Our community relies on support and services from nonprofits. Join in.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about a conversation I had last week on Christmas Eve with Leticia Ibarra Anthony. She was planning a Christmas Day dedicated to giving back, by joining fellow volunteers in distributing food to unhoused people in Soledad. 

The Greenfield resident is something of an uber-volunteer—it’s become a way of life for her, a way to be engrained in her community and to understand members of her community and serve them. Her commitment to volunteerism began decades ago, when her now-adult children were young, but it has evolved, especially during the pandemic, with outreach to farmworkers. 

“One connected me to another, and the more you did it, the more you wanted to help,” Ibarra tells me. “We’re just like a big network of family. It gives you energy.”

This idea of connectivity struck me especially. Through the act of giving back—in this case, a former farmworker supporting current farmworkers with learning their rights and meeting their basic needs—suggests connectivity in a particularly deep and meaningful way. It can be generational and longitudinal. 

Volunteering creates direct face-to-face opportunities to connect. There is another way to feel connected and to give at this year-end time, and this one is easy—it does not even require you to leave your house. I’m inviting you to join in as a philanthropist, at any level you are able, by donating to Monterey County Gives! 

The campaign features the Big Idea of 206 local nonprofits doing good in our community, and invites you to contribute to any number of them at any amount. The deadline to give is midnight tomorrow, Dec. 31. 

To get a sense of what draws different people in different ways to participate in philanthropic work, I spoke to Ibarra as a volunteer and Ted Balestreri, CEO of the Cannery Row Company, who is a donor; his real estate juggernaut is one of the matching fund partners in MCGives! He shared with me his personal focus—programs at places like the Boys and Girls Clubs or Rancho Cielo Youth Campus that help direct young people on a productive, successful path. “It’s the best investment in the world,” he said.

We can all make whatever we think is the best investment in the world in a charitable way, giving in any amount to a nonprofit doing work that matters to us. If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to read the MCGives! listings—the visions of these organizations are inspiring—and support them before the deadline tomorrow. 

Happy new year.