36 hours to unleash your inner generosity

If  you had 36 hours to demonstrate your generosity, how would you do it?

For our region, being generous is the gold standard. Just look at the outpouring of support each year for Season of Sharing, the campaign to assist people on the verge of homelessness. In this area, generosity isn't limited to a time of year. It's demonstrated all day, every day and The Giving Partner is helping us all do a better job of being generous.

This year, The Patterson Foundation is proud to once again support The Giving Partner, our region's most comprehensive online resource of nonprofit information, during the 36-hour Giving Challenge. The challenge is an opportunity to explore new nonprofit profiles on The Giving Partner's site and make donations to those that align with your values.

It's an opportunity for nonprofits to reach new donors and educate existing advocates -- demonstrating their value and important place in the community to new and existing advocates. In fact, there are 293 organizations with published profiles in The Giving Partner.

Not only does The Giving Partner site inspire more informed decision making, it has inspired several anonymous donors to post dollar for dollar matching challenges -- for example, an anonymous donor posted a $250,000 match for donations made to the Sarasota Opera.

In honor of this kind of generosity and the idea of strengthening philanthropy in our community, we are offering a match of new or increased donations made to organizations during the 2013 challenge -- up to $430,000.

This means we will match one-to-one donations up to $1,000 per unique donor per organization for new and increased gifts throughout the challenge until funding is exhausted.

We're looking forward to watching our region answer the call to be generous! (follow #36hourgiving on Twitter!)