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Today I read an news article about a fundraiser called Freerice.com, which is an online effort to help the United Nations World Food Programme. The site is the idea of John Breen – a notable fundraiser – and it is the sister site to Poverty.com – another world poverty initiative. The Freerice site has only been operating for a little over a month and has provided enough rice to feed 50,000 hungry people. The site uses ad support and a simple vocabulary game to put food in the mouths of starving people worldwide.

I have covered many fundraising and altruistic efforts in the last year, including a shared post Profy today on this cool effort. There are altogether not enough really innovative and simple sites like this to allow people to help easily. Freerice makes helping people as simple as playing a vocabulary game and honing one’s skill at the same time. It took me less that a minute to create 170 grains or rice for people who really need it. The multiple choice game generates 10 grains of rice for each correct answer on Freerice. How simple it that?

I don’t think I have ever witnessed anything so quick and effective that allows people to help with just a few moments of their time. This is the Web at its very best! According to the Reuters story, Freerice has raised awareness and has also raised over 1 billion grains of rice so far. That is fairly amazing – in six months imagine how many people could go without hunger for a few clicks from each of us. “The site is a viral marketing success story with more than one billion grains of rice donated in just one month to help tackle hunger worldwide”, according to Josette Sheeran WFP Director in Rome.

We all spend so much time on the Web – the least we can do is spend a few moments playing a simple game to help hungry people. This is the “east button” of all easy buttons for the sake of mankind. Check this site out and so as I did – make a pledge to yourself of how many grains you will hand deliver to someone’s hungry child. So for today, being unplugged should be about doing the most simple giving there is no the Web – donating a little time. We do use it like water here on the Web you know.