Community rewards being when a company gives some % of what you’ve purchased to a charity of your choice. They get the tax credit for donating, but you get to say where to the donation goes.
We got an email from the local library that noted they’ve got a community rewards thing going with our local grocery store. I checked to see what we were signed up with, and it turns out to be the local private school that DC1 went to that has since gone out of business. Our grocery rewards ($4.51 in the last quarter) were going to support their daycare center… which isn’t really a great use of the grocery store’s money. After determining that DC2’s elementary school wasn’t signed up for rewards (though the richer elementary schools out by our favored grocery store were…), I went and changed ours to the local library, even though it’s closed for renovation until the summer.
I had remembered to update our amazon smile when the private school went out of business (our amazon smile now supports the closest planned parenthood)– though I need to be better about remembering to actually use it and not just the regular amazon as I buy this year’s holiday presents.
Do you use community rewards? Where do you send your reward dollars? Do you remember to update them?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
December 3, 2018 at 6:26 am
December 3, 2018 at 10:16 am
Most of the “community rewards” programs are too small an amount and too complicated to use, so we don’t bother with them. There are two that we participate in: tokens for not taking a bag at the grocery store that we can deposit in a donation box on the way out of the store, and grocery-store gift cards purchased through a school.
The tokens are about 10¢ donations from the store, and we usually donate to Planned Parenthood or the Homeless Garden Project, though the organizations that we can choose from changes every few months, and those are sometimes not selections we can make.
The gift cards result in a 5% donation to the parent club of the home-school umbrella of our local school district (where my son did 3 years of high school). Because we do most of our shopping at the grocery store, we spend about $700–800/month there, so the school gets $35–50 a month, which is enough to justify the inconvenience of getting a check to the school each month. (There is another grocery store in town that has a similar deal with the school, using scrip instead of gift cards, but we don’t shop there often enough to use that program.) The parent club uses the money mostly to provide theater and art classes to the students.
December 3, 2018 at 2:43 pm
My Amazon Smile benefits an awesome organization called Santa’s Little Hackers (parent org: Maxmods) which adapts and gives away toys each holiday season to children who can’t activate a toy normally & need to use a switch to access it. Commercially available switch adapted toys are super expensive – a non-branded toy that is less than $20 on Amazon costs over $80 if you buy a switch adapted version. Plus, many families caring for children with these disabilities are already paying hefty medical bills, etc., so it is a real gift.
December 3, 2018 at 4:40 pm
Neat!
December 4, 2018 at 9:52 am
December 4, 2018 at 1:31 pm
My grocery store rewards thing was going to a local synagogue, but I switched it to our school. My Amazon one goes to the food bank.
December 4, 2018 at 1:32 pm
All good choices.
December 7, 2018 at 10:12 am
We’ve been giving to our local library and I think I’ll suggest that our employers’ community rewards go to them this year if PiC is into it.