I support quite a lot of charities of various kinds. Now as well as my own I am trying to continue David's causes as well. Things he cared most deeply about are now on my list of worthwhile organisations.
But at this time of the year requests for money are flooding in daily, almost hourly if you count the Internet.
They are all worthy causes, things I would like to champion. But the realistic truth is that I simply can't support everything....
I've had so many requests already that the organisers of the various groups should know now that the requests are setting up more negative vibes than positive....the begging bowl approach is being seriously overworked....
I sigh now at each new email, each envelope with free cards or various bribes in them, each phone call from overworked young people on the scrounge...
HELP! Desist ! Stop it now......
I am not alone in this I know but still it continues and it can only get worse as we get closer to Christmas...
I will go on supporting worthy causes but not if pressed too often..asking people who already give you something to double it might mean it being reduced not doubled.
If you belong to one of these groups and you don't see me as a loony Scrooge then try to get the message through to them that you can overdo it and the fatted calf could just go for a nice walk in the park..instead of laying a less than golden egg....how's that for a very mixed message.
Seriously. Please stop it....I seem to be developing a charitable giving phobia!
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3 comments:
Once more we are on the same wavelength or should it be treadmill?
I have written to the point of exhaustion on this subject but it makes no difference to the daily increase in the droves of begging letters.
As I have many times said I have a system.
Doesn't that sound organised?
Ha!
Apart from the charities to whom I subscribe by direct debit monthly, there are approximately 30 others who receive money on a strictly limited basis.
They receive a cheque every four months and all pleas in the period between these times are shredded as soon as they are received.
I list what is sent to whom each month and those soon to be due for a donation go into my in-tray.
Even as organised as that may seem, there is still the ever-increasing number of new (to me) appeals. These are no longer even considered.
Last year I used my calculator and added up every single donation subtracted it from my net (pension) income, and the result was that a staggering 20% of my annual income goes to charity.
Enough!
It seems to me that the older we get, the more the charities pester us. We get endless begging letters from different charities that we support, which switches us right off.
We operate on the basis of supporting a given number of charities and might switch them on a yearly basis, so to spread the load. But it's not just charities. Political parties, particularly labour have got in on the act and somehow my spouses email address got shared by someone with the labour party and she now gets personal emails from the Likes of Mr Milliband and Tessa Jowell asking for election and monetary support.
We have marked these as spam, so they go straight to the spam box now.
Jen supports animal charities and I support some Christian and some green charities, but I stopped supporting the WWW Fund when they persistently spam mailed me for more. Now their letters go straight into the bin.
A friend emailed me to say that this problem we share is commonly known as 'compassion fatigue' I'm not quite sure about this but it does have a ring to it!
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