The Fuzz Academy

The Fuzz Academy

"Environmentally friendly"

The Fuzz Academy is a networking site that combines simple, fun games along with valuable lessons and intellectual stimulus to create a worthy site that also happens to aid environmental causes and charities. The Fuzz Academy, or "FA" as some of its users call it, donates to several strong charities focused on saving the environment.

Fuzz Academy allows users to create an account and a personal pet, or 'cadet'. The cadets can be dressed up with various items that are bought with hairballs (the site's currency). Hairballs are earned by playing games, or showing some love to other cadets. Special, more intricately designed items are available for premium members, who spend real currency on the game. However, most items are available to normal users as well.

The site functions largely like the popular Neopets, in which the user has a social network profile, dressed up pets, and plays games for currency. What separates Fuzz Academy from your everyday pet site is that it donates to causes such as, according to their About Us page, the Nature Conservancy's Adopt-An-Acre, Plant A Billion Trees, the ASPCA, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Interested in helping one of those environmental charities yourself? You can do so, just by playing some games over at The Fuzz Academy!

AIDtoCHILDREN - Helping Children in Need Through Learning

AIDtoCHILDREN

"HELPING CHILDREN IN NEED THROUGH LEARNING"

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UPDATE: As of Sept. 18, 2011, AIDtoCHILDREN is down.
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AIDtoCHILDREN is one more great site to add to the list of easy-to-play browser games that help the world. Have you played FreeRice or Charitii lately? Then you'll definitely recognize AIDtoCHILDREN's style as soon as you jump in, with the question answering to raise funds for the charity (or charities).

The style is recognizable, with a question, and four possible answers. You click the answer you think is right, and if it is, then your skill level progresses and you donate money to the cause. If it's wrong, your skill level goes down, but that's it. It's simple, doesn't take time to load, and is very quick to play. You can exit whenever you wish, but there is no way to save your skill level and amount donated as of yet. Whenever you reload the site, you must start the questions over again.

Answering a question correctly will donate .25 cents to the AIDtoCHILDREN/World Vision cause, which is used to feed children in need. That's $0.0025, meaning 4 correct answers donates a penny. While that may not seem very helpful at all, consider this: you can answer 4 questions in about 10 seconds quite easily. According to the site, it takes just 25 cents to feed a child in need. All it takes to feed a child is roughly 250 seconds, or just over 4 minutes! Four minutes of your day to give another starving child some food, thanks to AIDtoCHILDREN.

The site itself is run by the World Vision charity. According to an article in the Puget Sound Business Journal:

"World Vision says it collected about $1.1 billion — an increase of 16 percent — from U.S. donors during its fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2008. The group’s total revenue, including grants, product donations and foreign donations, climbed 16 percent to $2.6 billion."

Even in a global recession, especially in the U.S., there was a considerable increase in the amount of donations pouring in to the charity. World Vision looks like it is and will continue to be a successful cause to donate to, and AIDtoCHILDREN lets you do that for free and with ease. So head on over the the site, and help feed children in need: AIDtoCHILDREN.

GamesThatGive - You Play. We Give. No Catch.

GamesThatGive

"You play. We give. No catch."

GamesThatGive is another very intriguing site that utilizes advertisement money to give to causes, much like FreeRice and The Hunger Site. Unlike those two sites, though, GamesThatGive is oriented around causes other than food, such as education, veterans, etc., as well as games, as the title gets across quite well.

How you earn money for the available causes is by playing games. You can bring up such games as Solitaire, Gems, FreeCell, and Bubble Burst, in your browser. You play these games, as sponsored by select advertisers, and the cause gets money for the time you spent playing (and, thus, the time you spent viewing the ads of the sponsors).

GamesThatGive does this by changing the background of your game to one of the select advertisers (such as Dominos Pizza or Propel Fitness Water), which you will view the entire time you play the game. For the amount of time you are playing, you earn the GamesThatGive site advertisement money. They, in turn, send a portion of the money earned to the cause you selected (you may permanently select a cause by selecting one here, if you are signed in).

While this sounds like a much more fun alternative to what some may consider dull trivia or clicking a button once a day, it's also good to note something very important. GamesThatGive only donates '70% of... ad revenue' to the charity you chose, which means they do make a profit instead of donating the full amount earned.

However, the selection of charities is actually quite respectable; there are currently 14 to choose from. Here is a list of available charities to select on the site:

The Wilderness Society
United Way
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
City Year
Breast Cancer Network of Strength
Unicef
ACCESS
Jumpstart
American Heart Association
Mercy Corps
ServiceNation
Ronald McDonald House Charities
Feeding America
DoSomething.org

If you're the kind of person who takes pleasure from doing something you enjoy and helping the world at the same time (and who isn't?), then get on over to start a game and help a cause: GamesThatGive.