Would you feel better if while doing those routines you could actually help good causes in various parts of the world? If you think that's a good idea here are some fast, free (and perhaps fun) ways to contribute -- albeit in miniscule portion -- as a conscious citizen of the world.
1. Free donation by clicking
The Hunger Site and its five siblings (the Breast Cancer Site, the Child Health Site, the Literacy Site, the Rainforest Site, the Animal Rescue Site) are the oldest of its kinds as far as I remember. The sites are sponsored by many advertisers to fund their causes. It appears from their statements repeated in each of the sites that '100% of sponsor money goes to charity' or '100% of sponsor advertising fees goes to our charitable partners.' These partners are independent charitable organizations like Nature Conservancy or MercyCorps and several others.
Another site which gives free donation on your behalf when you click on it is Ripple. It has four buttons to click: to help for access to clean water, to fight poverty, to educate people, and to finance a microcredit. Sponsors include Oxfam and Grameen Foundation, the pioneer of microcredit concept introduced by Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel laureate. To learn more about microcredit read this and this wiki.
Care2 is perhaps the largest online community with common objective of helping the planet Earth. It currently has more than 7 million members with various activities and campaigns in protecting the environment, improving health and caring for human rights. The website has 11 click-to-donate buttons for us to supports the causes for free. You need to sign up to become Care2 member if you want to keep track of your cumulative impacts.2. Free donation by searching the internet
Using a search engine like Google or Yahoo to find resources in the net is something natural that we do in our surfing activities. Wouldn't we feel much more excited if we can change that routine as another way of helping a charity? If you agree you'd better check GoodSearch, a search engine (powered by Yahoo!) which donates 50 percents of its revenues to charities and schools. Users can designate charity of their own choice from the long list of organizations and schools. They can even propose for a new charity to be added to the list.If you can get away from Google and start trusting Yahoo! you should find this alternative worthwhile to try or even to make as your default search engine.
3. Donate free rice by playing vocabulary game
I was not too convinced with an idea of giving 10 grains of rice for each word I get right in a vocabulary game. How many grains would it take to make a bowl or plate of rice? But as I am normally addicted to word games, spending few minutes on the site has been a worthwhile time-waster alternative.This site has been operating since early October 2007 and donating more than 100 million of grains of rice daily to the United Nations World Food Program for cumulative of almost 4 billion of grains of rice as of today! I am not sure how FreeRice will match these numbers in terms of tons or kilograms...
If you want to go one step further, practicing microcredit by giving loans to small business entrepreneurs in the developing world -- from Indonesia to Tanzania to Ukraine -- is a viable alternative. In this scenario, Kiva is a site worth visiting. It lets you connect one-to-one with small businesses in the developing world which needs low/no-cost microfinancing to advance their activities. Kiva partners with microfinance insitutions all over the world to reach its goals.
The process flow works like in this diagram (taken from Kiva's website):
