wounded Warrior Project. We all very excited about this event and so we shopped, baked, and stormed our school's high traffic zone. We made eye catching signs and got people to buy our brownies. The best part about this project was that we got new members that had just joined us at our last meeting to bake the brownies and sell them. This created a good bond between all of us and got them excited about promoting liberty on campus. In total, we had six members help out in this event with three of them being new members to our organization. 

According to the United Nations data on guns and homicides, the U.S. has a 3.2 homicide by firearm per 100,000 people rate.  That same data says that we have a 4.8 homicide per 100,000 rate for all methods of murder combined.  That means that, without counting all of the gun related murders, we would still have a homicide per 100,000 rate of 1.6.

1.6% (only non-gun murders in the U.S.) is higher than the homicide rates (with and without guns) in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland (which has a much higher gun ownership rate).

Guns aren't the problem in the U.S. and gun control isn't what is making these European countries have lower murder rates. Something else is the problem and focusing on guns is only distracting us from finding real solutions.

Here at Temple, we were more than happy to help out with a local charity for our very first national event, being a new chapter. We decided to pair up with a local homeless shelter that also serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner all year around in central Philadelphia. They are known as the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission. We decided to plan two events: one to collect donations on campus and another volunteering at the kitchen. 

We set up in the Student Center on campus and handed out free material asking students to please donate any amount they could. As hard as collecting donations is, we did not make out too bad. We had several bags of food and a check of $85, due to the generosity of several members. We also managed to get a few new sign-ups!

Above, Mitchell displays the food that we were bringing out to the hungry of Philadelphia.

We served upwards of 150 hungry stomachs. Everyone was so nice and patient as they waited to eat. The staff was ecstatic that we were giving our free time to help out. Overall we were extremely happy with how our Choose Charity event went. We raised a decent sum of money and were able to help the struggling and show them that life isn't so bad—that people can care for each other. Above all we proved that private charity prevails over government dependence, since the government was letting these people go hungry!