How do we help the folks in East Africa and Southern Asia who are suffering? Should one give money? Blankets? Food? This is a question that has mattered to me since many years ago when I heard a popular performer tell me he'd semi-regretted hosting a telethon to aid people who'd lost their homes in a flood in the mid-west. Everyone's intentions (including his) were only the best…but this particular telethon had been encumbered with red tape and way too many paid staffers. And as a result, though the telethon had raised a decent sum of cash, way less than half of it had actually been put to good purpose, and even that distribution took months. The performer said that after hosting that seemingly-successful telethon, he'd been deluged with requests to helm others, and that he'd declined most…not because the causes were not worthy but because, he said, he'd decided to confine his fund-raising and personal donations to only the most efficient efforts. Makes sense to me.
So yesterday, I called a friend of mine who works for a disaster-relief charity and asked, in effect, how one gets the most bang for one's donated dollars at the moment. Her answer was that really, while donations of food and goods always feel like "doing something," unless the final recipients are local, you're just saddling the charity with problems. So what should you give? Her reply:
There are really only two things that matter — money and, when they're short, blood. If you call us up and say, "I've got ten cases of canned food here for starving people overseas," I have to start looking in the budget for a way to get it from you and then get it to them, and that can be expensive and take time. If you give us money, I can have that money feeding hungry people in twenty-four hours.
The charity she works for is only peripherally involved in the current Africa/Asia efforts but I'll bet it works that way with most causes. She said that if one donates to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, very little of the money goes to administrative concerns. "You can't put the money to much better use than to give to them," she said. "And the Red Cross can also tell you if they have a special need for blood at the moment."
So here's a link to a page where you can donate to the Red Cross. And those of you who were thinking of donating to this site…please double or triple the amount you were going to send me and send it there, instead.
