Free Rice - Help Feed The World

According to Poverty.com 25,000 people starve to death every day. Let that sink in for a moment. In my town that's equivalent to number of the students enrolled in six local high schools. If all those children were lost in one day to some sort of disaster how would we cope? Would our nation ever be the same? Putting a recognizable face on hunger has a sobering affect.

I bet if you knew that you could help feed a starving child by playing an online game you would jump at the opportunity to help. Well, get ready...go..play. Free Rice is a program developed by John Breen and partnered with Poverty.com. The game is easy and educational. When you pick the correct definition of an English word twenty grains of rice is donated to United Nations' World Food Program.

Twenty grains is about a teaspoon full, so what's the big deal? Keep playing for a long as you like and the number increases with each right answer. My children and I played yesterday and today, compiling a total donation of over 10,000 grains. Still not much but what happens when thousands of people play this game?

Since the site went live on October 7th of this year, a total of 9,868,446,910 grains of rice has been bought and paid for by advertisements that run unobtrusively at the bottom of the gameplay banner.

Companies such as Sirius Satellite Radio, Personal Creations, EToys and ITunes see the value in using their advertising dollars in altruistic ways, not only promoting customer loyalty and brand name recognition but helping to end the ravages of hunger at the same time.

The icing on the cake for this novel idea is that the player increases his/her knowledge of the English language and their ability to communicate effectively. And at the same time it raises their awareness of world issues and their own unique ability to affect change.

The prestigious publication, The School Library Journal reported, “A teacher of fourth and fifth graders on the Yurok Indian reservation in Klamath, CA, . . . emailed the United Nations' WFP. ‘My students absolutely LOVE the free rice site. Almost daily they earn several thousand grains of rice!’ she wrote. ‘You cannot imagine the joy in my heart when I look out and see 25 kids doing vocabulary work and enjoying it.’”

What's more...I bet many of these school children are making the connection between playing the game and social activism. Maybe FreeRice.com is helping to raise a generation who will speak up freely and act on behalf of the world's disenfranchised. Maybe by then there will be no more hunger.

Please take a moment to check out the statistics on poverty.com. As a citizen of the United States, they are quite shocking and embarrassing.

So...go...play...learn...feed someone today.