I read Linda Polman’s ‘War Games’ earlier this year, a disturbing look at how donated aid can serve to perpetrate the cycles of war and and dependency, with reference to African nations, chiefly. And that book has very much been in my mind with the emergency/famine in the Horn of Africa.

As has my membership  (there, interest declared) of the charity Population Matters. But i assure you my comments are mine alone.

Of course saving lives is important but is it not every bit as important as taking action to prevent more deaths by famine in the future? By which i mean when families of 5 children or more are seeking help (as they must, they are desperate) once those who can be saved are stabilised, why is it not made a condition of further support that the families are obliged to accept long-term contaceptive measures eg injections for woman and vasectomise for me? I know if you have land you need children to help you work it – but surely it is better to have 2 healthy children than 6 malnourished sickly children? The bigger the family the more land you will try to work, and the more cattle you will seek to own. And that leads to more deforestation which contributes to drought. It may well be the developed nations’ cavalier attitude to caring for the planet which is a big cause of extreme weather conditions but it is still the impoverished people in parts of Africa which bear the brunt of this. And smaller families are easier to feed clothe educate etc. Would not those who scrape a living in the Horn of Africa prefer to raise 2 or 3 heakthy children than forever be burying sick offspring?

So is it residual guilt over the colonisation of the past which prevents us from enabling those who are suffering now to understand what they might do to look after themselves better? I know this is not all of it but it is part of the reason so many in the west think of Africa as a scrawny child with a begging bowl, when much of the continent is not like that.

And religion will play a part too. But really, by simply stepping in to feed the starving millions every time the climate slaps down the worlds poorest people again, we in the west really are part of the problem, and not just as the planets worst environmental polluters and over consumers of the planet’s resources.

So i don’t give to aid funds like this. I give to Population Matters and Marie Stopes International.

My Saul-Paul moment came in the spring of 2010. I read about the Optimum Population Trust and thought ‘if it’s good enough for David Attenborough, it’s good enough for me’. Apparently his stance on the future of the planet is to say that if we don’t control our population anything else we do is pointless.

So where might i be looking to donate in the following year? The OPT of course but also charities which look to save the planet itself (eg Friends of the Earth), birth control (unless it seems Bill Gates got that sewn up); charities saving animal species (not caring for domestic pets which are as much consumers as people); and charities working on conflict resolution as  threatened peoples will have more children as a hedge against being defeated in future (see the birthrates in Israel either side of the wall); and bee charities and those protecting plant species. Etc. Shall think on’t as there must be other areas which i can link back to the OPT philosophy.

My money will not be spent on looking after the people who are already here, eg trying to maintain health or even save lives. Why would i? Far too many of us here already. If we lose a few (thousand), shrug, then the planet can only benefit. How callous that sounds, but in OPT i seem not to be alone in having that as a dark thought which one hardly dare voice.

That said, where does that leave me? Coming from a long-lived family, and maintaining a very healthy lifestyle in every way, am i not part of the problem? The longer i live the more resources i consume, even if recycling and buying 2nd hand and being a frugal person etc. Perhaps i should also resolve to walk on the wild side in 2011 – eat drink & be merry. Smoke untipped cigarettes? Take up bungee jumping? Not gonna die of compassion fatigue that’s for sure.

So i consulted my notebook and found there are 7 charities at least to which i have given frequently in the past, and would happily continue so to do on a regular basis who have dumped me.  They never write they never call – was it something i said? They found out i was giving to other charities perhaps?

Then i looked at the whole notebook and, looking only at those  to whom i have donated since  my last change of address, found  9 charities who never wrote back ever. You would think they would have seized on me with a glad cry, added to me a database for regular contact, even if they were only out for one thing.

In both categories i worry that charities are in an ever decreasing spiral of falling income. If government funding is curtailed, people have less money to give, and charities cannot afford to ask for donations in the old way, then things can only get worser.

Time to get with the modern age perhaps cuddle upon the wonderweb.

Ms Polman uses the book to examine how aid organisations, unless working very carefully & thoughtfully (assuming circumstances allow – eg the warlord who wants to tax you for every child you are ‘allowed’ to vaccinate’ may be carrying an Uzi or such) , can yet compound the problem. Shocking and/or poignant stories illustrate the points she makes.

Up to 1,000 charities large & small, can be attracted to loci of  a disaster (eg famine or earthquake). Doesn’t that sound a bit crowded to you? two images alternate and neither are pleasant eg bees round a honey-pot, and ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers. Even if , say, 500 turn up, and even if each charity sent only one person, isn’t that an awful lot of extra mouths to feed & water? A lot of white land cruisers to fill with petrol?

How much of that is CV building? I ask as i have been a vollie with a charity for  11 years now. The area where i contribute my efforts is the original core service of the charity, and i once complained to the office staff that this now seems like the forgotten eldest child – doing the hardest work yet seeing all the fuss lavished on each new baby which comes along. And i was told that to keep attracting funding the charity has to keep thinking up new ways to enhance the service provided. Doing what we do we do well, however valuable, is no longer enough to keep the funding coming in.

So i wonder if that attitude pertains with other charities. It would be like the CVs i (fruitlessly) write – ‘I was instrumental in…’ only it would be ‘We ‘not ‘I’ and it would not be about  how beautifully i colour in spreadsheets but the effect of the charity concerned in a  disaster

I think of these issues in  conjunction with a recent Christian Aid report on the MDBs (multilateral development banks)’Bottom Lines, Better Lives’. The report was critical of the role these banks play (funded as they are by governments around the world) in exacerbating internal problems, or failing to alleviate them, or even creating new problems.

So if there is failure at the highest level to ask what is really needed in long-term planning, and fire-fighting disasters as they happen, then all this effort all this money (the sums governments use to fund the MDBs comes form all of us even if we do not donate directly) is not producing the change we all want to see.

So i don’t know  where to start. How can i do most good? Lobby parliament? Donate the widow’s mite every month? Something in between? WWBGD? A steal from Glee – not What Would Madonna Do – What Would Bill Gates Do?

Clearly a legal activity in this country, to set up a charity, but  why do we need so many? If i came across a situation where i felt charitable donations could be very useful in filling a gap in my community, then i would look online to find out if anyone else had had the same idea and would get myself involved in that. 

But then how many charities are very local, set up in response to a child’s illness, or death? Is it that people show a certain selfishness in their selflessness? By which i mean they want to raise money for their local child and only that child? The new charity does not recognise fellow cause with others in the same position?

Even in a situation like that surely charities could affiliate, to share what they know, what they can do, ideas for fundraising, put pressure on MPs, and so on? Be  the equivalent of how the Londis & Spar chains of small shops, where small retails concerns combine their buying power to take on the might of the supermarkets.

And what about buddy schemes? Not sure how it could be done but smaller yet experienced charities - perhaps some who even intend to fold once an aim has been achieved – could and should be able to share their good ideas and expertise with new charities operating in the same field. Well i do know, of course there would be a way of doing it online. Geography would be no barrier

A card in the local newsagent wouldn’t really do, these days. would it?

50% think the UK government is giving too much in overseas aid

49% think foreign aid for developing countries is a a bad idea as it can be misused or diverted

58% want the extra money spent at home (eg on improving public services)

62% want the money spent at home to relieve poverty

I can understand people polled – presumably at random – not giving much thought to spending on overseas aid but why is the media not joining the dots for those people? The public as a whole should be led into understanding that the worse conditions are in other countries the more likely people are to become refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants etc. And one can’t help but suspect that those who are most opposed to increasing aid are also the ones most vociferous in crtitcising the immigrants who come here for either ’stealing our jobs’  or not stealing our jobs but ’scrounging off the state’.

So as well as being generous with aid (albeit careful in ensuring & monitoring it is used for legitimate purposes) why don’t we

 stop allowing/encouraging western multinationals from exploiting and abusing & polluting other countries (Shell & Haliburton, anyone?),

stop allowing unfair farming and import tariffs to be set preventing other countries from trading equably with the west – oh and stopping subsidies for western farmers would help too

stop insisting on social engineering (eg welfare cuts and privatisation) as a condition for IMF loans

stop expecting other countries  to do things we choose not too eg the impoverishment (regularly leading to suicide) of Indian farmers who have been conned into growing GM crops and then can’t afford to buy all the fertilisers etc which have to be used and new seeds every year

stop waging wars for spurious human rights reasons when actually we just want to steal and/or control resources of other countries

So few people would leave their home, family,  friends to come here if they could live a decent life in their home country. So the man & woman on the Clapham omnibus need telling – if ytou don’t want ‘them’ here, we must to eveything we can to keep ‘them’ over there.

Question is, how can charities get that story into the press?

(ps – thanks be that government money is never diverted or misused in the UK, eg to pay for duck houses r bankers bonuses…)

However, Haiti did make me think about why people give at all, and specifically why me? Questions raised were do i want to 

relieve appalling suffering now (Haiti)

 prevent future suffering (funding anti-Malaria nets; empower people by equipping and training them)

protect a species (orangutans in Borneo, whales, bees) in recognition of their place in the eco chain

protect a habitat (Brazilian forest, Canadian tar sands, mangrove swamps)

cover the gaps in services provided by the government here (equipment for Great Ormond Street, Macmillan nurses, RNIB, NCH, Barnardos, St Mungos, Crisis, Big Issue etc etc)

fund health research (heart disease, MS, cancer)

fund responses to crisis or accident ( Medecins Sans Frontieres, RNLI , DEC)?

So many good and justifiable reasons to give (166, 000 charities in the UK per a R4 prog) but what is the end result of doing so and is that what i really want? Despite not having kids and therefore contributing nothing to the gene pool (shame as i am a redhead and we are diminishing in numbers due to a recessive gene) my most important aim is that humans survive on this planet. And as far as i can see the most destructive thing we do is to keep on procreating. the more of us the more damage we do with our demands the planet produce stuff for us.  None of the above charities nor all the many others i could give to will meet their aims if we degrade this planet ever more. 

So i feel i need to give more to  the Optimum Population Trust, and get involved somehow, as i am passionate about the procreation thing. Downside is that even deaths in in vast numbers evoke a shrug. Which is not logical as tragedy & loss often result in a greater need to procreate – says this baby boomer!

Of course i now have to think about the longevity issue including my own. Grandfather lived to 99 and i planned to do better than that . Yet the longer i am around the longer i will ‘consume’ the planet’s resources. Not very considerate of me is it. I shall start on the Capstan Full Strength and start hitting the booze (soaking it up with a daily fried breakfast) while taking exercise only by climbing on and off the couch.

But, no really, i’m sure i can’t take all the credit for the idea. Oh you are too too kind, no sparing my blushes is there…

Then i read a piece in the London Metro last week highlighting how much harder fundraising is across the charity sector eg ‘4 in 10 reporting a drop in individual giving’.  The article was based on a report by Baker Tilly who act for 175 charities:

http://www.bakertilly.co.uk/publications/Managing-charity-finances-through-uncertain-times.aspx

This against a background of cuts in government spending at home and abroad so as charities have a bigger gap to fill they have less funds to do so – a very vicious spiral indeed. And to judge by my mailbox, the drop in funds appears to make it harder for charities even to send out the begging letters which may have some hope of a return.

Which, as ever, makes me wonder why i still get thank-you letters with no envelope for another cheque to go in, and then a separate mailshot with an envelope. How can charities afford to do that? Is it that there are separate ‘departments’  handling different aspects? Then merge them! Use your IT capability, however basic, more intelligently so you can track all this. Now more than ever charities need to be lean and mean. If  it is true- as a spokeman for the Charities Commission commented  -  that a third of respondents have considered merger or joint working, per an earlier blog  for myriad reasons that seems a good idea to me, where charities are ploughing very similiar furrows.

Naturally i am an interested party, but i do feel the drop in giving is bad for general morale too, surely? Meaning that if you normally give £20 and now give only £5, you will feel better for still giving even if it is less. And the more people enabled to feel they are a decent person the more who will act decently, yes? I know, call me Pollyanna…

I note that many charities name the specific appeal on the envelope as well as in the bumpf they send with the envelope. So i assume this is to judge how much they recieve in response to each appeal. But i wonder if there are attempts to analyse further to see exactly why givers respond to that particular appeal. Might have little to do with the appeal itself but in the personal experience of the giver or what is in the news etc. If i am not planning to give immediately i may keep an envelope and use it many months later, and will not be giving in to a response to a particular appeal. It would surely be useful, regards  givers who have responded to an appeal in itself, to look at what it was that pried open their wallets. Might be able to use the concept again, even to expand on it?

Have to say, i have had very little charity mail of late, even prior to the post office strike. Presume the charities are holding back and saving their cash – ie the cost of a mail shot – for the pre-Christmas push? I have already decided where my extra Christmas donations are going so i can tell you now, don’t waste the postage on me.