The Thing With The Charity

Apr 21

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I lived many years in Italy, and charitable work was firmly in the hands of the Church or other big organisations, like Caritas.

Then I moved to Germany, where (again) Caritas and the Diakonie were the giants.

Here in the UK, it is different. Everyone must have a charity, and I mean everyone. Even big conglomerates wants you to know how they save the children, or the planet, or the forest and use this so massively, you don’t know what they want to sell you anymore.

But it is even worse than this, as this charity mania extends to simple individuals, all of them either persuaded they are changing the world, or moved by less noble motives (I’ll come to that).

I see several problems in this:

1. Where I grew up, every form of putting oneself in centre stage was considered in very bad taste, and rather stupid anyway. You were supposed to do good without anyone knowing, because if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing there’s something wrong already.

Not up here. Here in the UK the entire street, village and office are supposed to know and, if they really don’t want to fork out, they are supposed to pay one in recognition. 

2. Perhaps not in all cases, but in many cases there is a huge conflict of interest, which may become outright scrounging. As some of you might know, every fundraising charity can deduct (as it is only natural) the cost of its activity before paying the proceed of their charitable activity to the organisations meant to receive them.

Let us say I love running and would like to run the New York Marathon, but the inscription, the  fares to fly across the ocean and the other costs amount to a couple of thousands. What I can do to soften the blow is to create my own fundraising initiative (which is cheap, and fast). I can, for example, “run against diabetes” and select a charity to which the proceeds of my fundraising activity, after costs, will go.  Then I start “raising awareness”, that is: pumping the unwitting colleagues of the big company for which I work (if I work for a big multinational, HR  might well allow me to mail thousands, or dozens of thousand of them) making myself beautiful and asking for money for the cause. If I don’t work for a multinational, there will still be a lot of potential sources of donations: club, fitness studio, colleagues, even friends and acquaintances  (in that case, I’ll probably “bike against diabetes” in West Sussex, though). Of course I will never recover the costs of aeroplane, hotel and inscription fees, but I will able to set all the proceeds from my naive colleagues against my costs, and will run with the beautiful t-shirt of my charity: ain’t I a splendid fellow…

Bottom line: the “real” charity does not see a penny (unless I give them £50, because I am so good), I get a subsidy for my New York Marathon, and make myself beautiful at the same time. The example of the New York Marathon was not chosen at random (it is, actually, personal experience; with several “fundraisers”), but you can see similar examples everywhere: I sail against this, I run against that. Fine, but you would have sailed and run anyway because it’s your hobby, and unless you promise me you won’t charge your own costs I pretty well know you want me to, well, pay for your hobby.

I can’t say whether the first or second issue grates me more. The first, probably, because the behaviour of these sanctimonious (if in good faith) scroungers (if in bad faith) is particularly disturbing when you come from a country and mentality where such behaviour is particularly frowned upon. But I can’t avoid thinking that every day in this country hard-working people give away money thinking they are doing something good against leukaemia, when they are merely subsidising the favourite sport activity of some colleague they don’t even know.

My suggestion is that the readers pick a limited a number of very good Catholic charities above every suspicion (like Aid to the Church in Need, or The Verona Fathers, or The Catholic Truth Society)  and stick to that and to the donations to their own church.

Mundabor

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on April 21, 2012, in Catholicism. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.

  1. Benedict Carter | April 22, 2012 at 2:53 am

    Charity is now almost wholly divorced from its original Catholic intent of “faith fruitful in good works” and for the post-Christian lot it’s either a tax mitigation scheme or pure PR: note how many pop stars and other similar loathsome celebs tell the world what charitable work they are doing.

    One can only despise every man jack of them.

  2. Pepe Perez Palotes | April 22, 2012 at 8:58 pm

    In Italy that may have been wholly so……in Franco’s Spain half acentury ago one of the things that was not allowed to hardly surface much in the media, but did so occasionally and was wellknown was this very same type of behaviour by pillars of the establishment, and, to all visual puposes, of the church, with concerts and society balls where say performers gave free performances and covered their own costs, but a hundreds of thousands event ended up giving say 500 to the charity in question, after subtracting the costs of Lady M***K of T***d hall and her coterie- overwell known, because plenty of genuine charity always was overshadowed by this,(the police were usually actively suspicious of genuine mutually-invisible-hands christian charity, BTW, in which plenty of lefties were indeed involved!) but many people sadly had such an unrepresentative view that they did not and would not believe in the 80s crisis (Spanish unmeploymnet benefit is not everlasting, it stops dead) that but for the church many families in eg Madrid’s working class satellite towns would have died of starvation.
    Now of course the sad thing is having to refuse fellow parishoners who inallgoodfaith collect for oncegoodcauses which now subsidize experiments on murdered babies.
    Anyone who asks me to save the planet , or bulls, or cockroaches Im afraid I see so red , Id rather the money did go on marathons, frankly!……….