As teachers refine their curricula and define class projects for next semester, here's a suggestion: Create a single website for all the area's major charities -- updating their needs on a weekly basis.

Sure, if you're on the mailing list for Poverello House or the Rescue Mission, you get a newsletter that may remind you to send along canned hams, underwear or personal toiletries. Sometimes, the wish-list is unchanging, and sometimes is posted on a charity's own website. Sometimes it tells you what not to send (amazing how people have their own definitions for "gently used" clothing).

But as fuel prices soar, followed by commodity/utility costs, it would be timely to create web pages that integrate the needs. It might save phone calls, costly retrieval trips for charity workers and smooth the path for donors.  Some charities are reporting that familiar food sources and benefactors are drying up -- and the season when the public tries to make up for a year of being distracted is a long ways off.

This shouldn't be a competition for diminishing resources. And in the Valley, chronically beset by poverty and neglect, we don't need to feed hungry families and the homeless a new litany of "sorry, not today. Try us again tomorrow."

Maybe creating an omnibus charity website will ease a recurring absurdity. Charities, chambers of commerce and trade associations regularly hold fund-raisers where entire tables are empty -- paid for, full of food, but full of no-shows. Talk about counter-intuitive -- a benefit that wastes resources.