A Tiny Good Deed (Is Better Than No Good Deed)

I finally donated some money to charity. It’s only taken me nearly a year to get down to it, decide how much and to whom. I went back to JustGiving.com and settled on a charity called CAMFED International.

‘Educating girls and women is widely recognised as the single most powerful weapon in the fight against poverty and HIV/AIDS in Africa. Since 1993, the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) has been supporting girls through school in some of the poorest rural areas of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana and Tanzania. In 2005, more than 246,000 children benefited from CAMFED’s programme of educational support, helping them to leave behind a life of poverty.’

Confronted by an overwhelming choice – Here or abroad? Children or animals? Homeless or sick? Human rights or environment? – I decided on this one because I strongly believe that it’s better to give something that allows people to help themselves, than to give and leave nothing behind when the money runs out or the volunteers leave. People need to be able to sustain themselves, to protect their own futures and have dignity. And as a former teacher I believe in education as a means to do this.

It was a very small donation but I plan to give more in future. I have so much, not just materially but in terms of a loving family and friends, a home of my own in a peaceful and prosperous country, a good education behind me which has enabled me to achieve things for myself that would not have been the case if I was one of the girls that CAMFED supports.  I am also putting Just Giving in my blogroll. It’s my new favourite site.

Edit: Or I would do if I could work out how to make my blogroll visible.

Where DOES Charity Begin?

I am trying to choose a charity to donate to; not exactly difficult to find one obviously, but what bothers me is I don’t know where the money’s going. If you give to a big charity, how do you know your money isn’t just going into admin and not directly to the cause about which you feel strongly enough to want to give money in the first place?

There are of course a few causes particularly close to my heart, but deciding which charity would benefit most from my small donation is like trying to lick my elbow. I can’t do it! I guess the smaller the charity, the more likely they are to benefit, especially if your donation isn’t enormous. I wanted to give to Amnesty, but when I read that a donation of £5 a month enables them to ’send four faxes’ I just don’t feel like that would be doing the most good I could with a fiver.

I’ve done some hands on charity work and that’s always good because you can see the fruits of your labours and how people are benefiting from them, and of course it’s much more rewarding all round. Sometimes people need hands just as much as, if not more than they need cash, but sadly there isn’t always time for this, so I figured a monthly donation to a good cause would at least be something.

I’ve been on www.justgiving.com, which neatly categorises hundreds of charities for you, making it much easier to choose. In theory.  Clearly I need to set aside like an hour to trawl through charities large and small, so really I should stop writing now and go and do that.