Muscular Dystrophy Association

I have participated in the annual local MDA Lock-up a couple of times over the last few years at work. It’s a pretty cool deal. Basically the Muscular Dystrophy Association sets up at a local businesses, in the case of Carrollton at a restaurant called The Mansion, invite a bunch of business owners and managers to participate in raising money. On the morning in question, local cops show up at work and “arrest” you and take you there, where you eat breakfast and spend a couple of hours on the phone harassing you friends and family to raise money for MDA awareness, unless of course you have already raised your goal in which case you just hang out for awhile and maybe only call one or two.

I always enjoy it and have raised a little bit of money for them. It’s a good cause and you also get to meet local business owners and network with them. I’m not even sure if/when they had it this year in Carrollton though. We also participate in the shamrocks program every year in March, which doesn’t go over very well because of course the waitresses all think that the folks giving the dollar will leave $1 less of a tip, so they are difficult to get to participate. I can understand that because in a lot of cases they are right. Anyway, when we were setting up and getting our shamrocks I asked the representative about the lock-up and she couldn’t give me an answer because it was apparently the responsibility of another region or something like that but she would make sure to give my phone number to whomever was responsible for setting up. They never called and I completely forgot about it. So much for that this year. It’s still a really good cause and I will just make sure to contact MDA directly next year should I decide to participate.

You can also go straight to the MDA website if you want to make a tax-deductible donation or go over to Charity Navigator which is a site that lists thousands of charities and rates them. They have all kinds of useful information such as the CEO’s salaries and how effective each charity is in spending the money as well as how much overhead is being generated.

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