Sustainable Ideas...

My brother works for a small theatre, and they get some of their funding from an unusual source: a search engine.

Like some 59,000 other non-profits -- including hundreds of environmental organizations -- my brother's theatre is signed up on GoodSearch, a search engine that generates income for organizations with every search.

Here's how it works: You visit GoodSearch and first do a search for a charity that matters to you. You could pick the WWF, StopGlobalWarming.org, Bat Conservation International, or American Forests to name just a few. Once you find the charity you want, click verify. After that, every search you make on GoodSearch generates a donation for your chosen charity.

The funds come from advertising on search results, the same formula that has made Google a multi-billion dollar company. But GoodSearch donates 50% of its search revenues to charities and schools. The company estimates that every search sends 1 cent to a charity. That may not seem like much, but if 100 people support a charity and search just one time a day, that sends $365 a year to that charity.

(And if you're a web power-user like me, and you search a few dozen times an hour for your work, the donations really add up!)

GoodSearch's search results are powered by Yahoo, the number 2 search engine, so they're pretty reliable. And for charities, the funds are like found money.

Give it a try! Who knows, you might never Google again...