Share the wedding spotlight with something you believe in! Last year, the average wedding cost about $20,000. What if each of the 2.3 million couples getting married in the United States took 1% of their wedding budget and used it to change the world? The impact? $460 million per year!

How to make an impact at your wedding? Ideas worth adding to your wedding wishlist:

1. Shower the Starving

Hold your wedding shower at a place like Feed My Starving Children. Are you in a more established stage of life and need less houseware gifts? Skip the awkward present opening in front of your soon-to-be-in-laws and share in a memorable experience of hairnets and stopping hunger around the globe! For more inspiration, check out this story from FMSC about a couple and their wedding guests who packed food for 60 kids in Sierra Leone to have a daily meal for an entire year!

2. Bachelorette Party with a Purpose

Must bring a non-perishable food item to enter the party bus! Have the bus take a swing by a shelter to drop it all off.

3. MAKE YOUR FAVORS GO FURTHER

Nix the party favors that half your guests will forget to take with them at the end of the night. Instead, print off little cards that instruct people where to donate OR put the money you would put to favors directly to the non-profit and print off a picture of the people being impacted by the donation with a little blurb about where their (the guest) favor went to! Plus, depending how crafty (or un-crafty) you are – favors can take a lot longer to put together than using the internet to quickly donate to your favorite organization.

Recommendation: Choose an organization (or multiples) that are meaningful to your family and friends too!

4. Clinky Clinky!

Do guests want to see the couple kiss? Ask your guests to clink their coins”¦and Abrahams,
Alexanders and Andrews”¦into a beautiful vase at the head table. The bigger the bill, the crazier
the kiss! All the money can go towards your favorite charity or non-profit.

5. Donate Away the Dollar Dance

Instead of taking the money to use on your honeymoon, do a dollar dance to fund a tangible
project that could provide clean water to kids in a third world country or fund the one and only
basketball court in a Haitian village to keep the kids at school and off the streets! Check out a
non-profit like LIFT UP for more tangible projects with great impact around the world – this non-
profit gives every single dollar away! Just think – your wedding guests could raise enough money
for a water well in Cambodia – all in the amount of time it takes Elton John to sing Can You Feel
The Love.

Yes, Elton, we are definitely feeling the love.

Your wedding day is a special, momentous, unforgettable day in your life. How could you use this day to
make a life-changing impact somewhere else in the world? Now that’s truly something you (and they)
will never forget.