Do you blithely spend $5 on a latte every day — but hesitate and overthink before sending $5 to charity? If you suspect your spending habits don’t quite line up with your values, here’s a blog that might inspire you to realign your money with your passions: Living Philanthropic. This unique blog’s written by Carlo Garcia, a guy who’s committed to donate to 365 charities in 365 days!

How does he find this kind of money? According to MSNBC, Carlo started by giving up his daily Starbucks habit — and taking advantage of the fact that, thanks to text donations and other new technologies, charities can now easily take small, microdonations as little as $5 and put them to good use.

Not all of Carlo’s donations are latte-sized. Sometimes, he donates as much as $200. According to the tally on Living Philanthropically, Carlo has donated $3,009 so far, 244 days into his year of giving.

And that’s not all — Carlo’s amassed a nice crowd of would-be-philanthropic fans online, who’ve donated $4,482 to the charities Carlo has profiled. And Carlo’s followers have also donated time. In a recent post, Carlo relates an email he got from Literacy Works Chicago, one of the charities he donated to and mentioned in an interview with TimeOut. “Our administrative assistant opened her email this morning to six different messages from people who want to volunteer with us. We’re confident that this is the result of the Time Out article.”

Quite a few of Carlo’s beneficiaries are environmental organizations. Biggies like WWF, Global Green USA, charity: water, and Jane Goodall Institute have all received some of Carlo’s money, as have smaller organizations like Chicago Rarities Orchard Project and The Dinner Garden.

Carlo’s donation challenge is somewhat akin to the 29-Day Giving Challenge, which challenged participants to give away something, anything, for 29 days in a row. I participated in this — twice — and recommend it as a great feel-good challenge that has the second benefit of helping to declutter your home of stuff you don’t need — but others might.

Giving, as you may have heard, benefits not only the givee but the giver — in feel-good happiness. Carlo’s story has made me create a personal giving New Year’s resolution: To volunteer at least once a month for an environmental organization. What will you be giving in 2011?

Photo by mytat_2s

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