Want to help your community with a year-end donation? Maybe you can help someone escape poverty, learn English, move toward homeownership, or gain job skills. Your gift might beautify a blighted area or inspire artistic expression. To find nonprofits that can best use a donation, we vetted many groups with foundations and charity watchdogs. We came up with a dozen small local charities that have earned praise for both effectiveness and efficiency.

Not that larger nonprofits don’t do great work. Since 1974, the United Way of the National Capital Area has coordinated one of the nation’s largest annual campaigns. In its last cycle, it distributed nearly $36 million to almost 900 area nonprofits. Popular and well-regarded big nonprofits include Children’s National Medical Center, the Salvation Army, Ronald McDonald House Charities, and Catholic Charities USA.

Here we highlight small charities that aren’t so well known. “They simply don’t have the capacity to serve the people they serve and do the marketing, publicity, and outreach that larger organizations typically do,” says Barbara Harman of the Harman Family Foundation and founder of the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington, which annually profiles and recommends Washington-area nonprofits. “Being small may be a liability as they try to get the word out, but it is a great strength when they are responding to a specific need in the community.”

Julie Rogers, president of the Meyer Foundation, adds: “Giving to these smaller groups can make a large impact in improving the lives of people in need.”

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In a recent Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton was asked whether she preferred diamonds or pearls. Of course the answer was “both.” Why not have it all, if you can?

Washington’s foremost power-elite jeweler, Ann Hand, must have been thinking the same thing when she designed her new Miss America Collection, which was unveiled last night at Georgetown power spot Cafe Milano with the help of Miss America Lauren Nelson. Hand’s collection uses the pageant’s crown as a motif, and it features pins, necklaces, and earrings adorned with oversize pearls, silver, and lots and lots of sparkly diamond bling.

When we visited Dickstein Shapiro partner Ken Adams in 2005, the star antitrust litigator had won $87,430 in a poker tournament in Connecticut.

Since then Adams has oriented his legal practice more to representing poker organizations, such as online site Poker­Stars. He is working on a federal-court appeal for a professional poker player battling IRS rules about deducting entry fees as business expenses.

So it was natural in November that when Adams was invited to a poker fundraiser at the National Building Museum for Horton’s Kids, which funds tutoring for inner-city kids, it was both business and pleasure for Adams to donate $1,000 and enter the charity tournament.

Some 150 congressmen, lobbyists, and staffers showed up, but at the end, it was Adams who won the $10,000 entry to next year’s World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

Graduations

✔ Senator John Warner steps aside after a long and honorable public service career.

✔ A.V. Ristorante closes, bringing an end to one of the city’s great Italian eateries.

✔ GW president Steve Trachtenberg bids goodbye to a greatly transformed university.

Grades

A+ In what would be one of any year’s top journalism stories, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Anne Hull expose terrible conditions for Iraq War veterans at Walter Reed.

A+ The opening of the Shakespeare Theatre’s new Harman Center for the Arts showcases how vibrant the local arts scene has become.

A As President Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow brings new energy into an embattled White House—and is refreshingly honest in his announcement that he’s leaving to make some needed money.

A Volkswagen announces its American headquarters will move to Herndon. Drivers wanted!

A Georgetown star Jeff Green, the Hyattsville native who helped lead the Hoyas to the Final Four, ends up with Seattle after being picked fifth in the first round of the NBA draft. Go west, young man!

B+ The Nationals’ season ends better than expected, and hopes are high that 2008 will start a great winning tradition for Washington baseball.

B+ Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty appear to be everywhere in their quest to fix the DC schools.

B Virginia’s new senator, Jim Webb, becomes a Democratic star, but watch out—he’s got a gun!

B– With a fare increase on the horizon, will the aging Metro be able to provide needed service? C+ Despite their high-priced talent,the Redskins look like a high-school team against the New England Patriots.

C+ XM Satellite Radio has a mixed year as it struggles to gain approval for a merger with Sirius, loses a top exec, and gains some subscribers.

C+ New DC top cop Cathy Lanier will need lots of new ideas to arrest the District’s rising crime rate.

C The announcement that AOL’s headquarters will move to New York (as well as lay off thousands more workers) shows the company’s challenges after its heady dot-com days in the 1990s.

C The good news is that on some days the Tysons Corner Metro extension seems to be moving forward. The bad news? Most days it doesn’t, and it’ll be above ground.

C- The District and developer Victor MacFarlane fall out over a proposed soccer stadium on Poplar Point. Can’t everyone just get along?

C– Remember how some people warned that the local condo market would overheat? Well, it does.

C– The Palm’s renovations disappoint lots of regulars who think the airy, light-filled addition has changed the power-lunch spot’s character.

D+ FEMA’s fake press conference during the California wildfires manages to shame the embattled agency even during a disaster where relief efforts were going well.

D- Alberto Gonzales resigns and makes the country long for the good old days when John Ashcroft was attorney general.

F Larry Craig’s toe-tapping guilty plea, reneged resignation, and appeals leave the country wondering: Just who are these lawmakers?

F Increasing traffic congestion aggravates drivers and wastes fuel and time. More bike paths.

Incomplete

The Newseum was scheduled to reopen this fall, but delays push it to early 2008; early reviews are still positive.

Incomplete

The new Nationals stadium rising above Anacostia is still a big questionmark. Will the Lernerfamily and the District work out the parking problems before Opening Day?

You can hope for a chance meeting on the Metro. He would be the sixtyish gentleman with rosy cheeks, brown fedora, and funky overcoat.

Better yet, you can “friend” him on Facebook, the online social network that’s all the rage with much younger people.

At one of his occasional luncheons with staff members at the Post boardroom, Graham talked up NewsTracker, a new application that allows Facebook users to add Post headlines to their page and link to its Web site. He also mentioned that he has his own Facebook page.

This revelation further enshrines the strait-laced publisher as one of the hippest guys in the news business. As they say on the Web, Don Graham “gets it.”

Facebook started out as a social-networking site restricted to the high-school and college set. As it expanded to become the place of choice for young people to meet and communicate online, it opened up to all ages. Graham, 62, joined in.

Posties flocked to “friend” Graham, meaning they could communicate with him with a quick “poke” or a longer quip of a few sentences. At last check, Graham had more than 300 friends. Among them were media mogul and Post Company board member Barry Diller. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger friended Graham; Graham friended back.

While there are many ambitious Post writers on Graham’s list of friends, missing were executive editor Leonard Downie and managing editor Phil Bennett.

But it’s only a matter of time before the best way to reach writers or editors at the Post will be on Facebook. According to Facebook’s count, 555 Post staffers already are part of the network.

Not all have “friended” Don Graham. Yet.

Meanwhile, your chances of seeing Graham on the Metro have declined. The recently separated publisher is likely to be walking to work more often from his new Dupont Circle digs near the Phillips Collection.