They certainly help the candle industry.
They bring in a fair bit of money selling wigs. I believe they operate on sliding scale, but it’s not the “free wigs for sick kids” deal many people assume it is.
People really want to have an individual touch. I work for a non-profit and every day there’s a donor calling who wants to know who, exactly, their money is helping. We do medical development, so the answer is, well, no idea. Maybe it’s a going to go train a nurse somewhere, or to build a clinic, or to provide health education in a community that sorely needs it, or to pay for that surgery for an individual. It’s all dumped into one big pot (basically; I’m on the donations side and not the finance side), and used where it’s needed most. Sponsoring an individual makes for great warm fuzzies but terrible efficiency. I don’t know if any charities actually do it, though.
Along those lines and very timely, making a big year-end or tax-time donation feels great, but the organization would actually much rather you divide it up into recurring monthly donations. I’m not saying don’t give, but fifteen buck a month for a year is actually more useful than two hundred bucks in a lump sum.
Then there’s the whole “magnetic ribbon” industry that supports our troops or breast cancer research or animal rescue… right?? Right?
The day I found out that girl scout troops only get a pittance of the money they collect selling cookies was the day I quit buying the cookies. If I’m spending $4 for a box of mostly air, if at least half of it doesn’t go to the kids selling it, I feel like I’m being ripped off. I have noticed that scout troops around here have a donation jar now so 100% of what they collect is theirs. Much better.
Yeah, if you want the personal connection, donate a kidney. Or bone marrow.
…or blood.
That’s the easiest of the bunch
Easy, but not personal. For warm fuzzies, you can’t beat a kidney. It’s not as if there are bunches of kidneys sitting around at the kidney bank.
Do funerals? I don’t really think of candlelight vigils as an attempt to make a concrete improvement; they are a way to show sympathy. When a tragedy occurs, some people are comforted to know that they are connected to others who recognize their suffering and feel pain, as well. Participating in that sort of demonstration doesn’t seem useless.
Ah, but in this case the building is incidental to the primary goal, which is proselytizing. It’s an excuse to throw bibles at people rather than a pure charitable act.
Carbon offsets, for the same reasons as for other charities.
Regards,
Shodan
Probably annoys me more than anything else, but every year our local newscast in my hometown pleads with the community each winter to donate new or gently used coats for those that cannot afford it. They have also added blankets to the annual drive.
Then when summer time comes around the same plea comes asking us to give free fans for those who can’t afford those.
I don’t know of anyone personally that has been so destitute, they couldn’t afford a coat or fan, and if so, wondered what happened to the one they originally had, and I’d think after this many years, we should have pretty much everybody supplied in coats, blankets and fans by now, manyfold over.
Does your local community do this too?
Excellent.
I volunteer for Habitat For Humanity in New Zealand and we put a lot of personal effort into building homes for families who have never known they could own a house.
We have Global Village teams come from the USA to help and they are greeted with warmth and enthusiasm. That’s sort of embarrasing for a First World country but the need is there.
I have been on a Habitat (Jimmy Carter led) aid project in India where we built 100 houses in seven days. That was magnificent and humbling.
I would think that it would be far more helpful to utilize the airfare and other monies being spent to hire locals to do the grunt work of sweeping and carrying boards. Just like that money would be better used hiring skilled local labor instead of flying in well meaning amateurs.
I work at a food pantry every weekend, and I meet many people that cannot afford either. We also run a clothes pantry, and we can never get enough suitable winter clothing.
In my younger days I worked as a tree planter. There were times we’d spend a whole day replanting trees that had been planted by volunteers the previous weekend. (I think it was the boy scouts.)
Tree planting isn’t rocket science, but if not done correctly they will just die so we had to pull up and re-plant most of the seedlings. It was literally more work to do this than to just plant it correctly in the first place so the volunteer’s time was completely wasted.
It’s not that mission trips do zero good. I’m sure the Americans going over and helping build does get some work done. And part of the point is to broaden people’s perspectives. Some of the high schoolers going over will just come back with stories and selfies, but some will come back with greater empathy and will continue donating their money in the future.
But if the idea is purely to get things built and accomplished, it would be much more efficient to donate money and hire local labor, or send over experience labor and have them their for a longer time. You could send a group of 20 high schoolers to Cambodia for a week, and spend $1000 each on flights, and another $1000 each for their food, shelter, and transportation. Or that same $40,000 could be used to pay a local contractor and local labor for a month or more.
Right. I’ve had some not nice things to say about those two week “service trips” that a lot of people are into. Now, some people do long-term work, like newly minted American preachers who go spend 5-10 years in Rwanda building relationships, identifying community needs, and building and enhancing social networks and lines of communication. That work really helps. But if you’re going on that two week trip to help repair the roof of a hurricane shelter in the Dominican Republic, just admit that you’re taking a Caribbean vacation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a Caribbean vacation. That’s what it is. It includes a little bit of hard work to make it feel like it was somehow socially worth it, but it probably wasn’t.
For only 19 cents a day you can save a child… Yeah - right.
I’ve heard something similar. Making clothes is a somewhat easy cottage industry to get into, and there are a lot of wannabe dressmakers over there who work hard to learn the skills and then find themselves with no customers because there are free clothes at the charity tent. So they end up going to the charity tent too to beg for food to support their family. It encourages a cycle of dependence.
If you don’t know people that destitute, maybe you should get out more. Volunteer at your local soup kitchen, or just wander under a few bridges or overpasses.
My church has food drives all year round – boxes of cold cereal and cans of beans are symbolically carried up to the altar during the Sunday service. If I mail a hundred dollars to my local Food Bank, which buys food by the pallet load, and feeds thousands of people in my county every week, each of those dollars is enormously magnified in usefulness over my rummaging through my cupboard and bringing a retail can of peaches to church, because the Food Bank has great efficiencies of scale and reach of buying power, plus sources of matching funds through large donors.
Since I don’t need to imagine the needy child digging into my personal can of peaches to get my warm feeling, I just write checks directly to proven local organizations.