This has always bugged me. How people donate, and what people donate to. There can be people with no money for medical treatments, but people can donate money to a musical production.. or to an animal shelter.. or to donating to subsidise tuition programs for students! To rationalise donating, we need to consider two important factors:
1.Priority
Who needs help the MOST. I don’t think this is an impossible or irrational question to answer. Do we help a hungry dog or hungry old man first. Even if you donate to both, as long as there is still one hungry old man around, should you consider feeding the dog instead of the man? Are you going to donate to preserving nature, or are you going to donate to save/ improve a cancer patient’s life?
2. Effectiveness per $
How far is every dollar you donate going to go? How many people is it going to impact. To clearly see this point, I will use a global example. 1 SGD can feed a starving hungry kid in Africa for a day. However in Singapore, donating 1 SGD to feeding hungry children here is probably not even going to get him 1 meal! This means using the same amount of money, you can save/ help a larger number of people if you channel it intelligently!
Now even if you localize this, this logical assessment still needs to be done. What is the impact of donating $1 to old folks home A as opposed to old folk’s home B. One might be more inefficient with their funds and/or be paying their directors ridiculous pay checks, or pay $25,000 monthly rent a venue to hold events/ activities which are a drain on the donations.
Now I am not saying that there are any bad causes, I am just saying that, logically, some causes are more important than others! There are also some causes that donating to is going to have a bigger, more tangible impact.
City Harvest
City harvest is going down. Everyone knows it. But lets not get distracted by CH alone. The way they spend their donation money, is not exclusive to them. They are not the only one that throw lavish event in the name of charity, spend ridiculous amounts on renting prime real-estate venues for their sessions (srsly, if they wanted somewhere central, they can just rent an auditorium in Jurong or smth right??!!). They are not the only ones who pay their management staff super high salaries.
Another religious/charitable organisation, New creation, is guilty for many of the same things.. it’s just that they’re keeping their heads low.. Our National Kidney Foundation (NKF) also shared some of these problems recently. And who knows who else is using donations in ineffective/ inefficient ways? After all there are over 400 charity/ volunteer organizations in Singapore!
What should we do?
I believe this is an opportunity. An opportunity to do something new. To be the first in something.
We should set up a central authority to which ALL donations MUST be credited to. Nobody will be allowed to make donations that bank in directly to the charity. Even cash donations must be declared and banked into the central authority. However, the central authority will take not of who the money was donated to when making decisions later.
The Authority will then redistribute the funds according to PRIORITY and EFFECTIVENESS. They will channel more money, to solving the critical issues, to the most effective organisations. This central authority will also make sure not to distribute/ allocate funds for lavish functions or high pay-checks.
I believe this is an idea worth looking into and will bring about positive change to the way donations, of any kind, are being used.
Sg Bangala
*The writer blogs at http://sgbangla.wordpress.com/