Stamps for Fund raising

Just a few weeks before Christmas I saw a sign looking for stamps for the Guide Dogs.I thought people had given up collecting stamps years ago!A number of years ago when the children were going to school, there was usually a teacher who asked for stamps to be saved for a charity. I had not done so for years and often thought what a shame to be throwing out stamps especially the bright colourful ones from foreign countries.
These have just been saved for the month of December so I will continue for another few weeks.I remember as a child we collected stamps into an album and swapped them with friends.I must say we learned a lot of our geography from them, who now knows that Helvetia is Swiss for Switzerland?!OK it is trivia but we found it interesting, I suppose it was in the days before TV and Google answered every query for us. We had to look for answers if we needed to find out anything for school homework etc. My grand children cannot believe I lived in the era before TV...what did I do with myself?!!

The guide Dogs are based in Cork since 1974, they began as Guide Dogs for the blind but they now train their own puppies for the disabled, visually impaired and also Autistic children.You can read all about their work and/or contribute in some way to their fundraising which makes up to 85% of their total budget on their website Beautiful pics of their pups and dogs, mainly Labradors, these photos are from their website so these puppies are probably by now helping some one live an independent life.
We hear on the news and have read in the papers that due to the recession fundraising has hit the lowest ebb for years,all of our charities do Trojan work that should be paid for by the government ,even in the good years of the Celtic tiger charities still provided essential services for a large part of our population.We can all still do some bit and saving stamps is recycling and helping at the same time.