There's a very strong charitable spirit in the blogosphere, and a new project has tapped into that goodwill.  "Caring Compassion Charity" project asks bloggers to spread the word about worthy causes they support by blogging about charities that, as Alex Shalman says, "make your palms sweat, your heart bleed, and send tears rolling down your cheeks."

At Planet Aid, we love any ideas that promote worthwhile charities and gets people involved. All the posts in this project name worthwhile charities, causes and organizations, but some bring in a more personal involvement and really touched out hearts. One such post on poverty nearly brought us to tears with its sincerity.

It's things like the "Caring Compassion Chairty" project that make us glad we do what we do here at Planet Aid. We want to do what we can to help the world at large, but we firmly believe that we are also helping you make your lives better by helping others. It's a proven fact that doing good makes you feel good, so help yourself by helping others. Find your nearest Planet Aid donation center and drop off some of those clothes you know you don't really need; it's a little effort that goes a long way.

At Planet Aid, we do as much as we can to donate food, funds and clothing to the needy, but one organization can only do so much. So whenever we hear about a worthy cause or a great charity project, we like to spread the word and help out in any way we can. Right now, our hats are off to Free Rice, an addictive website that helps build users' vocabulary and feed the hungry-10 grains of rice at a time.

FreeRice.com, sister site to world poverty site Poverty.com, has been up less than a month and has already donated nearly 400,000,000 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The concept is simple: answer increasingly difficult vocabulary questions to boost your own knowledge and help feed the world's hungry. Every correctly answered question represents a donation of 10 grains of rice. The site is sponsored by advertisers, so you get to sharpen your brain and do something good-for free!

FreeRice has taken the web community by storm, getting lots of attention from bloggers and other media outlets. The game is hard to resist, and the Planet Aid employees are jockeying to be the first to reach the elusive high scoring level 50. Take a break from your day to excercise your brain and help make a difference at FreeRice.com.

Planet Aid is well-known for our hugely successful clothing donation program, but we participate in many worthwhile charity projects, often with other philanthropic organizations. We recently partnered with Humana People to People to donate laptop computers to Teacher Training colleges in Malawi as part of an ongoing program to support Teacher Training programs throughout Africa.

Since the institution of free primary education in 1995, school enrollment has soared to record highs. This surge left an extreme disparity between the number of students and the resources available to them. A lack of qualified teachers has allowed the student:teacher ratio to climb to nearly 80:1 in some rural areas.

Laptops donated through Planet Aid or Humana People to People will go directly to Teacher Training colleges to help prepare and train the educators that are so badly needed in Mozambique, Angola and Malawi. To date, these countries have trained over 4400 teachers and all three are continuing to expand their programs.

The success of our first laptop donation has inspired us to continue with this program at Planet Aid, so we are pleased to announce that we will now be accepting laptop donations all year round. Laptop donations are tax deductible and cannot be left in our clothing donation bins. To donate, please contact Mikaela Levons at Planet Aid via email at Mikaela.levons@planetaid.org or call us at 973-897-3006.