Dear FitHarians,

Welcome to a new Food in the Hood year! In 2010 we collectively gave $9000 to global charities, as seen in the six-month report below. This brings our total, in the 18 months since we started this gig, to $11,500. That's a lotta moola!

As some of you have noticed, though, we're behind on our bookkeeping, meaning that I'm good at throwing parties and writing checks, but bad at writing the letters to go with them. I apologize that some of your checks haven't yet been sent, and are falling into a new tax year. If anyone would like to volunteer to do this function for me, it would be a tremendous help and would get the money to these causes in better time.

All that it would require is developing a form letter that tells the recipient what we're doing and directs them to the link for their specific event. Then I make copies of the checks (without the signatures or routing numbers showing) and put them in a binder, and send them off. This doesn't sound like much, does it? So why am I so behind in doing it? Well, we all have our Achilles heel and I'm dangling by mine.

In 2010 we also introduced Goods in the Hood, which we look forward to doing more of in the coming year. It only took me three years to get the inventory and paperwork done to start that! At this rate we'll be inching towards world peace in no time.

This week we'll be raising money for Guatemala through Rights Action, since our New Year's event was more of a get-together than fundraiser. Here are the details from last year. Since John Sears is going there at the end of February, maybe we can get him to check up on it for us:

The website article has an excellent historical background of how colonialism affected deforestation and forced migration to the "agricultural frontier." It's useful for understanding a much wider scope than just Guatemala.