Menu for Hope VI -- Help the World Food Programme and a Chance to Publish Your Own Cookbook

Update: Menu for Hope extended to December 31.

Every year, Food Bloggers from all over the world join together for a fundraising campaign. We call it 'Menu for Hope'. For the past three years, we've raised nearly $250K in support of the UN World Food Programme. (As of 12/27, we've raised more than $53,000 for the programme this year and there is still time to participate. )

From Pim the Menu for Hope organizer: "This year, Menu for Hope ... is highlighting the new initiative Purchase for Progress (P4P). P4P enables smallholder and low-income farmers to supply food to WFP’s global operation, helping farmers improves their practices and putting more cash directly into their pockets in return for their crops."

The way this fundraiser works is that you make a donation and get to choose a bid item for every $10 donated. At the end of the drive, a "winner" is selected from those who have selected that particular bid item and the offering is yours.

The bid item Blog Appetit will be offering is a $50 gift certificate to blurb.com. At blurb.com you can create you own cookbook (or photo or other book) with the site's free software. Depending on the number of photos, size, binding, cover and paper, the gift certificate should be enough for you to buy one or more copies of your own book. Then you can direct others to blurb.com so they can purchase copies of your new book! (Alternatively, you can use the gift certificate to buy others books from the site.)

As an added bonus, I will be glad to help copy edit your new book. I'm an ex-newspaper copy editor and have taken classes in copyediting cookbooks. That's something the winner of this bid item can work out with me.

The bid item number for this donation is UW10. You'll need this number when you go to the donation site (see below).

Here's the list of bid items from West of the Mississippi food bloggers at Gluten-Free Girl, the West Coast coordinator. Here is the master list of bid items from Chez Pim, the founder and organizer of Menu for Hope.

Here's the rules from Pim:

To Donate and Enter the Menu for Hope Raffle, here's what you need to do:
1. Choose a bid item or bid items of your choice from our Menu for Hope main bid item list. (Note: background on all this is at http://www.chezpim.com/blogs/2009/12/mfh6main.html. The bid list is here.)
2. Go to the donation site at Firstgiving and make a donation.
3. Please specify which bid item you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per bid item, and please use the bid item code.
Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02 - 2xEU01, 3xEU02. 4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.
5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.
Check back on Chez Pim on Monday, January 18 for the results of the raffle.

Please be sure to come back later tonight for the updated post.
Thanks,
Faith