Doing good can get complicated.
Managing a frontline organization that depends on donations for its continued existance can be extremely complicated.
Donors make the world go round. They can also clog up the system and grind things to an absolute halt! It is amazing how the good intentions of donors accomplish this feat fairly regularly.
Interested in learning more about what I mean? If you are interested in really bringing about change in a city, you've got to read this! Check out this link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-hudnall/givers-greed-charitys-_b_70834.html
This is very good -- well worth reading.
ReplyDeleteI've seen this with the homeless people downtown. The very suburbanite who lumps 'the homeless' all together and considers them inhuman and a nuisance might well be bringing a new suitcase downtown the next week for my friend, Tina, for example, when he meets Tina. Then he sees how hard she struggles with her mobile street newspaper business and what a remarkable and courageous person she is. Identification! Tina as a fellow human being -- not 'the homeless'.
That's why face-to-face contact is so vital when we're trying to 'help' people. If we don't know them, we don't know what they really need. This can't be determined by committees 'on high.'
Witness the objection of the Cedars Neighborhood Association this week to having the homeless fed ON THANKSGIVING DAY at a church near the Cedars where they've been fed for the past eight years. And the association won the right to have the church who feeds the homeless move the feast elsewhere. Not In My Backyard!
How sad -- saddest, I posit, for the people at the Cedars who are primarily concerned that their own comfy lifestyle not be disturbed on the holiday. Why not volunteer to help the good people from Friendship-West Baptist Church feed the homeless and help pick up trash afterward? A much richer Thanksgiving for all concerned, I'm guessing.
This is the message you put out all the time on this blog. Making it personal.
Sorry, Larry. I know, I need to get my own blog.
No, Karen, keep firing away! I hadn't heard about the Cedars' group. Is it in print anywhere?
ReplyDeleteYes, I read it in the Dallas Morning News yesterday -- I think the Metro section. If you can't find it, I'll send you a copy.
ReplyDeleteThanks.