A maximum of 8 family member can participate and children must be at least 6 years old to qualify. So you could theoretically get a free day of admission for the entire family during your next vacation. Not too shabby! Although I’m not too sure I ever want to ride It’s A Small World again. It creeped me out when I was 4, it somehow got even creepier when I was 10, and I don’t want to risk seeing what’s it’s become now!

For more information on the freebie and the charity in general, check out this page.

[via Meri and Matador Pulse]

I first thought this was far too good to be true, but all my sources confirm that this free Brunswick bowling coupon is legit. It includes two hours of bowling, shoe rentals for up to six people, and a pitcher of coke. You can check here to see if you have a location near you and I’d still call ahead to make sure they accept this, but I plan on trying to use it with my family next month. There isn’t even an expiration date on the coupon, so you could theoretically save it for a party or something!

Yes, my freebee loving friends, I’m going to pander a cause. The American Red Cross.

I received a text message this afternoon about an easy way to donate $5 to help out with the Hurricane Relief funds this go round. You see, if you text the word “GIVE” to 24357, you can give that donation by just adding it on to your cell phone bill. Simple as that!

Yes, yes, standard text messaging rates apply and again, this isn’t a freebee because you’re paying the $5 in the end. But, it saves you finding a stamp and your checkbook or logging onto a website to do all of this. Yup, all you do is text and its applied to your cell phone bill like one of those Jamster ringtones.

And hey, with all of these freebees we’re getting? $5 extra on our cell phones doesn’t sound too bad…

Back later with more from the wonderful world of America’s Midwest.

[via the forums]

So there’s been a section on the freebie forums called Hey, It’s Free…To Help People! for months now, which I have yet to do a darn thing with. But I decided to change that today.

A few days ago I heard about Kiva.org, which is a non-profit website that specializes in helping aspiring entrepreneurs in third world nations. Using microfinancing, they are given small loans to be used to improve their daily lives before they ultimately pay the loan back to us lenders. To idea is to enable people to help themselves individually instead of simply throwing billions of dollars in aide to a foreign government and hoping it trickles down to the people. In fact, Muhammad Yunus recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his research into microfinancing and wrote a book called Banker To The Poor, where he details how effective the method is.

Just to give you an example, José Medina lives in Paraguay and is trying to raise $600 to purchase supplies for his handcrafts business. In 12 months time, he would have made enough money to repay the loan in full . They have had 2171 loans paid back in full and only 7 which have defaulted! Those are some darn good odds if you ask me.

Now, Kiva lets anybody loan money, but the minimum amount is $25. But I thought if anybody out there wanted to simply donate $5 or $10, that we could put our money together in a HIF pool or something and then pick a person to “sponsor” and help! It’d be kinda cool to think that all of us here at HIF specifically helped one person out there in the third world better their life!

So the basic plan of action is this: Donations of any amount can be sent to me, where I add them all together. No matter how much or little money we actually raise here, come September 12th, I’ll post two or three different potential people that we can “invest” in to help them out. We’ll take a day to pick a person and then I’ll invest all the money I collected into their venture. We’ll all be able to follow their progress along via Kiva.org I’ll even post a progress bar here on HIF or something. Then when they ultimately (and hopefully!) succeed in their business, they’ll pay me back. At which point, I’ll announce that we need to pick a new person and start the process all over again!

The beauty of this is that your one time donation doesn’t just help one person, but multiple people time and time again. If this is something nobody’s interested in, no worries, but I thought since we all get so many freebies all the time, maybe we could muster up a little support and pass the baton to those who could really use it.

So if you want to donate something to this cause, you can send it to my Paypal address, which is shyzer@shyzer.com or you can just click the donation button below. (Shyzer.com is my personal website that I owned years before HIF, hence when my Paypal account isn’t a HIF e-mail ) You can donate money using a debit or credit card or if you already have a Paypal account, you can donate through that.

Thanks for taking part in this and here’s to actually making a difference in the world!