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Stop your giving going to waste

By Valerie Yule - posted Tuesday, 13 October 2015


I have just counted up that 47 charities send me their appeals, not counting those that I mark "Return to Sender" immediately, people coming to the door and people pretending to say thank you on the phone.

The increasing amount of paper bumf sent with these appeals is making an increasing contribution to global emissions, waste of trees and waste of people’s time. It is getting worse.  

Last week one charity used an Express Mail envelope, several charities enclosed colour magazines, two had free gifts, one sent still more address labels, and none had only one sheet of paper.  

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Several have sent me six appeals in one year, although I always write on a donation slip ‘Only one appeal annually please and No Bumf paper’.

After one warning, I now cut charities off my donation lists, if they make more than one appeal in the year, and I sometimes return their self-addressed envelopes telling them why they have been cut off.

This waste is driven by competition for donations and by the findings made by charities that many people will be swayed to give by these expensive frills – including key-rings and Sleep notices for doors.

How about?

How about one annual Charity Supplement in newspapers and magazines, for people to keep and send off donations slips as they chose and when they could.  Other organizations and libraries could keep copies for referral on their display shelving.  Calendars could list a few charities for each month.   However, that strategy would not net all possible donors.

This sometimes works - a really good idea could be for charities to mark on their lists all those donor who ask for only one double-sided sheet per year,  which gives basic information and news, donation form and web sites, plus a return envelope.  Such waste-hating donors could have an exclamation mark next to their name, for computer sorting to pick up.   Val Yule !  means ‘No Bumf, No magazines or gifts, and Not more than one appeal a year’. Charities might find that half their donors had exclamation marks after their name.

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Think of the savings!  If we all insisted that the ‘Less Bumf sent to us – the bigger our donation”.  Some charities could cut their staff in half.  Then our donations could go further to their intended charitable destination, to whatever we meant it to go to.

One form of paper waste that wastes even more is pictures of large families seeking our charity, or mothers of eight who are given ways to fish, or small babies smiling that will arouse our generosity without making us think that they will grow to be adult men and women.  Why do we have Save the Children?  I would rather we had Save the Adults.

One useful research would list all the charities that converge on one place.

This includes the specialty charities like leprosy, trachoma and removing mines, as well as the broad sweep of charities like Oxfam and World Vision.

Some places have over a dozen charities supporting hospitals.

Special time-bound charities for earthquakes, droughts and volcanoes are on top of this.

And then there are places which have no charities for anything.

And can we have a charity that aims to cut down the production and distribution of armaments?  How can that be organized?  Will such a charity encounter opposition in our country or others that profit from the arms?

Could we have charities that try to stop us behaving in wasteful ways so that more money is available for us to give to those who have nothing to waste?  They will be trying to change our own behaviour.  And will alas be affecting the profits and indeed the existence of wasteful mattresses, baths and electric goods, and the retailers who sell them to us.  I dare not think what we can do if ventures are made to curb us here.

Carbon trading is only one of the ways to cut wasteful greenhouse emissions. Cutting junk sent by charity appeals is another, small but useful, and setting charities to do more at home as well as help another country.

We will be cutting so many people’s jobs in sending us appeals that we would do well to think of all the jobs that are really needed.  The jobs that are not being done.

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About the Author

Valerie Yule is a writer and researcher on imagination, literacy and social issues.

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