Unusual Christmas Gift Ideas

Gifts that Make a Difference
Unusual Christmas Gift Ideas
By Rob Sivak - Voice of America
Apr 17, 2008, 05:23

Washington
20 Dec 2000, 19:21 UTC

A lot of people looking for unusual gift ideas this holiday season look no further than the latest catalog from Heifer Project International. The catalog lets shoppers donate a dairy cow, a goat or other livestock to a poor family somewhere in the developing world.

In China, a boy poses with Heifer provided goslings which bring the family eggs for better nutrition and extra income. Photo Credit: Matt Bradley

Heifer Project International is a private, Arkansas-based development group, founded almost 50 years ago on a simple faith: if you give the world's poorest people the resources to provide for themselves, they will. The Project is now active in more than 40 countries, using donated livestock to foster small-scale family enterprises, boost incomes and improve the diets of its mostly rural clients.

Mike Matchett is Heifer Project's director of marketing. "The basic idea is to provide a means for people to lift themselves out of poverty in a sustainable way," he explains, "So we provide all types of livestock, even trees and other things, for people to help provide for themselves and have the self esteem that goes along with providing for themselves, rather than living from handout to handout."

Mr. Matchett says Heifer Project found a new way four years ago to encourage the public to share in its worldwide development efforts. Its 30 page color brochure, confidently titled "The Most Important Gift Catalog in the World," is mailed out to millions of homes across the United States at the start of the winter holiday season.

It is also available year round to international customers on Heifer Project's Worldwide Web site, w.w.w.heifer.org. The catalog invites readers to spend between $20 and $500 to purchase a heifer, a goat, a laying hen, a water buffalo, or other gift animal that will be donated to a needy family. Shoppers can also choose to buy just a share of an animal. Or they can spend $5,000 to buy an assortment of animals called the "Ark."

A young woman milks her Heifer-provided cow in Kenya. Heifer's high-production milk cows give more milk than local cows that are allowed to roam for forage, damaging the environment.

Marketing director Mike Matchett says the catalog is designed to give shoppers looking for "alternative" gifts something that is both easy to buy and meaningful. "It was the desire to give people an alternative to the tired tie or sweater or whatever you give during the holiday that just goes in the drawer, and trying to give people the option of giving a gift that actually helps someone," Mr. Matchett says, "So people say, they want to donate a sheep in honor of their mother, to Heifer Project, they can do that. So they can give something that is symbolic but which is actually helping a family somewhere around the world."

That idea had a powerful appeal to Maryland resident Brian Bach, who recently purchased a Heifer Project goat from the catalog as a gift in his brother's honor. Mr. Bach, a 20-year veteran of international development work, says he knows first-hand the positive difference even a single goat can make in the lives of a poor family.

"One of the other elements that I really like is the notion of a gift that continues to give," he says, "The [recipient] family is asked to give the offspring of one of the animals to another family. And that really helps in the community building. And I've seen locally how important it is for individual recipients not to be singled out too much, and for the gifts they had to be shared more broadly in the community."

Shoppers have been responding to Heifer Project International's gift catalog in record numbers this year. Donna Jarred, the organization's director of donor services, says toll-free phone, mail and web orders from the United States and many other countries are up 60 percent from last year. "So far this season we have received about $5.5 million in donations as a result of the catalog. Just since November we have had about 30,000 phone calls, so that keeps us quite busy. And of course on the website we have had about 10,500 folks visit the web, and that has resulted in already one and a $500,000," she says.

Donna Jarred predicts that by holidays' end, Heifer Project's livestock gift catalog will have generated more than $10 million in donations. That public response is not only satisfying, says Ms. Jarred, it's vital. Catalog sales last year accounted for 80 percent of Heifer Project International's annual budget.