Give a Gift that Changes Lives

(ARA) - It's beginning to feel a lot like holiday rush hour. If you find yourself frantically trying to come up with a gift idea for the hard-to-shop-for person, you are not alone. How about choosing something for a better world and transforming meaningless frenzy into true holiday joy: giving a gift that changes lives and multiplies over time. Heifer International provides just what you need.

Mary Ann Thompson Frenk of Dallas recalls trying to decide on a gift for her late father, John Thompson, who didn't need a thing. Not only did he have impeccable taste, he was always giving away things he didn't really need or want. When he opened the Heifer gift card that explained his daughter's gift of a water buffalo that would help a struggling family achieve self-reliance in his honor, John was delighted. He marveled at his daughter's generous spirit and creative thought behind a very meaningful gift.

Giving through Heifer International is a simple idea with powerful impact. Here's how it works: skip shopping the mall for meaningless gifts and instead decide to donate a sheep, or cow, or any other farm animal in honor of your mother, father, teacher, client, or anyone close to your heart. (Go on, start a new tradition!)

For example, a goat costs $120 (or a share for $10), which can supply a family with several quarts of milk each day. Extra milk can be sold or made into cheese, butter or yogurt. A llama is $150, and a water buffalo is $250. Heifers are $500 ($50 a share), chicks, ducks and geese are $20, and a hive of honeybees is $30 - to mention a few.

Follow these steps to set a life changing gift into motion.

1. Step one: visit www.heifer.org or call (800) 696-1918 to receive a free gift catalog.

2. Request a unique gift card to personalize and send to your honoree, describing the generous contribution you've made in their name. (Their reaction will make you glad you did.)

3. Thanks to your gift, a struggling family is on the road to self-reliance. Once the family has completed training and prepared appropriate facilities, they will receive the animal that you have helped provide.

4. This animal will provide wool or milk or transportation or eggs - and a promise of new hope and peace for this family. Surplus products are sold to give them extra income for school supplies, medicine, farming supplies and housing improvements.

5. Your gift multiplies. Every recipient family promises to "pass on the gift" of its animal's first offspring to another family in need. Then the next family to receive an animal and training makes the same promise, and so on until an entire community is lifted out of poverty and into self-reliance.

Heifer International provides the answer for donors who are looking for more accountability for what their charitable dollars are doing and who desire more specific, sustainable remedies to poverty and care for the earth. Every tax-deductible gift, no matter the amount, will make a difference.

Courtesy of ARA Content

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