Tag: charity

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Society

When did charity get so expensive?

Clarks
I remember when I was growing up, that my parents had a “Christmas Club Account,” which they referenced around this time each year; usually in the context of being thankful they had it to help offset the costs of all the gift-getting.

I’ve always been pretty money-conscious, so I have my own Christmas account and though it always seems to burn up pretty quickly once I start shopping in earnest, there’s always a bit left that I try and use to help someone out during the holiday season.

You may be familiar with Clark Howard–the nationally known radio and television personality known for his frugality. He’s based here in Atlanta and each year he goes from Walmart to Walmart broadcasting on-air, to promote his “Clark’s Kids” holiday charity drive. It’s promoted as your typical “come choose a child to help this Christmas” toy drive.

I’ve tried to get over to the Walmart he’s broadcasting at for a couple of years now, but this year was the first time I’ve really been able to get there. So yesterday, I got the boys out of school early and we headed over to Walmart in hopes of teaching them a bit about “giving” and maybe help a couple of children have a better Christmas.

We arrived at Walmart and sure enough, there’s the local radio broadcast truck outside so at least I knew that we were at the right place at the right time. We headed in and just generally aimed for the balloons near the ceiling cuz, it’s Walmart and it’s pretty big. Arriving at the charity drive, we’re directed a long table filled with sheets of paper, each containing the details of a particular child: name, age, race, and then a list of three items he or she had selected for Christmas.

I encouraged my boys to each look through and select a sheet of someone they wanted to “help” and while they did that, I began to just peruse the sheets. As I did, I noticed a couple of things:

  • The lists were very similar. For instance a “VTech” game thing was a common theme. I asked if the kids were given a list of items to choose from and was told “Yes.”
  • There were some pricey items on the list. I saw a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, bicycles, and other large-ticket items

My own boys came back to me with their lists and on them I saw:

For the 4 year old my youngest son selected:

  • a double-sided whiteboard easel
  • a balance bicycle
  • a little-tykes basketball thing

For the 9 year old my oldest son selected:

  • a Simon game
  • electric scooter (and if you bought a scooter, you were supposed to also buy a helmet)
  • a basketball hoop you mount to your door inside

Let me say here that my expectation was to spend about $50 on each child,  so I asked one of the volunteers how “this” worked; did I just buy a couple of things on the list? She replied that the idea is for you to buy everything on the child’s list, but if you didn’t, it would go back in the pile in hopes someone else would finish it up. No guilt there right?

Now, I won’t bore you with the next 45 minutes we spent walking around, unsuccessfully trying to find the exact items on the list, many of which I was told Walmart didn’t even carry, or me looking at the price of an electric scooter and saying, “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. My own kids don’t have an electric scooter.” But we did end up getting (similar gifts since we could find an exact match for most things) all but the most expensive item on each child’s list (they didn’t have the balance bike) and it still came out to $145 total.

I’m happy to have been able to help of course, but the onsite expectation didn’t match the promoted expectation. And who thought this through? If a kid did get a smartphone from someone, who is going to pay for the cell phone plan? Is a balance bicycle really the best use of $60 when they’re likely going to outgrow it in a matter of months? I don’t know…it just felt a bit “thrown together” and I didn’t feel like I was really “helping” someone.

Being a charity run by the Clark Howard foundation, I’m more than a little surprised. For someone so bent on saving money and making every dollar count, this toy drive certainly didn’t live up to what I’ve come to expect from Clark.

Next year I’ll find someone, or an organization, a bit more “need” driven and a lot less “wish” driven.

 

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Charity, begins at home

Contribution Chart In the grand scheme of charity, I’m a fan of the “Teach a man to fish” mantra rather than being on the “Give a man a fish” side of things. This is not surprising considering my political views, but it goes deeper than that.

I’m just not a handout kinda guy. My folks didn’t pay for my college. My folks have never given me any money since I left home outside of small sums for birthday and Christmas gifts and when I was out of work for several months after a layoff, I didn’t file for unemployment (though if I had to do it all over again, I definitely would!)

Asking for stuff just isn’t in my genes. Now, if you want to just voluntarily GIVE me things, well now, that’s a completely different story. Please make your checks payable to…

This carries over to my charitable contributions as well. I have absolutely NO problem donating things to charity, and I also give money to church (ahem..*cough* *cough*…when we go).

CareerMom is just the opposite of me. She donates at work through United Way, and she was also once suckered into giving by some group that “gave” her some nifty return address labels. Now she gets no fewer than 8 or 9 charity requests by mail each week, most of which I toss in the recycle bin in the garage on my way in the door in the afternoon (I know, I know…I’m baaaad!)

I’m also not a huge fan of just giving money to a big organization, only to have half of it eaten up in administration costs, or having it go to some faraway place helping God knows whom, with God knows what.

That said, if everyone in the world were like me, it would probably be a pretty miserable place. So, I recognize my own shortcomings.

But regardless of your beliefs on the subject, the very idea of Charity, is that it should come from the heart. It shouldn’t be forced upon you because then, it’s not really Charity–it’s taxes.

With it getting near the holidays, charities are cranking up their efforts to get their piece of the pie this year and my company, like many across the country, have joined them in their efforts. I have no doubt that this is mostly just so Public Relations groups can tout how much money they’ve raised so that when next quarter’s earnings report comes out, perhaps folks will cut them a little slack.

Regardless, I’ve been ignoring the Employee Charitable Contribution Campaign e-mail for about a week now. I have not in the past, nor do I now, have a desire to have some charity automatically deduct money from my paycheck each month. So when I got another one this morning, I ignored it too.

Then, as I was sitting at my desk, my chat program popped up:

ECCC Chat

So, whether you donate or not, you’re supposed to “confidentially” respond whether or not you’re going to donate.
Fine, whatever.

I followed the link she enclosed and here’s what I had to fill out:

CCC registration

It’s not enough to say that you don’t want to donate, but they have to go about it in a way that makes you feel guilty about not doing so.

THIS, is what drives me away from it every year. It’s the tactics, as much as anything.

I truly do hate to sound all “bah Humbug’ish,” but this isn’t exactly the best time to be hitting people up for cash. But I do have an idea for my company and others who REALLY want to gen up Charity contributions:

You give me a guaranteed employment contract for the next calendar year, at my current or better salary and benefits, and I’ll donate.

How ’bout that?