Going through our archives, we came across this great post by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars from January 1, 2016 “How to make the world better without winning the lottery” that we wanted to share in case you missed it the first time around.
So …Powerball is up to $1.3 billion and just like every time the amount to be won gets into the hundreds of millions, there have been all kinds of articles asking people what would they do if they won the lottery.
Inevitably, people say things like;
First, I would give half to charity.
or
I’d give 25% to the church.
or
After I paid off all of my bills, I’d give 10% to the church.
I was curious about this, so I asked a priest whether the church really received millions of dollars from lottery winners. He just laughed and said, “No.”
I actually bought a lottery ticket for the first time in my life tonight. I didn’t even know how or where you get them. Apparently, you can get them pretty much anywhere except church.
Truly, my life wouldn’t change drastically if I had a billion dollars. I don’t want a bigger house, a flashier car, a private jet. Most of the places I want to visit, I’ve already been.
I realized that if people were really serious about giving to charity, they’d do it now and not wait until they had an extra billion dollars. So, I had just put some money in the bank. It wasn’t a major amount – miscellaneous reimbursement checks. I decide to take one-third of that and donate it. I happened to randomly see this article on a Catholic charity in Chicago whose boiler had broken and they were working in the cold. I absolutely loathe being cold and I think the things they are doing like after school tutoring and feeding the hungry are exactly what I want to support, so I donated it to them.
So, here is my idea…everyone who claims they would give to charity if they won the lottery – which is probably all 50 million or so of you – should donate something to charity today. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Maybe you can only afford $5 or $10. Let’s say the average person could afford $20.
$20 x 50,000,000 = $1 BILLION DONATED TO CHARITY
Even if you don’t win the lottery, with that much money going to good causes, we’d all be winners.
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What I’d Do With a Billion Dollars
The main way more money would change my life is that I could spend a greater proportion of my time working on making our educational games better and demonstrating our games for parents and teachers, rather than continually writing to granting agencies and investors asking for funding and writing reports on what we’re doing with the funding.
If you want to help out, check out our games. You may have no money left to buy one since you just donated your extra cash to charity (you sweetheart, you) but you can still help out by telling your friends who are parents or teachers, sharing our Facebook page or downloading a free demo and trying the games out.
You don’t have to stop sharing because Christmas is over.
We have the educational games that you need. Browse them here!
