This is my opinion alone and not that of TopDrawerSoccer.com

Charity has become a tricky thing in our day and age. While people wanting to help other people is an ages-old attitude, our greedy and litigious society seems to have made an industry and art-form of just about anything, including the giving of material from one person to another who needs it more. Rather than the simple and anonymous giving of help, charity today is as much about employment opportunities and positive public relations for the givers. The benefit to those who need the help may or may not be real.

So when multi-million dollar company after company starts banging a drum about what it's doing for AIDS-ravaged Africa just as the World Cup is about to open its doors, pardon me for being a bit skeptical. Look, you can judge each effort on its own merit, and those in need are not too likely to say anything because even if only a little bit of help trickles through to them, the fact is they really need the help, so they'll take it. I won't even get started about government corruption that often is more than willing to take part in any short-term cash splash that does nothing, like the government itself, to address the long-term and foundational issues affecting the area.

But I want you to know about a young woman and her colleagues who are laboring diligently and effectively under the radar for the sake of some of the most blighted people on earth.

Sarah Kate Noftsinger directs sports-related programming in the Nkomazi Region of South Africa for TRIAD (Training to reduce the incidence of AIDS-related death) Trust, a Boston-based non-profit. Sarah Kate played soccer at Wake Forest and briefly in WUSA before becoming an assistant coach at Stanford. A collision on the training ground left her with a broken neck in 2006.

But this started the sequence of events that led to her taking on this incredible task of trying to educate young people through sports about HIV and AIDS. Even in the context of Africa, where the mortality rates related to the disease are staggering, the projections for the New Jersey-sized region are mind-blowing at around 65 percent. In our American context though, even these numbers get to be a bit numbing after a while because, after all, what are you going to do about it?

What Sarah Kate has been doing is trying to make a difference. Her organization has used the context of sports leagues to build relationships with large groups of young people, and using the entire effort as a platform for AIDS education and prevention. The effort includes but is not limited to dissemination of HIV test kits and training of medical educators. An accompanying video explains just how much that education is needed in the rural area.

Additionally, with high unemployment rates accompanying the catastrophic medical situation in the area, TRIAD is working to build sustainable partnerships with businesses and individuals in the west, working to build the self-sufficiency of individuals in the area through microfinance and entrepreneurial efforts. "Venture capital without the capital" is how she describes it.

Increased education and the building of a steady revenue stream are vital cogs in the effort, but another fundamental tenet to what the organization does is to avoid creating some kind of charity industry or empire.

"I am trying to phase out my own job by creating long-term partnerships with personal and private donors," is how Noftsinger describes it.

You can learn a lot more about TRIAD and their own World Cup-related program to this end, by going here.

What I have already learned is that this work and the people involved with it, are cut from a different cloth than all the people and organizations who make me so cynical about what they call charity. They were involved long before people started looking at South Africa due to the World Cup, and they will be there long afterward, when the corporate benefit is nil but the human need is just as great.