Last year, I gave up my birthday. I'm already blessed with a ridiculous amount of stuff and I wanted to do something instead that would have a lasting impact. Together we raised nearly $600 for a local organization, First Glance, that speaks into the lives of teens.

This year, I'm upping the ante.

Over a billion people in the world are living without clean water. Millions contract deadly diseases from contaminated water. 45,000 people will die this week alone. The lucky ones won't, but still walk hours each day to get dirty water to give to their families.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Mozambique and witness this personally. You can read a short article about my experience retrieving water at my blog: http://joeldaniel.wordpress.com

So this year, instead of saying "Happy Birthday" on my facebook wall, or giving me a call, or handing me large sums of cash (ok...that doesn't happen that often), I'm asking you to donate $20 to my project. If I can get 100 people to donate $20 each, we'll have raised $2000 and provided clean water for 100 people. Wow. Now that's something worth celebrating.

You might wonder if all the money will really go to water. I did. But because of charity: water's unique model, 100% of all donations go directly to direct water projects costs, and each donation is "proved" and tracked to the village it helped when projects are complete. That means sometime next year I'll get a picture and GPS coordinates of the exact location that our donations impacted.