For the first six months of our existence, membership in Foundation Beyond Belief included a $9 annual fee. This provided a small, reliable income stream to see us through the early days. Those of you who joined under that system helped provide that extra support we needed, and we thank you.

We've now decided to drop the membership fee entirely. New members can now sign up for our charitable giving program with no additional fee.

We still have operational costs, of course, but it's now entirely up to each member whether to contribute to the running of the Foundation. We hope this organization is valuable enough for members to designate a small percentage of their monthly donation to the care and feeding of the Foundation itself. If you'd like to do so, just log in, then click here to change your distribution.

Second-quarter beneficiary The Global Fund for Children gave us this report on how they're using the funds they recieved from Foundation Beyond Belief. Foundation members donated $1,975 to The Global Fund for Children last quarter.

The Global Fund for Children supports innovative community-based organizations around the world. These organizations reach the world’s most vulnerable children, those not touched by government and social service agencies.

We make small grants to these organizations and work to build their capacity. To date, GFC has awarded nearly $18 million in grants to 401 grassroots organizations in 75 countries. Our grants bring medical care to children living in remote areas, help children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic stay in school and receive the education they need to thrive, and raise awareness about issues such as domestic violence and human trafficking in local communities where they are an issue.

Third-quarter beneficiary The Mountain Fund recently led a successful medical trek to Nepal. Here's their account of the experience:  

This spring, The Mountain Fund took another amazing and diverse group of people from all over the world on a medical trek through the Rasuwa District of Nepal, where we have been working for the last 10 years. We had members from Canada, the US, Sweden, the UK, and Germany. While only about half the group was comprised of medical professionals, everybody in the group was fully able to contribute to the needs of the people of Rasuwa. We hosted three medical camps over the course of 10 days seeing close to 700 patients. The busiest member of our group was Pete, an optometrist from Muscatine, Iowa. He diagnosed an 8-year-old with glaucoma and gave some much-needed glasses to a 7-year-old boy who can now really see the world for the first time. Pete, of course, was not the only busy person on the trip--everybody kept busy organizing, seeing patients, and giving out medicines.

Third-quarter beneficiary Compassion & Choices is getting some unexpected national attention. Read what their president, Barbara Coombs Lee, had to say about the matter.

Recently Capitol Hill staffers pulled Compassion & Choices into federal politics, suggesting the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, should be called before Congress to answer accusations that he is a member or affiliated somehow with C&C. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of Compassion & Choices?” Something like that.

It’s a new experience for us to occupy the center of a partisan battle. The issues our clients and constituents confront are intensely personal, never political, and certainly not exclusive to people who ally themselves with one political party or another. Our supporters cover the landscape from right-wing libertarian to left-wing progressive. Polls consistently show majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents support end-of-life choice. Among our clients, those naturally averse to government intrusion in their personal decisions are over-represented.