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Your contributions can help our community

Today our cover story marks the launch of our 2010 Pleasanton Weekly Holiday Fund campaign, a community-wide fundraising effort to provide needed financial resources to vital nonprofits serving Pleasanton and the Tri-Valley. These organizations serve the hungry and disadvantaged, those with little or no health care coverage, those needing help and encouragement in facing life-threatening disease and end-of-life care, and even our furry friends in the animal kingdom who mean so much to so many of us, especially to seniors and the disabled.

It's also back to the basics for this year's Holiday Fund which in 2009 joined with federal, county and regional agencies as part of a national initiative to put people back to work. Using matching funds, contributors received a 4 to 1 match through the Tri-Valley Regional Initiative, a collaborative economic recovery initiative sponsored through the Tri-Valley Community Foundation, the Tri-Valley Business Council and Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty. That effort provided $466,732 for assistance to some of the poorest families in the Tri-Valley with some 200 unemployed breadwinners being placed in jobs which most of them still have.

This year, five nonprofits are designated beneficiaries of the 2010 Holiday Fund. They are Axis Community Health, Hope Hospice, Open Heart Kitchen, Valley Humane Society and the Ryan Comer Cancer Resource Center at ValleyCare Health Systems.

The Pleasanton Weekly Holiday Fund drive benefits not only from the generous contributions of you, our valued readers, but also matching funds from the Tri-Valley Community Foundation and its generous donors. This enables us to double your contributions and allow your gift to have twice the impact. There are three good reasons to contribute to the Pleasanton Weekly Holiday Fund:

* 100 percent of your gift will go to nonprofits serving people in our community.

* Neither the Pleasanton Weekly nor the Tri-Valley Community Foundation will take any fees or expenses for administering the fund. All donations will go the intended recipients.

* Because of matching donations, your gift will be doubled up to this year's goal of $100,000 and thus be twice as effective.

We thank all those who have generously contributed to the Pleasanton Weekly Holiday Fund in the past and hope you will make this fund and the organizations it supports part of your holiday giving in the coming weeks.