How do you give back?
Here is a short video:

http://blog.altpick.com/2013/09/09/zave … ives-back/

I've been a civil rights and housing activist for most of my adult life.

My wife and I founded and for twenty-five years maintained a not-for-profit theater that included a new works development unit, a theater for children unit and a theater by children unit, all at no cost to the participants, and which toured underprivileged neighborhoods in New York.

It's not entirely altruistic, however.  the neighborhoods (and houses) we've lived in have grown appreciably in value and there's nothing like twenty-five or thirty years later seeing a young man or woman, who you first met as a disadvantaged child, now graduated from college, and with a family of his or her own.

Give backs have a way of  producing their own paybacks, in my experience.

I volunteer at an organtization that shoots weddings at no charge, for active members of the armed forces who can't afford it.

I've done a few Toys for Tot's motorcycle runs, March of Dimes for Babies a few years in a row. Volunteer here and there. Nothing very steady but at least I try anyway.

And to think that M.M. reputation is just a bunch of G.W.C.s and women who love to show off.

Great work all.

All the time.

I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 hours on the Gulf Coast doing Katrina relief work after the hurricane and subsequent flood. Worked in Pearlington, MS (they got over 30 feet of water from the ocean as the eye of the hurricane went over it), worked in NOLA several times and also worked along the TX coast for relief work after Ike. I've built a lot of damn houses.

I also did very similar work in Latin America and the Caribbean. I've worked in the Costa Rican jungle, interior valley in Honduras, the mountains in Jamaica (tourist brochures would have you believe that Jamaica is all beaches but move two miles inland from any point along the coast and you realize it's very mountainous; and quite beautiful). Built a lot of damn houses down there too. Slept on a lot of floors. Shat in a lot of outhouses. Stepped over a coral snake on a worksite once whilst carrying metal roofing materials up a mountainside (stopping and/or freaking out would have spooked the workteam I was leading and they probably would have dropped the materials and sliced someone's body clean in half).

Ironically, though I've worked in a lot of 3rd world countries, by far the worst conditions I've ever worked in have been in right here in the US (though the barrio in Tegucigalpa, Honduras was the worst general conditions I'd ever seen). I worked in parts of the Navajo Nation that was like a 3rd world country. I was shocked.

Anyway, I've built a lot of houses and dug a lot of latrines. It's amazing how good conditions are in the US. Homeless people in the US live long lives on the streets. In 3rd world countries, homeless people often just die. The poor in other countries are really fucking poor. That's not to say that the poor in the US have it good you'd be amazed: in some of the countries I've worked in, they're in tears simply because they now have a concrete floor for their house. Or they have a proper latrine downwind so the house doesn't have a stench and standing water doesn't become a breeding ground for disease. I've done a lot.

I do all of it for free.

For my photography, which come to think of it is pretty much a non profit hobby, I donate a portrait session to couple of local charities that auction them off for their cause.