Every Penny Counts,Yoni Glatt

I placed a shiny penny on the busy intersection of 96^th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan the other day and stood nearby waiting for someone to pick it up. Over one hundred people walked by until finally someone bent over and took the penny. It was a young boy about four, whose mother quickly slapped the penny out of his hand saying, "That's dirty." I highly doubt she would have done that if he had picked up a fifty. I stood around a little while longer watching the penny. Over three hundred people walked past it, many glancing at its gleam in the sunlight, but picking it up was clearly too much of a hassle. I put the penny back in my pocket, went home, and put it in a pushka later that day.

The reality is that in today's world the individual penny has nearly no value. However, every penny does ultimately add up. And if a group of people were to pool their pennies, then they might amass a small amount of money with "real value." It was under this premise that Yosef Birnboim started the tzedakah website Pennies At A Time.

The concept for Pennies At A Time is simple; it's a search engine within a search engine. One can either go to the website or make Pennies there default search bar, and then when a search is made the site redirects towards Google, giving you the same results you would have gotten if you had gone straight to Google. The only difference is that every time you do a search via Pennies At A Time, a penny will be donated to the charity of your choice, providing you've registered at PenniesAtATime.com. It is really that simple: do a search, give a little tzedakah.

One can make even more money for charity by making online purchases via the site. For example, three percent of any purchase made through Amazon.com (which has its own tab on the Pennies site) will go towards your charity of choice. Three percent is the average for 700 plus stores Pennies is associated with, including Best Buy, Gap, Toys R Us, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.

Some companies give only one percent, others as much as seven percent towards the tzedakah of your choice. But the math is simple enough: if 50 people for one charity can generate $50 in a year by using Pennies then the charity gets $2,500. That is certainly nothing to scoff at.

Birnboim, together with his team of part time workers and volunteers, created the technology to start the website two years ago in order to "raise free money for charity." Birnboim has a successful career in television and multi-media production, and his media teams have won three Emmy awards. For him, Pennies at a Time is all about the money the money going to tzedakah. Pennies was a way for him to use his technology skills and business connections to give something back, and many shuls, charities, and major non-profit organizations have started using PenniesAtATime.com.

Some notable names that have started using Pennies include NCSY chapters, Ohel, Shaare Zedek, Chai Lifeline, and several Young Israel shuls. Charities can also have custom sites designed at no cost, so users can simply go to their charities sites rather than PenniesAtAtime.com.

For some charitable organizations, implementing Pennies has been a way to help curb the decrease in donations due to the recession. "During these challenging economic times, this is a great way for our supporters to continue to help us," says Rachel Wolf, director of operations at Shaare Zedek. "The current environment calls for creative fundraising, and working together with Pennies At A Time is a smart and easy way to achieve that goal."

The National Council of Young Israel has added the Pennies search tab to many of their computers in hopes of raising more scholarship funds for teens to go to Israel for the first time with Achva. "Adding the Pennies At A Time search engine was a no-brainer for us. It's amazing to think that a needy kid could go to Israel for the first time because we've been Googling and buying things over the internet, which we do anyways," said NCYI Achva director Roger Braverman.

As good as it might sound, Pennies At A Time has yet to become the tzedakah sensation Birnboim hopes it will be. "A lot more people could be giving a lot more tzedakah. The biggest challenge for us has been to remind people to actually use the site," says Birnboim, alluding to the fact that people who know about the site still might use Google instead of Google via Pennies. In an effort to bring more people to the site, Pennies At A Time now has weekly coupon printouts on everything from Huggies diapers to General Mills cereals to ReNu eye-drops.

"The truth is that most people won't bend down to pick up a penny," says Birnboim. "However, other than registering, there is no extra effort in using Pennies At A Time, so a lot of people have the attitude of 'Well, why not?'" Hopefully, most people won't view clicking on a link as too much of a hassle especially when it's for tzedakah.

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