{"id":86,"date":"2011-01-13T16:53:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T16:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/giving-the-wrong-way"},"modified":"2021-01-02T13:03:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T21:03:05","slug":"giving-the-wrong-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2011\/01\/giving-the-wrong-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving the wrong way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/handstop.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1240\" src=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/handstop.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"154\" height=\"203\" \/><\/a>I regularly read the questions posted to the <a href=\"http:\/\/answers.yahoo.com\/dir\/index;_ylt=AvwzftrKLS8U8CDtS8KrPe_x7BR.;_ylv=3?sid=396545455&amp;link=list\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Community Service section<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/answers.yahoo.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">YahooAnswers<\/a>. It helps me to know what is trending regarding volunteerism, philanthropy, community service, especially among pre-teens and teens.<\/p>\n<p>One of the many things I&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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 &#8211; and donations of these materials flooding a country can drive them out of business.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>In addition, a lot of people want to donate their &#8220;gently-used clothes and toys&#8221; to people in need, not understanding that even the poorest people want their children to have new clothes and new toys, not people&#8217;s cast offs, however &#8220;gently-used.&#8221; Maybe the last thing they have to hold on to is their dignity.<\/p>\n<p>That isn&#8217;t to say people shouldn&#8217;t <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/stuff\/donatestuff.shtml\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">donate used items appropriately<\/a>: I&#8217;m a strong advocate for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodwill.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Goodwill<\/a>, because it is a secular organization, accepting <em>all<\/em> people as volunteers and recipients of service, and it is focused on helping people to enter or re-enter the workforce. Goodwill stores aren&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>My friend Ann in Ukraine wrote an awesome blog that talks about how international donations of stuff can be <a href=\"https:\/\/ankainkyiv.wordpress.com\/2010\/04\/21\/giving-the-wrong-way\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">giving the wrong way<\/a>. 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&#8217;t trying to discourage people from giving:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"posterous_medium_quote\"><p><em>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&#8217;t want the &#8220;take-away&#8221; of this post to be that you should never give to a humanitarian aid organization. You should!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;ve&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[1611,87,90,1607,1610,657,1609,236,244,1603,1604,353,368,1606,1605,1608],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-volunteer-engagement","tag-borders","tag-children","tag-clothes","tag-customs","tag-donated","tag-donations","tag-food","tag-helping","tag-humanitarian","tag-in-kind","tag-inkind","tag-philanthropy","tag-poor","tag-shipping","tag-things","tag-toys"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-1o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6055,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/6055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}