Despite the lingering economic woes that most Americans are still feeling, only one in five plans to reduce donations to charity this holiday season, the American Red Cross found in a new survey. More Americans will cut back on travel, decorations, parties and gifts.

ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Volunteers Ken Newman, right, and Caren Shepsky heft a 50-pound bag of rice at the Cherry Street Food Bank, run by Northwest Harvest. As hunger has worsened, Northwest Harvest's pantry is seeing more than 2,500 visitors on busy days this year, up from a peak of 1,800 visitors last year.

The results tell a somewhat different story than a recent Harris Interactive survey that showed charities will probably see a decrease in generosity this season. Some large charities are preparing for lower holiday giving.

Regardless of how they interpret the data, charities are downsizing their appeals and targeting smaller donations. They're also making the most of free social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and asking supporters to help them spread the word.

The United Way of King County recently launched its Give 10/Tell 10 campaign, which asks for $10 contributions to help struggling families hit by the recession avoid falling into homelessness. After making a gift on the site, donors have the option to pass on a message emailed to 10 friends, encouraging them give, too. The charity is also using Twitter and Facebook to network, post links and share facts, such as "$25 = a week of food for a homeless person in Washington."

"We really wanted to do something different to get the word out to people that the needs are so great right now and provide a low barrier way for them to get involved," said United Way spokesman Jared Erlandson. "The thought was what if we could get people to tweet not just about what they are doing tonight, but about how they just helped someone stay in their home for the holidays then we could really have an effective vehicle to get our message out."

Mercy Corps is getting creative around Thanksgiving with a new online tool that allows families and groups of friends to make donations together. The global charity is calling on people to match the amount they spend on their own Thanksgiving Day meal with a donation that fights global hunger. The average American family spent $45 on Thanksgiving dinner in 2008, Mercy Corps said.

Other interesting new twists include gift cards with a $5 donation to charity built in. The recipient can choose where to direct the $5 gift from among more than 5,000 charities.

Getting donor fatigue? Another option is to vote for your favorite charity and have a large bank pick up the tab. Chase is donating $5 million -- $25,000 each to the top 100 charities on Dec. 15, one $1 million and five $100,000 grants to others in February, and another $1 million chosen by an advisory board of active philanthropists.

You've heard of blood diamonds. Now mobile phones and other technology products are being targeted for containing minerals sold by armed groups engaged in war and rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A House bill introduced today by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) aims to curb that trade by identifying which mines are in conflict zones and requiring importers of related mineral goods to certify whether or not their imports contain minerals from those mines. Companies would have two years to implement the requirements, and the U.S. Trade Representative would report on their compliance.

McDermott said the conflict in eastern Congo is the deadliest since World War II and is fueled in a large part by the multi-million dollar trade in minerals. Armed groups generate an estimated $144 million each year by trading ores used to produce tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, he said.

Co-sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the Conflict Minerals Trade Act (attached here) requires companies to use outside auditors to determine whether refiners are "conflict-free." The USTR will report to Congress and the public which companies are importing goods containing conflict minerals.

In a report last December, the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo found armed groups in the eastern region continue to fight over, illegally plunder, and profit from the trade of columbite-tantalite (coltan), cassiterite, wolframite, and gold. Such groups enslave child soldiers and use rape as a weapon.

Minerals from the DRC are used in industrial and tech products worldwide, including mobile phones, laptops and digital video recorders.

Companies and consumers have the ability to make an impact. But enforcement of such a law seems tricky. A couple of questions come to mind immediately -- will companies really be able to identify sources of their supplies that clearly? Even if they can, two years is a long time in an entrenched and brutal conflict that claims lives daily. And what about China (the world's largest market for mobile phones) and its hunger for resources with a no-strings-attached policy for dealing in Africa? This report identified European firms fueling conflict minerals.

The bill has the support of the Information Technology Industry Council and the Enough Project, a Washington D.C. group working to end genocide and crimes against humanity in Africa. I wrote a bit about local efforts here.

Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast said he expects a legislative battle. "The electronics industry has spent about 2 million dollars per month lobbying to relax similar, yet weaker, legislation in the Senate (S. 891)," he writes. He urged consumers to push for passage of the bill. "Together we can help turn a system of exploitation and violence into one of peace and opportunity."

U.S. legislation would be a good start to address the problem, said Rory Anderson, deputy director for advocacy and government relations for Federal Way-based World Vision, which works in eastern DRC and endorsed McDermott's bill.

"Americans deserve to know whether the electronics they buy are fueling bloodshed in Africa," she said, adding that the law would benefit the electronics and software industries by providing a certified mechanism to label their products "conflict free."

"We saw from the success of our 'conflict diamond' campaign a few years ago that American companies want to do the right thing," she said, but "without a uniform process, such as the one proposed in this legislation, it's very difficult for companies to tackle the supply chain challenge on their own."

By Sandi Doughton

Fear is as infectious as any virus, and gives many Americans a warped view of the dangers posed by vaccines, genetically engineered crops and other beneficial technologies, New Yorker writer Michael Specter said in Seattle Tuesday.

Touting his new book "Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives," Specter took aim at the kind of anti-science sentiment he says is hijacking public discourse and policy.

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Ice sculptures by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo melt on the steps of Berlin's Concert Hall in a WWF event aimed at calling attention to the earth's melting poles. Specter's book on denialism has been criticized for not tackling the issue of global warming.

"We need to step back and look at the other side of every issue - and we never do," Specter said at a lecture at the University of Washington sponsored by the World Affairs Council.

He was particularly critical of parents, like many who live on Vashon Island, who refuse to vaccinate their children. "This is insane," he said. "Vaccines are the most effective public health measure in the history of the world, except for clean water."

Study after study has shown no evidence that vaccines cause autism, yet people ignore a mountain of data and instead focus on unproven horror stories from neighbors or things they read on the Web, he said. "People jump to conclusions. They decide what makes sense to them intuitively."

While vaccination rates climb in the developing world, they are dropping in the United States and Western Europe - endangering more than the families who chose not to give their kids the shots, Specter said. Last year, children in Minnesota died of haemophilus influenzae for the first time since a vaccine was introduced 18 years ago.

Specter has written for The New Yorker about Bill Gates and his technologically-oriented crusade to improve global health. He's also covered the quest to develop synthetic life-forms, the AIDS epidemic and computer hackers.

Specter's Seattle audience was receptive to his pro-science message, but others have accused him of uncritically accepting arguments in favor of genetically engineered crops. See Tom Philpott's take in Grist.

The same review in Grist also took Specter to task for failing to grapple with the growing numbers of Americans who reject the overwhelming scientific evidence for global warming.

But Specter said he intentionally left that out because it's already been extensively covered.

Seattle's global health experts are busy in laboratories and in the field, working on problems such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. So busy, in fact, that they don't always know about work being done down the street.

Washington's health expertise is spreading around the globe.

A new study being unveiled today attempts to bridge the information gap. It shows the breadth and depth of the state's role in global health, mapping out nearly 500 projects of global health organizations in Washington in 92 countries with 587 unique partners.

The two maps are based on data from nine local organizations and will be expanded in the future to include others.

This map shows where local organizations currently have projects.

This map shows where Seattle organizations have offices and labs.

Produced by the Washington Global Health Alliance, the maps are designed to help local organizations discover potential collaborations and shared facilities, and showcase global health as a powerful and emerging sector in the region.

"Everybody recognizes that to address these issues, the more information the better and the fewer barriers the better," said Lisa Cohen, founding director of the alliance.

Alliance members include Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Institute for Systems Biology, PATH, Public Health - Seattle & King County, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Seattle Children's Hospital Global Alliance for the Prevention of Prematurity and Stillbirth, the University of Washington, Washington State University and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation is not included in the tally because the study focuses on organizations doing work in the field, not those funding them.

Many of the founding members of the alliance have doubled in size over the past five to seven years. Global health organizations expanding in South Lake Union are redefining the area beyond the original life-sciences cluster.

The alliance can help state businesses and non-profits get connected to opportunities in places where global health projects have paved the way, such as China and India, Cohen said.

Through the alliance, local health authorities hope to apply methods used in global health projects to improve health of people here in the Seattle area.

"A lot of people think global health is over there and doesn't have relevance here," Cohen said, but the H1N1 pandemic has made the links clear.

Community health workers, for example, have been vital to programs internationally, bringing medicine and information about prenatal care and disease prevention to people in rural areas. Such a model could work here, especially in South King County, where workers with language and cultural skills could help train diverse populations living below the poverty line who are unfamiliar with the health system, Cohen said.

Social entrepreneurship has caught on in Seattle in a big way. It takes two of the region's strengths -- its entrepreneurial streak and its humanitarian drive -- and forges interesting new hybrids. Think FareStart, VillageReach and many other examples.

KRIS HERBST

Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka and pioneer of social entrepreneurship.

Now the man who helped pioneer that concept and expand its practice is visiting Seattle this week, judging the Microsoft non-profit awards and speaking at an event tonight.

Bill Drayton founded Ashoka, a global network that encourages and funds people to change society for the better. Started almost 30 years ago, Ashoka now has a network of 2,000 fellows in more than 60 countries. Some notable fellows include Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Whales.

Similar to the way a business entrepreneur might create new products or services, social entrepreneurs create new solutions to social problems.

Ashoka has expanded its Youth Venture program to Seattle, and 40 new ventures have been started by students from around Seattle, including Jessica Markowitz.

One new local partnership between Youth Venture and the Jolkona Foundation is aimed at getting young philanthropists interested in supporting the work of other young people.

Jolkona will feature some of Youth Venture's projects in Seattle on its Web site, including a teen publication in Issaquah to encourage journalism skills and newspaper reading habits among youth, and American Youth for Equal Educational Opportunities, a project to provide education supplies to students in the Bellevue School District who are in need of financial aid.

Social entrepreneurs help bridge the gap between philanthropy and business. On that topic, an interesting debate is going on with Intrepid Philanthropist blogger Phil Buchanan.

After the pounding that non-profits have received from some critics in the business world, it's good to see someone pushing back.

Update: And the winners are: Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University; Trish Millines-Dziko of Technology Access Foundation and John Wood of Room to Read.

Microsoft alumni have been a generous bunch. They've started at least 150 non-profits and given millions, if not billions, to causes from global health to education to equal rights.

Now the Microsoft Alumni Foundation is kicking off a new awards program to honor former employees working to improve the world through their philanthropy and socially motivated business.

On Wednesday evening, Bill and Melinda Gates will present the top three award winners as Integral Fellows, who will receive $25,000 each for the nonprofit of their choice. The finalists were chosen by a panel of judges -- former President Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Drayton, Pierre Omidyar, and Tom Tierney.

Of the 66 nominees, here are the six finalists:

Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University, an educational institution in Ghana whose mission is to educate African leaders of exceptional integrity and professional ability.

Peter Bladin of Grameen Foundation, which helps the world's poorest, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty through access to microfinance and technology.

Linda English of Learning for International NGOs (LINGOs), a consortium of over 40 international humanitarian relief, development, conservation and health organizations providing the latest learning technologies and courses from partners to increase the skill levels of the international nonprofit employees and the impact of their programs.

Tom Ikeda of Densho, The Japanese American Legacy Project, which helps students explore issues of democracy, intolerance, wartime hysteria, and the responsibilities of citizenship through the examination of the unjust World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Trish Millines Dziko of Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that is dedicated to preparing students of color for academic and professional success in today's technology-driven world.

John Wood of Room to Read, which partners with local communities in the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children's literature, constructing schools, and providing education to girls.

It's a massive project taking shape during a steep decline in real estate development and commercial property values.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's new 900,000-square-foot headquarters, comprised initially of two six-story, boomerang-shaped buildings on 12 acres near the Seattle Center, is scheduled to be finished in April 2011 at an estimated cost of $500 million.

Update: The WSJ's Robert Frank asks: Does a charitable foundation need a $500 million complex?

The Gateses said Friday they are making a $350 million payment of personal funds into their foundation's $34 billion endowment for construction costs. The couple made the one-time payment to distinguish money for the campus from money they have given for grants.

The foundation purchased the parcel of land from the City of Seattle for about $50 million.

The construction project has been going on more than a year and is now about 40 percent complete. Here's a view of it from a live Web cam. It will house the foundation's nearly 800 employees, now working in five locations, and an 11,000-square-foot visitor center.

At the heart of the campus is an atrium six stories high that is completely open and enclosed by glass windows.

On the site at 500 Fifth Ave. N., 400 workers are busy welding steel, pouring concrete, operating now three cranes and reinforcing an underground sewer line. The building takes close to 7,000 tons of steel for the structure and more to reinforce the 67,000 yards of concrete. The project is being led by Sellen Construction based on a design by NBBJ architects.

Green building features include a living roof on the parking garage and a million-gallon rainwater storage tank to reduce water use. The project is aiming for a Gold rating in LEED Certification, an environmental building standard.

Taking a look at some other recent developments, the non-profit Mercy Corps completed its new global headquarters in Portland, transforming and expanding a historic downtown building at a cost of $37 million.

For its new headquarters in a building complex now under construction in South Lake Union, Amazon.com signed a deal to lease about 800,000 square feet for about $700 million, with an option to double that.

However, a recent national report predicted that the recession and bank troubles will continue to weigh down the Seattle market next year, with WaMu's collapse and new but mostly unoccupied office towers combining to push the downtown office-vacancy rate above 20 percent.

Northwestern Mutual bought the WaMu Center tower from JPMorgan Chase for $115 million, less than one-third of what it cost to build.

The Gates Foundation's headquarters is the biggest project in Brian Duke's 27 years at Sellen Construction, where he is senior superintendent.

The design and communications effort needed to pull it off is huge, he said.

Cranes operate in close proximity to high-voltage power lines. When winds are above 20 miles per hour, the cranes have to stop, which could slow progress over the winter. In the record heat this summer, temperatures on the steel decking reached 120 degrees.

One challenge was removing contaminated soil -- 600,000 tons of it, load by load. The soil and groundwater were contaminated from decades of fuel storage and vehicle maintenance.

Workers also had to rebuild part of a live sewer main in the middle of the project, he said. First they had to demolish an old brick manhole from the early 1900s, being careful not to damage the line, which runs underneath Republican and serves the South Lake Union neighborhood.

Duke said he draws inspiration from the foundation's charitable aims. "It makes it easier to come to work," he said. "Your job isn't just a construction worker; it has some meaning."

Community service helps veterans make an easier transition home, but the new generation of veterans is underutilized in their own communities,
a report released today by Civic Enterprises found. The report is based on the first nationally representative survey of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Veterans from a younger generation are returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world eager to assimilate back into their communities and campuses but often do not have the means to do so," said Army Reserve Staff Sergeant Brian Hawthorne, president of the George Washington University chapter of the Student Veterans of America, who has served two tours of duty in Iraq.

Starting today a program called Mission Serve will help connect veterans to volunteer opportunities near their homes, supported by a coalition of non-profits. The effort, led by the national campaign ServiceNation, involves more than 50 organizations in 36 projects to bridge the gap between service to the country and service to the community, and expand the U.S. volunteer movement.

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Veterans and their families can find volunteer opportunities using this Web site.

First lady Michelle Obama, along with Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, kicked off the initiative in a speech at George Washington University, saying average Americans can honor veterans by volunteering, too.

Local participants included Steve Dubiel, executive director of EarthCorps, and Mark Fischer, Veterans Conservation Corps coordinator in the Washington State Department of Veteran Affairs. Organizations participating in the program include EarthCorps, Sierra Club, Veterans Conservation Corps and Big Brothers Big Sisters.

The initiative is interesting on many levels. Helping others is a way to address the trauma many veterans face after war, including high suicide rates. It also brings together diverse groups like idealist.org and the environmental movement, the American Legion and the American Red Cross to form partnerships between civilian and military service organizations. Idealist, an interactive site for exchanging resources and ideas, has Seattle non-profit expert Putnam Barber as its senior researcher and several staffers from Portland.

Soldiers who are part of the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Lewis will continue a program to build low-income houses through a Habitat for Humanity project.

Sierra Club is offering outdoor trips and environmental education for military personnel, their children and families.

Another event for veterans is taking place next week, when the RecruitMilitary Opportunity Expo opens on Thursday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at ShoWare Center in Kent.

More than 300 veterans are expected to attend the expo, which aims to connect recently returning troops, other veterans and their spouses with employment, entrepreneurship and educational opportunities. More information can be found here.