Tipping the begging bowl

Does anyone really like asking friends for money? I have recently (as some of you may know) sent a 'begging letter' to friends and family asking for help for JPA-flores, the new NGO I am helping to set up here. This process has stirred up mixed emotions in my fastidious soul.

I find it hard asking people for donations, partly because I am anxious about being disappointed by the response. Last year we tried to raise some money for a couple of projects, and a very small number of people were very generous indeed, and a very large number of people gave nothing at all. Beth's education fund (which has already sent one girl to university in Jogjakarta to read International Law) raised some cash, but we were surprised by the very small amount yielded for my project. In fact, I was so embarrassed that I felt I could not tell my local colleagues about the amount raised, and I bulked the sum out with a large contribution of my own to save my blushes. If I am honest, this made me feel a little resentful about the folks back home. Here was I, a volunteer earning 100 quid a month, donating to the project, while friends of mine earning more than this an hour demurred.

This, in turn, made me wonder if it is even ethical to ask friends and family for money, and in particular if the very nature of 'charity' means one should never expect people to give, nor admonish them if they choose not to give. Perhaps charity is best kept anonymous; transactions between the keen-as-mustard charity worker with a clipboard who stops strangers on Oxford street and signs them up for five-pound-a-month direct debits that are soon forgotten about, yet continue to be paid through inertia.

I agonised over how the e-mail was written, and felt that perhaps I had not given good enough reasons for people to be charitable, or that the process of giving was too convoluted. However, our good friends Ellen and Joost, a couple of Dutch volunteers, have recently raised nearly 5000 dollars by asking their friends for cash, and this news has inspired me and spurred me on. The Dutch are, according to all my Dutch friends, notoriously careful with money, so surely a well-aimed appeal to the spendthrift British should yield more than a similar appeal to the frugal continentals. At the least, I could appeal to the British sense of fair play and patriotism.

So, in constructing the e-mail, I came up with an idea which I hoped would make the process of giving more pleasurable and frictionless. For a start I have abandoned the idea of collecting contributions via VSO, as this did not work out well last time (it took months for the money to get to us). So I have decided to use this site (see the 'Donate' button on the right hand sidebar), Paypal, and the simple expedient of 'send a cheque', of which the latter will hopefully capture some corporate donations.

To make the very experience of giving more pleasurable and rewarding, we reflected on the fact that before we left the UK many people were telling us how much they envied us for what we are doing, and even admired it. Perhaps in most people there is a volunteer trying to get out, and so we came up with the idea of asking people to volunteer for one hour. The idea is that they should devote one hour of their working day (preferably a lucrative hour) to earning money not for themselves, but for the poor and disadvantaged on a little-known island in South East Asia. This makes it easier for people to decide how much to give (thus avoiding procrastination), and also makes a clear link between effort deployed and output gained.

However, this still left the problem of motivation to give. It is quite hard to ask people for money for something so prosaic as a computer, or even just a stapler, and yet without these things the new NGO cannot function. I expect people would rather give money to pay for the one meal that saves a child's life, or the eye operation that saves an old person's sight. The trouble is that such appeals are disingenuous, as your cash in fact goes to an international NGO, which then selects a local partner NGO, who organise a prolonged process of needs analysis, problem identification, resource allocation, project implementation and finally monitoring and evaluation. One of the outcomes of this project may well be that a child was given a nutritious meal, but your money paid for the process (and the stapler), not the fruit and vegetables.

But how do you get all this into an e-mail without boring everyone rigid? The answer is that you don't. If people want to read about the nuts and bolts of our work out here they can read it on this blog, or on the new site for JPA-flores. If they feel they need to know more then they can post a question here, or send us an e-mail, as we would welcome the chance to discuss these issues. However, not everyone wants (or has the time) to get stuck into the often perplexing arguments that surround international development. We therefore hope that people have enough confidence in our good sense to give the money with a clear conscience.

As for the squeamishness about asking friends for money, I feel sure this will quickly dissapate once I can tell my friends at JPA-flores that they can go out and buy that desk, organise that community meeting and pay for that phone call.

I will keep this blog posted on what happens next...

Comments

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I know all about the frustrations of asking wealthier friends to contribute to NGOs. I feel for you. I would donate to your project myself except for the fact that you are contemplating a "livestock project." I would never ever donaate toward the ethically and environmentally unsound practice of introducing enslaved animals into an ecosystem.