Tag Archives: donations

How to help Alabama & surrounding areas

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This is the address of the Alabama Red Cross serving the areas hardest hit by the tornado, including Tuscaloosa. Donate directly to them if you want help to get quickly to those in most need. The Red Cross provides food, shelter, vital information and connections to the government and health resources local people are in desperate need of right now – and will continue to do so in the weeks to come.

The Humane Society of West Alabama is in need of financial help – they’ve suffered some serious damage and can’t take in all the abandoned and lost animals in need. The Greater Birmingham Humane Society will also need help with the influx of lost and abandoned pets. Making a donation will help buy food and pay for medical services. Adopting a pet from this or any nearby shelter will free up space for other animals.

For other areas, simply look up the state and county’s American Red Cross chapter or Humane Society or animal shelter on Google.

Unless you have extensive medical, engineering, logistics, health care or emergency management experience in post-disaster zones, and unless you are *already* affiliated with an emergency response agency (American Red Cross), and you are fully self-sufficient (you have a place to stay, you have transportation and fuel, etc.), DO NOT GO. If you do, you will be in the way and you will be a drain on resources (food, gas, etc.).

If you enjoyed the Royal Wedding today, why not make a donation to any of the above in honor of such? Or in honor of anyone you love? In honor of your own pets?

Also see:
Volunteering To Help After Major Disasters
(earthquake, hurricane, tropical storm, flood, tsunami, oil spill, etc.)

Please call your local American Red Cross and get training NOW for disasters LATER. They have training specifically for disaster response!

Volunteer with your local animal shelter NOW and build up your skills and your credibility so that you will be in a place to provide critically-need help in the future.

 

 

Giving the wrong way

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I regularly read the questions posted to the Community Service section of YahooAnswers. It helps me to know what is trending regarding volunteerism, philanthropy, community service, especially among pre-teens and teens.

One of the many things I’ve learned from participating on YahooAnwers is the ongoing misconception people have, particularly in the USA, that collecting items to send abroad is a great idea and something NGOs and international agencies will help you coordinate. Most organizations do not want donated items. There are a number of reasons why:

  • Donated items can take away desperately needed local jobs. Even donated food can hurt, because how are local farmers supposed to get people to buy their food if a rich country dumps huge amounts of such into a country? There are local people in poor countries barely getting selling clothes, paper, pencils, building supplies and more – and donations of these materials flooding a country can drive them out of business.
  • Donated items shipped from the USA to another country can cost more to ship than simply buying the materials locally, or closer to the affected area.

That’s why many aid agencies try to buy needed materials and supplies locally, whenever possible, in cities near an area in need of such assistance: it helps the local economy, which is often in tatters because of the crisis, and stretches donor dollars much farther.

In addition, a lot of people want to donate their “gently-used clothes and toys” to people in need, not understanding that even the poorest people want their children to have new clothes and new toys, not people’s cast offs, however “gently-used.” Maybe the last thing they have to hold on to is their dignity.

That isn’t to say people shouldn’t donate used items appropriately: I’m a strong advocate for Goodwill, because it is a secular organization, accepting all people as volunteers and recipients of service, and it is focused on helping people to enter or re-enter the workforce. Goodwill stores aren’t just the places where the organization raises funds for its programs; they are also training grounds for those the organization is trying to help. Volunteers work alongside clients on the sales floor and behind the scenes in inventory.

My friend Ann in Ukraine wrote an awesome blog that talks about how international donations of stuff can be giving the wrong way. She wrote about a US NGO that wanted to send a humanitarian aid shipment to a hospital in a Chornobyl-affected area of Ukraine. It turned into a DISASTER. She isn’t trying to discourage people from giving:

There are extremely important reasons to give to humanitarian aid organizations. They do valuable and critical work, and they are essential in conflict zones, disaster areas and other at-risk places around the globe. I don’t want the “take-away” of this post to be that you should never give to a humanitarian aid organization. You should!

That said, her blogs about her situation with the US NGO will give you wonderful insight into why many NGOs in the developing world just-say-no to material donations.