On the fourth Monday of each month, Rufi Natarajan gathers with friends at a Houston café for a book-club meeting. The conversation begins at 6:30 and typically lasts for two hours — but last month’s discussion is continuing well beyond that.

Ms. Natarajan’s book group is one of more than 430 that are participating in a project by Mercy Corps, the international aid charity, centered on a new book by the journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.

The book, Half the Sky, argues that many of society’s problems can be alleviated by improving the status of women. Mercy Corps, which recently started a campaign to advance the idea that investing in women can fight global hunger, is using the book to win support for that effort.

The charity issued a challenge to book clubs around the world: Don’t just read the book, take action. Raise money for Mercy Corp’s campaign, recruit other...

If the past is any judge, Americans will not give as much as they did in 2007 until three years after the recession ends, according to a report released by the Giving USA Foundation.

Foundation grant making could take longer to rebound than giving by individuals, researchers at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University write in the latest issue of Giving USA Spotlight.

For clues, they examined the effects on giving of the Great Depression and of recessions in the 1970s and 1980s.

Itemized charitable deductions, when adjusted for inflation, did not recover to pre-1929 levels until 1937, then fell again in 1938 but rebounded the next year. Giving took three or four years to recover after the recession in the 1970s.

But the researchers say there are some signs that giving may rebound more quickly after this recession.

For example, there are more foundations today and...

Typically a consistent source of revenue for the nonprofit groups that rely on them, child sponsorships may even be suffering as a result of the recession, according to a study conducted for World Vision.

One in five people surveyed in August said they were less likely to sponsor a child because of the economic climate. More than half said they would be more likely to sign on to a sponsorship program if they had more money, according to the poll of more than 1,000 adults by Harris Interactive.

Lana Reda, vice president of donor engagement with World Vision, said that fewer people feel comfortable making a long-term commitment to a charity when the economic situation is so fragile.

“Americans have a great heart for those that are downtrodden,” she said. “But it takes discretionary income, as well as the ongoing ability to commit.”

Her charity, which provides relief to poor...

Sean Stannard-Stockton, an adviser to donors and a columnist for The Chronicle, predicts that foundation giving will plummet in 2010.

Here’s why:

Foundations are required to give 5 percent of their assets annually, based on the value of their investments the previous year. “If the market trades exactly sideways for the rest of the year, required foundation giving in 2010 is going to fall another 23 percent compared to 2009,” writes Mr. Stannard-Stockton.

What’s more, many foundations tried to maintain their giving last year because of the greater needs — and to the extent their grants exceeded the 5 percent figure, they can count it toward 2010’s requiring giving.

“In other words,” writes Mr. Stannard-Stockton, “from the standpoint of foundation giving, more than half of the impact of the stock market has yet to be felt.”

So what’s to be done? Foundations should encourage...

Among cities large and small, who is the most generous of them all?

In terms of online giving, Alexandria, Va., took the prize for the most charitable giving per capita last year among cities with populations over 100,000, according to an analysis by Convio, a company that provides Web-based software to charities. The city, which is located just a few miles from Washington, D.C., was followed by Cambridge, Mass., and Minneapolis, Minn.

Princeton, N.J., beat out Carlsbad, Calif., and Wilmington, Del., among small cities, which were ranked based on total dollar amounts contributed rather than per- capita giving.

Convio based the rankings on an analysis of online donations it processed for 273 large cities and more than 1,700 cities with populations of less than 100,000.

Rounding out the top five big cities were Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Va. Alpharatta, Ga., and...

Local bloggers are trying to come to the rescue of a Washington, D.C., charity whose imminent demise was reported on Sunday in The Washington Post.

Trustees of the domestic-abuse charity, Weave, decided two weeks ago to shut down the organization because of a financial crunch.

But a Web site dedicated to keeping the group’s doors open has brought in more than $50,000 since last weekend, the blog DCist reports.

The blog encourages readers to donate to the organization online and attend a fund-raising happy hour.

Prince of Petworth, a blog that chronicles restaurant openings, safety concerns, and other news about the Petworth neighborhood in Washington, ran part of a letter from the charity’s legal director asking for support.

Do you have a story of a charity in your city that has been saved from closing?

Lose weight, fight hunger.

Those are the goals behind Weight Watchers’ Lose for Good campaign, which runs through mid-October. For every 1 million pounds that members of the weight-loss club shed before then, the company will donate $250,000, or up to $1-million.

The campaign, which is in its second year, benefits two antihunger groups: Share Our Strength and Action Against Hunger. Because of last year’s success — the company donated $1-million and club members lost more than 4 million pounds — Weight Watchers decided to continue the effort and add new ways to help.

The company is putting up an additional $25,000 for the charities through Lose-a-Palooza, a daylong effort to get people talking about the campaign on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other social media.

For every mention of the campaign, the company will donate $1. The event will take place on September 15.

Action...

“All You Need Is Love” may not be the most popular Beatles song ever — it topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for one week, far shorter than the seven weeks for “I Want to Hold Your Hand” — but the anthem could turn out to be the band’s most charitable.

Starting today, owners of Xbox video-game consoles who download the song to play with their new Beatles: Rock Band game will benefit Doctors Without Borders, the international medical charity.

The song costs $1.99 to download. Currently, more than 20 million people use the Xbox feature, Xbox Live, through which the song can be downloaded. Xbox is owned by Microsoft.

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison chose Doctors Without Borders as the beneficiary of the Microsoft deal.

Microsoft is also raising money for Doctors Without Borders by auctioning 50 “special-edition” Beatles-themed game consoles....

Muslim Advocates, a legal and civic-education charity in San Francisco, has released a video that provides guidance to donors who want to support Muslim charities this Ramadan and beyond.

The six-minute video, Guidance on Zakat: Law and Best Practices, instructs donors on reporting their gifts on tax returns, assessing charities, best practices of giving overseas, and other steps to ensure their gifts effectively support humanitarian causes.

The video is an effort to reassure Muslim-American donors, some of whom have become skittish as a result of government scrutiny of such nonprofit groups following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

What do you think of the video?

Charley Miller has a twofold mission for his new business: Raise money for charity and reduce the stigma around online dating.

The coupling of these two very different objectives led to GiveandDate.com, a Web site Mr. Miller and three others created for socially conscious singles. The dating site, in beta form since late May, will be officially unveiled in six weeks or so.

Here’s how it will work: Users will purchase monthly subscriptions for $12, half of which will go to charity and the other half to GiveandDate.com.

Money also will go to charity, even with the beta version, each time someone contacts one of the “featured users” on the Web site. It costs $1 to send a message to those users, 50 cents of which goes to charity.

Mr. Miller, 31, got the idea for the site as a graduate student in interactive game design at New York University. He hopes it might appeal to those squeamish ...