IT Infusion Inc.

ChristmasFuture empowers people to give a new kind of holiday gift—one that helps eradicate extreme poverty and changes the way we think about giving.

ChristmasFuture exists to inspire and empower North Americans to refocus a portion of their Christmas spending towards strategic and sustainable projects in the developing world to help them eradicate poverty.

After many LONG nights we’ve finally launched the functional version of ChristmasFuture.org and we’re very exciting to start changing the world.

I started volunteering with ChristmasFuture because I love the approach to elminating extreme poverty: Redirect holiday spending towards eradicating extreme poverty by building a social networking platform that allows you to invest in the lives of others while providing proof of impact. The idea is to help redirect holiday spending (which approaches $1 trillion in the US each year) towards projects that meet the UN’s Millenium Development Goals. We’re not talking about charity handouts here. We’re talking about projects with lasting impact on quality of life.

The best part is that 100% of everything that is donated goes directly to our partner grassroots organizations “on the ground”. These organizations are carefully chosen to ensure that you get the best “bang for your development buck”.

So do you really need all those useless Christmas presents (e.g socks, underwear, chocolate, etc.)? Why not get together with your co-workers, students, friends, and/or family and redirect one present each (or more) towards a worthy development project and save a few lives?

We have so much in North America, and even a small gift can do an amazing amount of good in the 3rd world.

WordPress is best known as a leading, open source, publishing platform that powers a LOT of the leading blogs on the internet. All of the current site is powered by WordPress (soon to include a huge dose of Ruby on Rails goodness!) and I’ve found it to be a highly flexible and stable platform for building blog-centric websites. With a little template modification and a few choice plugins, WordPress is a great solution for many small sites (even if they don’t require blog functionality). And hey, the price is right!

I’m a big supporter of ChristmasFuture.org and I just finished helping them to modify WordPress for their purposes. The site remains a work in progress, but I think its a great example of the flexibility of WordPress. Many thanks to the wonderful work of Dave Yarema for his design work, and the rest of the ChristmasFuture and DonorTrust team for their feedback and hard work on the site.