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No offence intended, but was it possible that the charity, which presumably dedicated a lot of its time to dealing with cancer in some form, already hhad access to plenty of people with access to information on the relationship of pesticides to breast cancer?
Because this strikes me as interesting - what we have here is kind of the "undeserving recipient" response. Let's say we see a homeless person on the street. Feeling sorry for him or her, we decide that, although we have no money to give them (or we have no wish to give them money, perhaps because we fear it will go on a purchase we do not believe is desirable, such as alcohol or heroin), we will give them the ham sandwich in our backpack, which might have a cash value of £2.50. The homeless person responds that regrettably he or she is a vegetarian, and as such this gift is useless to him/her, and restates the desire for change.
At which point, do we feel that the recipient of our charity is being ungrateful or difficult? If we had attempted to buy a magazine with that ham sandwich as a mechanism of exchange, we would have been politely rebuffed.
Now, this is comparing charities to mendicants, which is awkward but reflects certain similarities - money given to either has no immediate return, apart from perhaps a warm feelings of having given to those less fortunate (or as unfortunate, depending, but anyway). In this case, your friend was contacted by a charity seeking funding. Your friend was unwilling to provide funding, but did offer something else which in her opinion was of equal or greater value. However, the charity was not looking for that something else, so it was clearly not of equal or greater value in the eyes of the charity. Next question is, is this a reason a) to accuse the charity of being "ungrateful" or b) to suspect the charity of being more interested in fueling a bureaucracy than in helping people? I would probably say no. There may be other information not so far provided, but, as mentioned, if you are a cancer charity, say, with access to vast amounts of data and expert opinion from experts in the field of oncology, then you are probably nnot going to value highly offers of data and expert opinion from an expert in the field of organic gardening.
Back to bureaucracy - your position appears to be based on the idea that administration is useless, and therefore that charities with administrative staff are being somehow perverse in having them. This is an extension of the idea that small, local charities are best-equipped to keep their operations slim and maximise the amount of money that goes to the worthy cause. Fair enough, but a) some issues are not local issues, and so presumably cannot have purely locval solutions - a charity which uses the vast disparity in wealth and purchasing power between the developed and developing world is by definition going to need a purchasing and logistics operation, say. The United Way is, as I understand it, an umbrella covering a large number
So, at present I think your position is garbled. Teasing the strands out we have:
1) Capitalism is not a good system, and therefore any charity working wityhin capitalism is not operating within a good system - this is perfectly reasonable, but it's not the problem with charities, it is the problem with capitalism.
2) Some charities see the raising of money as a way to advance their goals. See (1), really - as long as money is needed to achieve things, charities will need money.
3) Administration is an unnecessary expense, and therefore breaks the bond of trust between donor and charity, as the donor will expect the full value of their contribution to be given directly to the needy. Personally, I don't think such a bond of trust exists - if I give 50p to somebody shaking a bucket, I know that some of that will go to defraying the cost of a bucket. Charities may be able to secure many goods and services at reduced rates or pro bono, which is good, but the need to pay for certain things like accountancy or auditing is not really the charity's fault. Likewise fundraising - see Quantum above:
Most charities spend very little on administration. The staff are paid less than in equivalent positions in other fields and often volunteer as well or do extra work for free.
Also, of course, your contention:
As these things tend to go, the larger the bureaucracy, the less efficient it is.
Is a truism, but not one supported here by any actual data. "Bureaucracy" is a good scare word, but it doesn't actually mean very much in this context. Let's call them "administrative staff". How many administrative staff does United Way, for example, employ? How much does that cost? How much more money could go direct to those in need with fewer staff, and how much would be lost through oversights by overworked administrators, for example?
4) The ham sandwich. A particular charity was not suitably appreciative of what you believed to be a valuable gift, and thus is not deserving of the kind of gift that they were looking for. Thing with this is probably that there were good reasons why the charity was not interested in that data - they already had access to equivalent data, they were focused on providing palliative care rather than activism, or they felt that the cost of your friend's contribution, in administrationm, peer review and so on would outweigh the benefits - that is, that they would have to create a new bureaucracy (if you will) to process research, rather than efficiently employing the one they already had in existence for processing monetary contributions which they then give at the other end to people with established administrative systems to process that money into (for example) research and administration.
I think your position needs attention. You have already stated that this is not a problem with the concept of charity in itself, or indeed with all charities (only the ones with problems). So, give us an example of a charity with problems (United Way, if you like), and explain to us, with specifics, how it illustrates your complaints - essentially, of overspending on administration and of inflexibility to the detriment of the work it is doing. |
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