Got five minutes? Take some time out of your busy day and check out several actions you can do to help the homeless:

1. Add your name to a petition to Congress for homeless youth support efforts, including making November a National Homeless Youth Awareness again in 2008. Add your name at HomelessYouthAmongUs.org.

2. Virgin Mobile subscribers can text KARMA to 68405 and a piece of clothing will be donated to a young person in need, courtesy of American Eagle Outfitters and Levi Strauss.

3. Donate some money to a homeless charity. Go to NetworkForGood.org and enter "homeless" in the Keywords field to fine a homeless charity.

We, as residents of a developed country, tend to take water for granted. How many times have you left the water running while brushing your teeth? Or left the sprinklers running in our backyard for hours and hours? We forget that in some other parts of the world, water is not as accessible as a turn of a faucet. The founder of Cirque du Soleil wants us to remember this.

I received an e-mail from Cirque du Soleil last week announcing the launch of ONE DROP Foundation, a non-profit organization that fights poverty worldwide by "ensuring equal access to water for everyone across the planet, now and in the future." In developing countries, ONE DROP establishes educational programs based on the arts to manage water and works in communities that need access to water. In developed countries, ONE DROP will develop artistic and educational programs to increase awareness of this issue.

You don't have to give anything to the organization to get involved (although your donation and help are greatly appreciated, I'm sure!). But you can easily help the organization and the people around the world by doing several simple things. ONE DROP website lists several actions that you can take to preserve water, such as limiting consumption of bottled water and filling your bath tub to only one-quarter full. Did you know that if you don't fix a leaky tap, just one drop of water per second yields an annual waste of 10,000 liters?

Check out ONE DROP Foundation's website for more ways to preserve water.

What do you do with your old cell phone when you get a new one? Do you throw it out or recyle it? If you're like me, you probably just leave your old cell phone laying around somewhere at home and forget about it until the next spring cleaning.

Here's a solution that makes you feel good: donate it to help a charity. One of the charities that participates in cell phone recycling is CARE, whose mission is 'to serve individuals and families in the poorest communities in the world.'

Cell phones donated to CARE are either used by their field staff while working on poverty-fighting projects, or sold in developing countries, where proceeds are used by CARE to complete their mission.

CARE works with an organization called CollectiveGood to collect cell phones. It's pretty easy to donate your cell phone -- just fill out a form on their site and send your cell phone to CollectiveGood. So what are you waiting for? Start digging up your old cell phone and turn it into something good!

It's a lovely thing when you come across people really impassioned to help those in need. And that sort of emotion is what overtook me when I began to read about the non-profit organization, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The folks at the OLPC organization are on a mission to provide the poorest children in the world with a potent learning tool -- the XO, a laptop created especially for them.

The XO, about the size of textbook, but lighter than a lunchbox, is designed to run on minimal battery power, has no hard drive, as well as free, open-source software that the OLPC hopes will engage children and teachers to learn in a new way. With the ability to reinvent and program their software, the goal is that children will be empowered to learn in new ways. And to make the XO even sweeter, it is it's own wireless router -- connecting children to those around them as well as to the Internet.

When I think about poverty and hunger, I usually picture hungry children in Africa and Asia. I'm sure you've seen ads and infomercials for sponsoring a child in Asia for less than a dollar a day, and images of children in Africa with their ribs sticking out. There's no doubt that children and adults in those parts of the world need our help, but today, let's focus on how we can help locally.

Here are some ways to help adults and children who are in need of food in your community. These are not the only ways to help, of course, so if you know other ways to help, please add your comments with your ideas!

Local Soup Kitchen
You don't have to know how to cook to help in your local soup kitchen. Trust me, I don't cook and they still let me help! Generally volunteers prepare and serve food, but some soup kitchens also have other tasks to keep volunteers busy. For example, volunteers for Martha's Table in Washington, D.C., can help sorting donated clothes and working with kids in their daycare. To find a soup kitchen near you, search for soup kitchen and city name in your favorite search engine (try soup kitchen Washington, D.C.) or contact local homeless shelters.