If you're looking for a great cause to donate to...

I don’t know if this falls afoul of the forum rules - if so, mods can feel free to yank it. If not, here goes.

As some of you know, I lost a child to cancer a few years back. While he was being treated, he spent a lot of time either getting chemo (which truly sucks) or recovering from one procedure or another. One of the few bright spots of his days in the hospital were the weekly visits from the Hole in the Wall Camp’s Hospital Outreach staff. The HITW Camp was started by Paul Newman in 1988 and is modeled on an old west motiff. It’s set up specifically to give extremely sick kids the camp experience, and hosted over 200,000 kids in the 25 years since (and over 20,000 in 2013 alone). The Hospital Outreach program sends staffers out to 28 hospitals in the Northeast so that “kids who are too sick to make it to the Camp can have the Camp brought to them”.

Every year, I take part in their Angel Ride where I and about 300-400 of my closest friends cycle the length and height of Connecticut over 2 days (about 83 miles the first day and 50 the second) - this year, I’m riding the 2nd day. The proceeds from the ride (we’re hoping to raise about $800,000 this year) go entirely towards funding the Hospital Outreach program. If you’re looking for a good cause to send some scratch to, look no further.

In case you’re amenable (or even if you just want to learn a bit more about an extremely good cause), here’s a link to the camp, here’s one to a video about the ride, and here’s the link to the donations page.