| |
|
oooh, first proper post
Before I begin I suppose I should declare an interest - I work for a chairty, and have even studied it as a Masters, so from a very selfish point of view I'm all for people giving more money to charities - keeps me in a job. It also means this will be a bit of little essay - apologies for this.
My personal view on giving to charities is that a lot of people have a pretty much incorrect view of what charities are and how they operate. The charities that most people know about tend to represent the tiniest fraction of charities - 2/3 of charities receive less than 1% of the money that goes into the whole sector. Yet it is the largest charities that do most of the public fundraising. So if you are concerned that your donation isn't making an impact then I would advise looking for a smaller charity to give money to. Requires a bit more effort but in my view its the smallest ones that often arguably do a lot of the footwork amongst the most deprived and excluded people and even small amounts mean a lot to them.
The argument on whether charities are doing the government's job is an interesting one. Firstly the vast majority of charities are religous or recreational - and thats likely to expand with proposed changes to charity law. Also charities that engage in 'social work' are often largely funded by the government through contracts. The money that 'joe public' gives often goes to paying for additional services that fall beyond the remit of the government, but doesn't replace the government money. Of course it is a difficult balance to make and many times the government sees this additional income as a way of copping out, but charities tend to argue the point reasonably effectively.
Are there too many charities? Last year there were 164,000 in England and Wales. 99,000 of them had an income of less than 10k and never come to your door or stop you in the street, so its doubtful they are the sort of charities that people mean when they say 'there are too many charities'. What they seem to mean is those few charities with sufficient resources to employ skilled marketing and publicity people whose job it is to get your attention. Its less a question of are there too many of them, and more a question of should they stop being so pushy? Branding of charities is still a big topic in the sector with people who feel it is a bad thing. Personally I'm not so sure - fundraising is pretty cutthroat and the demand for a lot of charities services is such that the money never meets the need - this is more of an indictement of the world we live in I suppose than an indictement of charities
Also in many cases they seem to be talking about cancer charities of which there are a great number. But most of those are not research charities battling to find a cure, but care and support charities to help people affected by cancer, and there are a lot of them. As Nina says these charities can do lots of different things. I wouldn't agree that government could do it better though. A lot of charities are run by people who have been affected by that particular concern and are able to provide a very personal and relevant service to the beneficiaries that you wouldn't get through any government service.
My view is that it would be dangerous, from a civil liberty point of view, to put a restriction on the number of charities. Having the right to set up a charity is essentially the right to associate together and effect a change in the world around ourselves. If government prevented that from happening they would effectively be imposing even greater limits on free speech and the rights of its citizens (and non-citizens)
As to why people give to charities and should they volunteer, I would really encourage people to volunteer. There are a lot of those small charities, run on a shoe string that rely heavily on volunteers and while lots of people do volunteer they tend to do so for less and less time, but can't be replaced by paid staff,as there's no money. However I strongly oppose the idea that the government should introduce compulsory volunteering. For one thing it wouldn't be volunteering and also experience shows that the government doesn't see volunteering as a civic exercise, or as an opportunity for people to do something they think is fun and enjoyable, but as a pool of free labour, and that leads them to cock it up as they have done in the past with sponsored schemes. Jury-sponsored schemes etc are more a form of community punishment than volunteering and I don't think they should be confused (althogh some studies have tried to put them on a continuum).
Was charity better in the past or are charities effective now? I haven't read Hogarth, but from my study of the subject I would say that charities in the past were very limited and their attitude in most cases was extremely parochial and disempowering to beneficiaries. You had to buy into the belief system of the patron - lots of reading prayers, being of good character etc. Recipients of charity were required to apologise for being poor and one 19c organisation set up for effective charity adminsitration did so on the basis that only the poorest and most deserving people should receive charity.
So is it better than today? I think its a case of apples and oranges. Many of the social problems in society will never be dealt with by charities relying on voluntary donations and work - they require government funding to address properly (and over 50% of charity money comes from government), and rhetoric pushed by politicians about charities being better than the state etc is bullshit by and large. However I agree with Haus that people feel less need to give to charity these days - while the numbers of zeros for donations does keep growing, the proportion of donations to overall wealth is lower now than in the 19c. However a lot of those donations in the 19c, as far as we can estimate, were within social groups rather than between. That is that 'poor' people tended to give a lot to other 'poor' people, more than weathly people passed the money downwards. There are a few exceptions to the rule of course, but to my mind they are few enough to prove the rule that wealthy people don't like giving away their money
So is it worth giving to charity? At the end of the day it is a personal decision that I think everyone has to make for themselves and they do so for a variety of reasons - ethical and moral reasons, personal experience, social comformity etc. If you are concerned about what a charity does with your money, I would say that its better to be positive than cynical/negative and find a charity that you know you want to give money to, rather than wait to be ambushed by a chugger.
I'll save the argument for whether donations should pay for charity adminstration costs for another day. |
|
|
