Global Giving, the website where people like you and me can safely donate money to charities that make a difference, unveiled it’s new green section on Friday.  Now, you can give money to charities that Global Giving has deemed worthy of it’s green leaf of approval.  Can you be more specific, you may ask?  Why, I happen to have information straight from the website, right now!

A brand new section of our site focused on helping people and the planet. We’ve hand-picked projects that address climate change and poverty - you choose your favorite and watch your donation make a difference!

Fantastic.  The people at Global Giving Green have developed a scoring system to decide which charities are the greenest and thus must deserving.

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It’s May 16th, I’m Gina Telaroli and this is TakePart.com’s look at the week in social action…

Central China was hit with a devastating earthquake today measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale. The quake is the worst to strike the world’s most populous country in decades. The state-run Xinhua News Agency currently estimates over 8,500 people have perished as a result of the disaster, tragically including 900 students who were trapped under the rubble of their collapsed school.

The epicenter of the quake was in Sichuan province, in the hilly region of the Middle Kingdom leading up to the Tibetan plateau, but its force caused skyscrapers in Shanghai and Taipei to sway. The shockwaves were felt as far away as Thailand and Vietnam. You can view video of the quake shot by a student in Sichuan province after the jump:

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Last month’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival featured “The Axe in the Attic,” a poignant and thoughtful documentary about both the natural and human costs of Hurricane Katrina. Filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small spent 60 days on the road exploring New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, Alabama and Kentucky in their efforts to collect post-storm footage and interviews, but broke with documentary tradition by deciding to include themselves in the story. “When you’re two white northerners heading South,” they said in their directors’ statement, “remaining behind the camera just doesn’t feel like an option.”

The title of the film is a gloomy reference to those who sought refuge in their attics from the flood, but had to chop their way through the roof when the water failed to recede. The documentary itself focuses on how evacuees have had to adjust to their new environments, some achingly alien to them, as both subject and filmmaker take on such controversial topics as class, race, and the government’s failure to provide for those who have lost everything.

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