10 Ways to Build Community and Support Sisters!

We would love to talk to you about partnering with Sisters to spread the word about the good work of Sisters and get the community involved!  Here are 10 creative ways to help.

Volunteers of America Vehicle Donation Program

Support Sisters and get rid of your old clunker at the same time - plus, you might even receive greater value for your vehicle as a charitable contribution than you would selling it (on your itemized tax return) - up to fair market value when you donate to the Volunteers of America!

It’s super easy to donate your car, truck, van, motorcycle, or even boat! The VOA will tow it for free, or you can receive a $30 McMenamin’s gift card for delivering it yourself.  To donate your car to Sisters, click on the image for the VOA donation website (be sure to select Sisters Of The Road as your beneficiary!), or call them at 1-877-VOA-3977 with your title in hand and tell them your donation is for Sisters.  Hurray!

GoodSearch

Make money for Sisters while you browse the web! At GoodSearch, you can earn around one cent for Sisters Of The Road each time you search the web, and all those pennies add up! GoodSearch is a search engine powered by Yahoo which donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by you, the user. Another great opportunity to earn money for Sisters is using GoodShop, where a percentage of each online purchase you make from their hundreds of listed stores comes directly to Sisters! Just be sure to enter Sisters Of The Road as the organization you support before you search or shop. Thanks!

Rooms for Peace

Are you a traveler, or a host with a guest room in their home? Would you like to support Sisters while you host guests or enjoy your stay with people who share similar interests? Rooms for Peace exists “to connect travelers with lodging money and like-hearted people with guest rooms, so that affiliated peace charities receive this liberated money.” Sisters is one of the beneficiaries of this great project. Click here to learn more.

Merit Telecom

Merit Telecom, located in the San Juan Islands in Washington, is a nonprofit corporation that provides long distance, local and cellular telephone services to residential & business customers. They donate 100% of their profits to the nonprofit or charity of your choice.  Each long distance phone call you make becomes a real-time donation—and you can choose Sisters!  Click here to learn more.

Songs for Sisters

Portland businesses Artichoke Music and CD Baby are both selling our CASCADE SONGWRITER’S COLLECTIVE: Songs For Sisters (And Brothers) CD. From CD Baby’s notes: “Focusing on the themes of homelessness and poverty, the songs ask the listeners to stop, think, and consider these issues in a variety of ways with beautiful and sometimes haunting melodies and lyrics….This is a fine collection of music by singer-songwriters with a social conscience responding to an important social need.”

CDs can be purchased from Richard Colombo and all the friendly folks at Artichoke Music, 3130 SE Hawthorne Blvd, or online at CDBaby.com. Please help support Sisters Of The Road, and these great local businesses!

Supporter Shares his House Profit

This letter came to us in September 2005 accompanied by a check from a supporter with an unusual and generous idea:
“Last month, I closed on the sale of my home in north Portland.  Since I purchased it in 1996, its value has increased substantially—partly due to improvements I made but mostly because it happens to be located in a neighborhood in which home prices have skyrockets over the past decade.

As increased housing costs have provided me with this un-earned financial windfall, they have simultaneously made my neighborhood, and the Portland metropolitan area in general, a place in which too many hard working folks simply can’t afford to live.


Looking ahead, I believe there are many things we could to do as a community to ensure that everyone can have a decent place to call home.  One appropriate and relatively painless approach I support would be for us to establish transfer fee on the sale of real estate.  Such a fee could be used to expand our stock of permanently affordable housing and to address the housing needs of people in our community with the fewest housing options.


As a small measure, I have decided to donate 2% of the sales proceeds of the house to organizations that I believe are already doing work to further these goals.  Specifically, I am supporting organizations that:
• Provide permanently affordable housing
• Support, house and empower residents of our community who are homeless; and
• Advocate at a local and regional level for policies and additional funding to preserver and create new housing in our communities that will remain affordable forever.


Enclosed is a check for $500 to Sisters Of The Road for all you have already and will continue to do in the future to empower, nourish, employ and provide safe haven for members of our Portland community who, despite (and in some ways because of) our raging housing market, continue to lack basis shelter.


Keep up the great work!


                      Cheers,
                      Eli Spevak”