Why I still give to charity November 3, 2009

I was depressed – or perhaps just bored – to read yet another round of articles and letters in The Age relating to charities and their cost/income ratios. This discussion comes up with tedious regularity; it was a particularly hot topic around the time of the 2004 Asian tsunami, and to a less extent, during last year’s Victorian bushfires.

Is it really worth giving to charity, does our money reach the beneficiaries or do charities squander it all on marketing, operational and administration costs? These are the kind of questions that are asked again and again.

Charities are like any other business. They need to generate money to conduct their core business and meet their objectives – in this case, to fulfil a community need. Charities exist to plug the gaps left by government and welfare systems, and they operate in a highly competitive market place. Not only do charities have to compete with all the other charities for the punter’s dollar (there are over 700,000 charitable organisations in Australia alone) but also with all the for-profit businesses relentlessly chasing our hard-earned dollars.

So it should come as no surprise that charities need to invest money in advertising and marketing across all types of media from Direct Marketing to social networks. They need to constantly update their skills and knowledge and explore new ways of building their donor (customer) base and income. The larger, better-resourced charities may choose to work with marketing and fundraising consultants to do this. And as with most business models, there may be a negative cash flow for the first one or two years until there is a return on the investment or marketing spend.

But before you vent your spleen about how charities misuse your donation, think about what it takes to actually run a charity. There is a common misconception that charities should be run without paid staff and instead by volunteers. Anyone, who like me, has worked on a professional basis for a charity, will tell you that it takes a lot more than enthusiastic volunteers and do-gooding retirees selling cakes and plants at fundraisers to build new aged-care centres, rehabilitate drug addicts, help the homeless, conserve eco-systems – let alone fund development programs overseas.

I have worked for a range of not-for-profits in the UK and Australia over the last 12 years, both as an employee and a freelancer. I have witnessed first-hand the tight cost controls and annual audits (no fancy Christmas parties), not to mention the strict monitoring and evaluation processes in place. But working in the not-for-profit sector is more than that.

It requires great dedication, vision and commitment from staff who are prepared to work for lesser pay but often, for longer hours. During the Boxing Day tsunami crisis, many staff working for overseas aid agencies interrupted their Christmas holidays and returned to work without hesitation.

A colleague, who works for one of the largest overseas development agencies in the world, told me recently what her CEO tells the charity-doubters. It concerns the lifecycle of a donor’s dollar. The gist goes something like this: you mail a dollar to the charity of your choice. When it gets there, someone has to open the envelope, record your details and perhaps generate a thank-you letter (otherwise you may feel aggrieved). Making sure your wishes are respected, this office worker must now earmark your donation for a particular project before putting it in a new envelope, addressing it, taking it to the post office and sending overseas.

Unless said charity has already established networks and best practice standards in the project area, the envelope containing your precious dollar may be intercepted and pocketed by an unscrupulous middleman. It may never reach the beneficiary. Well, you did say you wanted to make a direct donation?

Running a charity is a complex business and requires the same respect and support as any for-profit businesses. Charities rely on our support and donations to survive as do their beneficiaries. Listening to those who trot out the so-called scandals of uneven cost/income ratios make it all too easy for Jo Public to continue his me-me-me existence and avoid helping those in need.

Edwardian Tweets October 9, 2009

Research indicates that tweeting has been going on since the early 1900s. Seemingly compulsive communicators, the Edwardians exchanged almost six billion postcards – an average of 200 per person – between 1901 and 1910.

With an image on one side, the old-fashioned picture postcard only allowed a small space for the written message. In an interesting parallel with contemporary ‘text-speak’, postcard writers sometimes adopted ungrammatical abbreviations causing consternation in liteary circles at the time.

Unlike today, when so much communication is online, there were up to 10 postal deliveries a day in the major cities leading to a flurry of back-and-forth postcard writing. Reseachers at the Lancaster and Manchester Metropolitcan universities believe that the speed and low price of the Edwardian postcard communication represents an early form of micro-blogging.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if amid our busy, screen-based, e-enabled lives we made time to rediscover the joy of the humble postcard, pen, ink and stamp. Now it’s such a lost art, I wish I had hung onto all those picture postcards sent by holidaymaking friends from sunny spots around the globe. All those pictures of bullfighting, jugs of sangria, donkeys in straw hats…

Wrong is the new right September 8, 2009

I attended an interesting personal development workshop recently with New Zealand coach and mentor Keith Mason. All about getting into our heart space, he invited (and challenged) us to adopt a new mantra: Wrong is the new right and right is the new wrong. Instead of driving ourselves ever forwards to a fixed concept of what we think we should do and how we think we should be, we can experiment with checking in with our feelings and sense of individuality.

Following this line of thought, I was interested to read an article in The Age’s Sunday Life magazine on how children who are emotionally and creatively intense (labelled eccentric by society) don’t fit the mould. The challenge for parents is to resist the temptation to force these ‘non-conformist’ children to adapt to social norms and expectations. Not all little girls dress in pink and play with dolls… But it goes beyond this and is about respecting their individuality and contribution. As Oscar Wilde said: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

We should allow them to be curious, to play, to invent, to dream and to imagine the unimaginable otherwise they shut down their creativity. One child described in the article believes in magic, plans to invent a time machine and is interested in tarot. Brilliant! He hasn’t sacrificed his creative spark to the gods of the computer game, TV or Ipod.

What’s right for one person is not right for another. We need to get out of our straight-jackets and mix and muddle up our perceptions to avoid bland conformity. They have just swapped (driving) sides of the road in Samoa and right is now wrong and left is now right. That’s enough to keep anyone on their toes and ready to embrace change.

Listening to the earth August 27, 2009

A few Fridays ago I spent two hours walking a short stretch – just 200m – of the Yarra River. Mentally stripping away the Crown Casino and the Melbourne Convention Centre and blotting out the noise of traffic and trains, I let myself be transported back to the wetlands bordering Birrarung, the River of Mists.

Lead by Dean Stewart of the Koori Heritage Centre, a born storyteller, this magnificently evocative walk is all about listening to the earth beyond the din of our modern urban world. With the sun shining on the water, it’s not hard to imagine dolphins leaping in the river and wetlands teeming with eels, turtles, magpie geese and ibis flying in V-formation above.

I shared the walk with a group of TAFE students and before we dispersed back into our 21^st century urban lives, Dean encouraged us to lay a hand on the ground and feel its pulse.  What a wonderful sight to see these 20-somethings unplug from their ipods and mobiles and connect to the earth and the history underneath the concrete.

At a session entitled Deep Listening at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last weekend,  I had another chance to listen to the song of the earth. Aboriginal writers and performers including Andrea James, Esme Bamblett and Lou Bennett talked of their work to retrieve the Yorta Yorta language through the arts. Reading from her play Yanagai!Yanagai!, Andrea conjured up the spirit of the land and the incongruity of a government court case seeking to impose white ownership on land continuously owned for thousands of years by her people.

Lou Bennett encouraged us to close our eyes and let her mesmerising lullaby take us to the banks of the Murray River. As with Dean’s walk, it is about learning to listen with all of our senses, but most of all with our hearts, and to connect to the culture and language of the traditional owners of our land.