As a rabid hiker and mountain biker, I love REI. They’ve also been long-term supporters of the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council’s volunteer trail building, for years giving us grants for equipment and publicizing our events, often even bringing their own staff along.
Last Saturday I was chatting to Jennifer Day, the outreach officer at their Santa Monica store. She’d not only brought along a crew of volunteers to work on the trails, she also supplied free t-shirts, juice and raffle prizes. She mentioned that REI ran an online affiliation program we might be interested in. It’s a generous 7% of any purchase someone makes through the website after clicking on the ad. Since most of our members are already heavy REI shoppers, and there’s free shipping to the local stores, this was money for nothing we could spend on keeping the trails open.
There’s no catches, all you have to do is click on the ad here or in the sidebar, and for the next 30 days any purchase you make online will mean a 7% donation to the SMMTC, for the same price you would have paid anyway. If you have an organization you’d like to help instead, signing up for their affiliate program yourself is easy too.
Pete Warden's blog 