Posts Tagged ‘charity’

A massive thank you to everyone who contributed to the Humanist Action Group‘s 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters! Last Sunday saw the (almost) final day of what has been six nearly two months of hard work, planning, coordinating and executing the project and we’re pleased so that in total, we raised in-kind donations worth a brilliant…

The donations went to three local homeless shelters, two of which are direct access – this means that service users are able to turn up, often coming in just for a day or two to escape the cold – so being able to give out a box containing food and some warm clothing is invaluable to such organisations.

You can see all the photos from the event on our Flickr page.

As you may be aware, the Humanist Action Group is currently staging its 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters in Leeds.

Next week, Leeds Skeptics hosts a talk entitled “Do we get the legal system we deserve?”, as part of their programme of monthly events.

Unlike a usual Leeds Skeptics event, though, we won’t be taking donations to help cover the cost of running the meeting – that is going to be covered by the organisers. Instead, all money donated will be given to the Holiday Food Drive.

So, if you fancy helping those a little less lucky than ourselves, in a way which simply involves you hearing an interesting talk in a great pub, then come along to the next meeting of Leeds Skeptics! Full details can be found on their website.

In April last year, the Humanist Action group launched our first set of guides. These were the feed the homeless guide and the organiser’s guide, allowing you to start a Humanist Action Group in your town or city, and get started with a basic programme.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re launching our third guide – on running a food drive. This will take you through all the steps required to run your own food drive, similar to our Holiday Food Drive – though it can be at any time of year, and indeed for anyone who needs it.

The guide is available for free to anyone who would like a copy – if that is you, get in touch!

Reading this on Facebook? Why not click the like and share buttons, and share it onto your own wall to get even more people involved.

Anyway, I’ve previously written quite a bit on Facebook and Twitter about Kiva.

It’s a microloans charity – people in the third world ask for loans, usually around $1,000 to help them work their way out of poverty. We then come along, donate $25 each and between us raise the money for the loan, and it’s given to the person in the 3rd world. They then improve their business, take another step to working their way out of poverty and then pay us back. We can then lend the same money to somebody else!

It’s a superb idea and one that I am proud to say I have been donating to for several years.

But here is why you should get involved now. They’re currently offering free money to people who sign up – thanks to an anonymous donor, the first $25 loan you make to someone in the third world doesn’t even come out of your pocket!

Not just that but you can sign in with your Facebook details (though you don’t have to, if you would rather register separately) – so it only takes a couple of minutes to make a $25 donation to help someone in the third world without it costing you a penny.

Given that then, I don’t see any excuse for anyone not to get involved. Seriously, just follow this link. Do it! Do it now! I literally don’t see any reason why anyone reading this shouldn’t get involved.

P.S. You can also access the site directly at kiva.org. However, if you follow one of the links above, it will record a referral for me. I don’t get anything out of that beyond the warm feeling inside that I’ve helped spread Kiva a little further, but that is still nice to have.

P.P.S. You can also allocate your donation towards a community team – these are just groups you can join, like a Facebook Group. The biggest and best is the atheists, agnostics and non-religious, but you might also want to consider the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Even CWF has a team.

This is a great PSA by Lauren Luke.

YouTube link is here if you’re having problems with the embedded code.

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard that some councils are planning to place restrictions on fundraisers. I’m very much in favour of this, so I write to my local councillor to voice my support.

Dear Elizabeth,

I am a resident living in your ward. As you may have heard, several city councils have proposed restrictions on “chuggers” raising money for charities on the street. I am writing to you to voice my support for similar restrictions in Leeds.

I walk though town on a regular basis and often feel like I am “running the gauntlet” as I walk up and down Briggate or Lands Lane only to have people madly waving their arms at me and block my path.

Worse still, as a trustee of a local charity based here in Leeds, I am familiar with the industry and know that these people are almost always professional fund raisers that are primarily funding their own salaries, and taking money away from local charitable causes. This to me seems dishonest, as when people give to charity, they expect that money to actually end up in the charities pocket.

Therefore, given they provide benefit to neither charities nor residents, I would strongly support any move to reduce this nuisance.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Worfolk

I would encourage you all to do the same.

Recently, I headed down to Leeds Salon for their debate on “The Big Society: A Clean-up for the Charity Sector?” The event was well attended and had a diverse range of people there. Though as the event was part of Leeds Summat, I’m not sure whether that was partly responsible.

The speeches were good, though as someone who only dips in and out of politics a lot of the time, some of the content went over my head. The discussions afterward were very interesting as well. I’m looking forward to attending their next event.

As part of Non-Prophet Week, Atheist Society recently held a charity quiz to raise money for the very much worthwhile cause, Medicines Sans Frontiers. It was an enjoyable night and I came away with a pair of tickets to the West Yorkshire Playhouse so a good night all round.

Last Tuesday I delivered a talk entitled “A History of Atheist Charity” at Leeds Atheist Society. I’m not sure how accurate the title was, it also looked at religious charities and why we shouldn’t expect atheist charities, before going on to discuss atheist charities past and present. The feedback was positive however, so it seemed to go quite well.

A week ago the Humanist Action Group did a holiday food drive that I was involved in. Once we had made up the food packs we delivered them to local hostels, dropped them off and went home.

There were no banners, no photo shoots outside the hostels, no informational leaflets carefully concealed inside the packs so that receipts would know which deity had suppository inspired someone to think that helping out your fellow man would be a good thing to do. We just wanted to do a good thing, for goodness’ sake.

Later, a friend of mine brought the issue up.

“A part of me wonders if you can really afford to miss that kind of publicity. You could have been there, during the day, spoke to the manager, got a photo,” he suggested. “Part of me likes the way you guys just do it and disappear back into the night, taking nothing but a warm feeling that will shield you from the next dozens times you refuse to give £2 a month to save a child’s life because you know it’s actually going to pay the salary of the professional fundraiser currently talking to you. But you’re missing such a good opportunity for PR.”

I thought about this for a while. And I think he’s right.

Consider this. The problem with milking such PR opportunities is that it detracts from the moral goodness of the whole situation. It looks like you’re only doing it so you can show everyone you’ve done some good and can feel really good about yourself (of course, if you do good, you should feel good about yourself – that’s how charity works, if people didn’t feel good about themselves for volunteering, nobody would – it’s what we and every other charity depends on!).

Or, for a perhaps clearer analogy, consider corporate giving. Big corporations give, often huge amounts of money away to charity. Ignoring that a lot of this is just a tax dodge there is one big reason why corporations do this – to get their photo taken helping out some kind of good cause, so everyone thinks they are a nice company, so people buy from them and they make more money in the long run. It’s selfishly motivated, they’re only doing it so they can earn more money in the long term.

But lets look again at organisations like the Humanist Action Group. What benefit would we derive from milking publicity out of such situations? Well, profit obviously wouldn’t be one of them. We’re a registered charity and therefore obviously non-profit, we have no shareholders to pay and money is definitely a one way stream away from the trustees pockets than towards them!

So what would we get out of the publicity? Well, we would get publicity in itself. But actually, this isn’t just a good PR shot to help cover up some shady business dealings as it may be for corporations – this is actually our business, we’re getting publicity doing what we do – helping people.

And what would be the consequence of doing this? More people would know about our work, more people would support us, we would generate more volunteers and more revenue – and end up with more resources to help more people!

It turns into a perceptual cycle in which the more good publicity we get from doing good things, the more support we will receive and as it’s a closed system (money doesn’t come out to fund things like shareholders, it’s all invested back into the charity) it just means we can help more people, and get more publicity and help even more people, and so on.

When a charity milks something for publicity, it isn’t helping its own ego (it’s not an evil corporation), it’s not helping it’s shareholders, it’s only helping one cause – the cause it’s trying to help in the first place.

That isn’t to say that from now on it’s all about grabbing as much positive PR as possible at every opportunity. But maybe being open to the idea of making a bit more of a deal about the amazing stuff I see our volunteers doing, wouldn’t be such an evil after all.