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Disaster pimping
When is it OK to support the middle man?
A few days after the bushfires started in my local community in regional Australia I put some feelers out to find a locally based Non-profit organisation to create a fund for cash donations.
Why?
The first reason was a response to the bags and bags and bags of ‘stuff’ I saw at all of my local recovery centres. Stuff that was not likely to be distributed in its entirety for the next decade, stuff that was half used, covered in plastic and otherwise just useless. This is NOT to discount the stellar and generous efforts of the many thousands of people who helped but look — a week into the recovery (or perhaps even less) cash was needed a whole lot more than stuff.
Besides, we are yet to deal with the full ramifications of the stuff, I dread to think how many 600ml plastic water bottles are floating around my community at the moment.
The more pressing reason my thoughts turned to cash donations was that national media had commenced ramping up campaigns to donate cash to large, national charities.
Now, my opinions on large NGOs don’t really count at this time. What does count is getting the largest amount of support to the people that need it most sans the red tape.
