During the holiday season, you must have received countless mailings and calls from around the country asking for your donations to charitable causes. It can be overwhelming. After all, how do you choose among feeding the hungry, curing diseases, helping wounded veterans, educating at-risk youth, and protecting the environment? While you may already have your favorite charities, including some halfway around the country or around the world in your home countries where you came from, I am urging you to give locally, where you and your family and community now call home. There are many great reasons to give where you live, but here are a few that have compelled me to give locally each year.

• Investing in the well-being of the community at large helps build strong communities that benefit all of us. A report on the Greater Washington, DC charities a few years ago showed that for every dollar invested in local charities, we get an average of five dollars of return in economic benefits in reduced need for government services or avoidance of greater crisis down the road that could be far more costly to all of us as taxpayers and members of the society.

• Giving locally helps us pay attention to local affairs and gets us connected at a deeper level. Many important policy decisions were made without our communities’ direct input because we did not bother to read about them in local papers or show up at town halls or find some other ways to shape the outcomes. Giving makes us focus on who we give to and why. It also helps us exercise our influence and exert our voices.

• Giving locally enhances our communities’ image and relationships with the larger communities, especially when you do that in an organized fashion. If we are perceived as only interested in economic opportunities, we cannot enjoy the true benefits of social integration at the local level. The Muslim community in Montgomery County has been a great model among new communities in that regard. For example, the Montgomery County Muslim Council (www.mcmcouncil.org) was founded with the dual mission of serving the larger community and increasing Muslim community’s activism and visibility. In the words of its visionary founder, Mr. Tufail Ahmad, the Muslim community doesn’t need much but has much to give. In just a few years since its founding, MCMC and its affiliate MCMF have made a great name for themselves through their range of charitable activities. Another one, the Muslim Community Center (www.mccmd.org), runs a highly successful health clinic for the uninsured and low-income, by using the wealth of medical expertise within the Muslim community to serve the larger community while building good will.

Many of us came from countries with no tradition of an independent nonprofit sector, so charitable giving, especially giving to those we don’t feel connected to, is not deeply rooted in our cultural psyche. In this country, nonprofits, especially charitable organizations, are an American beauty. They are critical partners of the public and the private sectors doing what neither one of them can do alone or cost effectively. They are a measure of a society’s civility and collective conscience.

As we become more established both individually and as a community, we are in a much better position to give. At the risk of playing favoritism, I am recommending a few local Asian American charitable organizations that provide vital services to the most vulnerable among us so they may lead a dignified life.  Due to space limits, I am only offering links so you may check them out online.

• Asian American LEAD (youth services, www.aalead.org), Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center (www.apalrc.org), Korean Community Services Center (www.kcscgw.org), Chinese Culture and Community Service Center (www.ccacc.org), Boat People SOS (www.bpsos.org), and Maryland Vietnamese Mutual Association (www.mvma.org), Montgomery Coalition for Adult English Literacy (www.mcael.org, serves all populations).
  

• Several great local charities that serve large numbers of culturally diverse communities on essential needs include Manna Food (www.mannafood.org), a Wider Circle (www.awidercircle.org), Family Services, Inc. (www.familyservicesagency.org), and Interfaith Works (www.iworksmc.org), and Catholic Charities (www.catholiccharitiesdc.org).

For a list of local charities, visit the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington (www.nonprofitroundtable.org) or the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region (www.thecommunityfoundation.org).

This New Year, let’s put “give where you live” on our New Year’s resolutions. Let’s pay it forward--it’s the American way.

Lily Qi is the Vice Chair of Maryland Governor’s Commission on Asian American Affairs, and a speaker and trainer on Asian American, language access and cultural competency issues. She can be reached at qulturematters@gmail.com. Her previous columns can be found on her blog site, www.qulturematters.com.