So here’s the thing:
Back in March, I took part in a charity event, a sponsored hitchhike from Wales to Morocco. As part of the agreement when signing up, everyone promised to raise at least £300 in sponsorship, to be given to the charity by June 1st. If I don’t have the money, the difference comes out of my pocket.
I did pretty well and raised just over £500 but the girl I travelled with, let’s call her G, only managed to get together about £100. The deadline is approaching fast and it doesn’t look like she’ll be able to colect the rest by the end of the month. She’s asked if she can have some of my sponsorship money so we’ll both be just over the lower limit. Should I give it to her?
FWIW, I’m leaning towards ‘no’ at the moment, but another factor is that G is also a good friend who I live in a shared house with. I don’t want to upset her and I’m sure the way she sees it, it’s just a case of doing a favour for a friend.
You have to look on it as not being your money, to start with. And whether it’s £500 from you and £100 from her, or £300 each, the charity is getting the same. Swallowing your pride, or overcoming your annoyance that she hasn’t put in the effort, etc., is worth it, as the alternative is a big bust-up and a horrible athmosphere for the two of you and anybody else in the house.
That’s the fact I use to come to the opposite conclusion. I think your initial inclination, “no” is correct, as far as it deals with the sponsorship money. If you do this favor, the charity gets 600.00, and if you both live up to your initial promise to the charity, it gets 800.00, so there’s a significant harm there. My opinion is that you can’t ethically use the charity’s money to subsidize your friend’s promised gift to the charity. It is morally the same as her merely defaulting on her promise, except this way she’s asking you to steal the charity’s money so she can seem to have fulfilled her obligation. This is a friend of yours? If you had signed up together and promised to meet a 600.00 obligation collectively, then you could pool your resources. But you didn’t, so you can’t.
You could give her the difference, but it’ll have to be out of your own pocket, not the funds you have raised for the charity. To do otherwise wouldn’t be stealing from Peter to pay Paul, it would be stealing from Peter to pay Peter.
I think she could raise the money over the next few weeks if she really tried, but she’s a student and it’s exam time so she’s kind of busy with that.
I know she is short of money, in fact she still owes me £350 that she borrowed on the trip, but at the same time she keeps buying things that she doesn’t really need.
I also know she has a habit of getting into financial trouble and getting other people (usually her parents) to bail her out, and I don’t think I want it to be me this time, even if it isn’t technically my own money.
I should mention that as an incentive, the charity offers £75 back for every £500 raised, which I would lose out on, so I’m not thinking 100% selflessly here…
But that’s not so. The initial promise, from everyone, was to raise as much money as they could, to guarantee a minimum of three hundred (out of their own pocket if necessary), and implicitly, to turn over all money collected on the charity’s behalf to the charity. The agreement Wayward’s friend entered is exactly the same as his/her own. Every penny raised by Wayward becomes, at the moment it exists, the property of the charity. S/he can’t spend it on groceries, take it to the dog races, or use it to meet personal obligations, his/her own or anyone else’s, including the obligation of each participant to raise a minimum of three hundred pounds for the charity. If they entered as a team, and promised six hundred pounds, their collective obligation would be fulfilled, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, despite their traveling together.
Actually every fact I learn about this charitable endeavor seems strange to me, from the 75/500 kickback to the fact that it’s possible to spend 350.00 on a trip designed to raise 300.00 (could we have saved a step here, perhaps?) to the fact that apparently the participants are collecting money directly from their sponsors. But nobody asked me about that.
The kickback is there as an incentive to raise more money. I know it seems odd but it obviously works for the charity, they’ve been running the hitch for fourteen years now.
As for spending lots of money on the trip, the hitch was the high profile event we were getting sponsored for and once we got there it was essentially a holiday, and we treated it as such.
As far as I know, it’s perfectly normal to collect money directly from sponsors for these sorts of events. The charity already has £208 which was donated online and I have £205 in cheques made out to the charity plus about another £100 in cash from tub-rattling in pubs and the like.
Sounds like you have worked hard to get the money, and she hasn’t.
So if you don’t give it to her, you shouldn’t feel guilty.
If you do want her to come with you for company, or just to be a friends, give her the bucks and the charity still comes out OK.
It doesn’t sound like you are all that wild about having her ride with you anyway, so if I were a betting man, my guess is you will wind up NOT giving her the money, and that is your right to do.
Have a nice trip, and…uh, that seems like quite a stretch to travel and I am envisioning 3000 people standing by the side of the road in Wales with signs saying “Morocco Or Bust” and some little old couple driving by and wondering why half of Wales is trying to leave the country…
Plus hitchhiking can be dangerous and there is the liability factor so you could sue the charity if you get mugged or raped or injured in a car accident and…
Never mind…I am thinking too much like an American lawyer…shame on me.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but I’ve already been and come back. It is long way to go but we it’s surprising how fast you can do it - we took about four and a half days and that seemed to be pretty much the average. We had an amazing time and she was mostly great company.
As others have pointed out, it’s a bit odd that we didn’t have to cough up before we left but that’s just the way they do it.
Ooops…I thought you signed up last March and have been collecting for an upcoming trip. Never mind. Still, I doubt such an event could be held in the USA due to all kinds of liability issues. But that was actually a pretty fast trip…although I am a bit puzzled how you hitched that ride across the water to get to Morocco, but I guess that is another story.
So this money thing is all after the fact eh?
Aw, go ahead and give it to her - minus the 75 Euros you richly deserve for your efforts.
Freeloaders are freeloaders, even if they’re really nice company.
As you say, she’s been buying things she doesn’t need all while owing an obligation to this charity. She voluntarily signed up for it and she knew the conditions of the trip. It’s (presumably) a good cause. She needs to learn that being an adult means living up to one’s obligations. You bailing her out isn’t going to help the charity nor is it going to, in the long run, help her.
If you feel bad about her predicament, is there some way you could help her raise the rest of her money?
I wouldn’t recommend flat-out giving her the money. She hasn’t been doing the work to raise enough in sponsorship, and she hasn’t been managing her own money well, and she needs to take responsibility for that.
Okay, I have a different impression of the ethics of the situation. I may be a little off-base here, but . . .
Everyone’s talking about the charity’s money, but you got this money from people who gave it to you thinking they were sponsoring you, correct?
They gave the money to you, for whatever reason; you seemed like an upstanding person, your salesmanship was above-par, you’re their friend, you remind them of them when they were that age, or whatever the heck. The didn’t necessarily have a good reason, but they did have their reasons. After all, they could have decided that they’d rather donate their money directly to this charity, rather than sponsoring your trip.
I know this is kind of strange, but it seems that for you to turn around and give the money to someone else is cheating your sponsors, to some degree.
If this were your only ethical qualm about the situation (though other posters have raised more valid objections, I think), you could explain that you have a friend who’s having a hard time getting sponsors, and ask if any of your sponsors would agree to transfer their sponsorship to her.
Well I’ve told her no, giving my own reasons and some good ones suggested here, and I felt a complete bastard doing it.
I’ve decided I don’t really want the £75 kickback though, after all that was money that people gave to charity. Of course once the charity has it it’s up to them if they want to give it back to me but still…
One thing I found out that I didn’t know before was that apparently a shop-owner friend of hers promised (without signing anything) £150 in sponsorship and has now gone back on the deal. I’m sure if that should change things or not.
I’m thinking I might still compromise and help her out with at least some of the money. At least she knows now that I won’t be at all happy to do so…
Well she didn’t seem very happy, but didn’t try to beg for it or anything. She did say that she couldn’t afford the difference herself, which is when I brought up the whole thing about buying crap (car stereo, wetsuit, rollerblades among other things since we’ve got back). She said it was things she needed, I said there’s a diffrence between ‘want’ and ‘need’…
She also said that she could probably manage to raise a bit more by the deadline.
I’ve been kind of avoiding her the rest of the evening to be honest.
Why not send a note to the charity explaining the situation and asking if they can consider your extra to cover her minimum? There’s nothing unethical about asking.