personal experience of good and bad charities to support please

[60andsomething]

If you have been on the receiving end, please give a bit of information about which charities you think money should go to, and why, if you can, and also, which charities are not full filling their aims, in your opinion, and money should not got to

Thank you

I support WaterAid and the Samaritans.

Are these good choices for my hard earned scraps? Are there better choices?

Thank you

Fred Hollows Foundation https://www.hollows.org/uk/home

Amazing charity.

Name changed recently but I am a frequent poster / commenter

For me I'll never donate to Caner Research ever again. Raised close to 14K and the person I dealt with to communicate the donation along with other conversations said 'this amount of money isn't really worth our time'

As a cancer survivor I was so offended

@taxguru on the RNLI comment - they are all of those things!

I support marie curie, centrepoint and a local charity which is a residential school for profoundly disabled children and young people. I also sponsor a girl in Togo through Plan International, I get updates on her life and can write to her, send birthday cards and postcards etc

I think it will partly depend on your personal interests.
I support Cats Protection both the national charity and my own local branch. I was a volunteer for five years in the local branch and all money is wisely spent.
I also support my local foodbank, a local horse rescue, a local mental health charity and another local animal charity. I see how donations are used.
On my low income this is as much as I can do. It consistently shocks me when rich people here and irl don’t give anything to help anyone except themselves.

Fairly recent connection, but the Youth Hostel Association. I support by staying there sometimes, using their cafes, which I like a lot (don't have to be staying to do that), and some appeals such as No Child Left Behind for funding younger people or groups who would otherwise get little chance of a holiday with family for many reasons.

I also like some appeals where it is possible to contribute to a similar ethos around music, choirs, or musical instrument loans - done this in a small way through Good Gifts mainly.

RNLI - I know they're very wealthy, but I live near the Cornish coast, and every summer I see a rescue they carry out. Dramatic but vital!

When my parents died i donated a big chunk of the inheritance to Stroke Assoc (for a targeted scheme in our area which I knew was previously lacking) and Alzheimer's (for a specific research study now named after my dad). Both parents suffered horribly due to those conditions, and it felt right. I carried out a lot of due diligence, research, and liased with the charities over shaping the way the money was spent. It felt empowering after feeling all the power drain from me in the previous two years caring for mum and dad.

Last xmas - local clothes and food banks, and the local women's refuge. I'll do something similar this xmas. We buy fewer Xmas gifts than we used to, so the excess can do some good.

Curious about the comments about never donating to cancer charities - why? So much medical academic (leading to practical solutions) study is funded by charities.

I like to give to charities that mean something personally to me, so I do regular donations to

• Scope (having seen how much they helped a friend)
• Amnesty (not sure about them these days though!)
• Abortion Support Network
• Women's Aid (after seeing how often they are recommended to women here)
• Rethink
• SHINE Trust (read about them in the paper)

I also give one off donations to appeals on Acts 435 (though I am an atheist) because I like seeing how donations make a direct impact on individuals

I support;
Local hospice
Guide dogs
Acts 435
Battersea cats and dogs

I have cancelled my dd to rspca

I've personally been helped by 4Louis a very worthwhile charity in my opinion.

4louis.co.uk/

Maggie's - they were amazing when I had cancer
A small local secondary breast cancer charity set up by a local woman which my late friend was involved in.
A charity supporting young people and parents with the genetic condition my DS1 was born with.
Tomorrow's Women - a Scottish charity supporting women involved with the criminal justice system.

I donate items to local clothing and baby banks.

I don’t give money to any charity unless I know exactly what it’s being used for.

I once stupidly got coerced into giving money via text via oxfam by a friend, and the amount of marketing and pestering i got from them afterwards was insane.

I have benefited from Homestart and Maternity Action, so I like the idea of giving back to them.

For me choosing charities to support is very personal. For a long time we had a monthly donation to Winston’s Wish (after a friend died leaving two young children), Sue Ryder Hospice (after theh looked after a close relative in his last weeks) and a charity which aimed to raise literacy in London primaries by supporting children one on one with reading and writing.

I occasionally donate to a mega charity like Save the Children if they have an appeal, but always think of the smaller charities where my money will go further (hopefully smaller overheads and directors not on mega bucks).

Another one who tends to focus more on local charities than big global/national ones. They’re not all local to where I live now mind you, but include the different parts of the UK and Ireland I’ve lived in, as well as the US. We keep in touch with all the charities and see directly where the money goes.

We support:

• a US-based water charity which we are fortunate enough to know many people actively involved in the charity and their on-the-ground work.
• a Mexico based anti-trafficking rescue centre.
• Friends of Anchor - the local cancer charity where we used to live.
• We sponsor a child in Uganda through a charity local to where we live now and again, are fortunate enough to have close contact with the charity and to have met our sponsored child on more than one occasion.
• Local food bank

On a bigger scale we are regular supporters of IJM.

Macmillan will never get a penny of my money. As above, they train their nurses with reasonable skills, but then leave it up to the NHS to fund them. They are also incredibly pushy as noted above, and have zero compassion for anyone who is triggered by their messaging/advertising/cold calls - just attempting to guilt them into giving more. And in our case, their nurse was shit. We had incredible care from every single medical professional when DH had cancer - from the oncologists, to the surgeons, to the dietician and speech therapist - all except the Macmillan nurse who was pushy, rude, didn’t listen, and made an incredibly stressful time 100 times worse.

I don’t donate monthly but will donate as hoc to -
GOSH -
RNLI - for all the reasons cited above
Guide dogs
Hearing dogs for deaf
Hypo hounds
Stroke association

I only have two I support financially,because then I'm not spreading myself too thinly.

Medicins San frontiere ( was Doctors without Borders when i worked with them).
Salvation Army - on a local basis, they are heroes.

On a practical basis, I help out with a very local cat charity ( just picking up and dropping off donated food) and volunteer with a food bank, but I'm thinking of leaving that one and going elsewhere.

Not RSPCA or Macmillan. Had bad experiences with them both.

I refuse to go near oxfam

Years ago,we where struggling to buy my father anything for birthday/Christmas (very close together) as he's one of those people that doesn't do 'stuff'

So I can up with the bright idea of buying him a 'something' from the oxfam catalogue
We bought him 50 condoms,3 goats,a mango tree and a toliet (all the family chipped in)

They HOUNDED him-4/5 phone calls a week,(and they wouldnt let him off the phone-he had to hang up,so theyd call back-it was them that where clogging up the phone when i went into labour and couldnt get through to my parents) letters everyday and the only reason they didn't email him is because he doesn't 'do' computers and has never had an email address

It took nearly a year to get his details deleted from their systems and that's only because my mother took on the top boss and had a go at him-and that took a further 4 months for it to stop

It was a shame as they could have made a packet out of us over the following years instead of spending money hounding him

I won't touch the rspca-they are worse than useless everytime I've called them out,they haven't bothered and once put the phone down on me (they only seem to bother if they have a camera crew with them)

I do support the red Cross,pdsa and Katherine House by shopping in their shops (the only ones in out high street) and support friends of the earth,Marie curie (they where amazing with my fil) and alzheimers (my grandad died from this awful illness)

Agree about smaller local charities
I donate to Acts435 . I chose this charity because the money goes directly to those who need it and it is usually for a specific need

I'd suggest independent local charities. Such as an animal shelter, food bank, or a nearby hospice. Because they aren't part of a huge corporate charity with associated massive corporate salaries and overheads, the money goes straight to where it is needed.

I volunteered (not at macmillan) with one of Macmillan’s trustees, a specialist chief nurse. He was bewailing the fact his oldest friend had left the charity her house - he said ‘that amount of money means nothing to them’.

Cancer charities are rich as hell. Just so you know.

So is the Salvation Army, who recruit ‘community managers’ which sounds like they’re aimed at good works, as most church managers are, but in our SA they’re fundraisers tasked with getting money out of locals, not serving them. Can’t donate any more.

Having worked for the Salvation Army for several years, they will never see a penny from me ever again. It is a very insular organisation, and very cult like in how they pick and choose what behaviour they accept and what they turn a blind eye to. Whilst on the face of it they do good work, the vast majority are government contracts.

Agree re Salvation Army. I’ve often seen posts where people praise how their officers get paid peanuts and therefore are a true charity, but fail to realise they are bought houses, given a car allowance, a pension, etc etc.

Cross posted - I didn’t see your post about Acts435.

We support one local children’s charity supporting children and their families affected by cancer.

Then, things we are interested in
So we are architects and have direct debits going to
SPAB
English Heritage
National Trust
We also holiday at Landmark Trust properties

We are vegetarians and have dd going to
WWF
Battersea Cats and Dogs
The Humane Society ( they are doing a lot of good work to stop the dog meat trade and cruel industry especially in Yulin during the truly disgusting cat and dog eating boil them alive so called ‘festival’ 😔

I’d say
Support something you have experience of or something that interests you / you care about.

[Of course EH and NT also give us unlimited entry to places and SPAB have been invaluable in technical support for our house ]

I tend to donate super local, foodbank, a cat rescue and dog shelter, I can see exactly how my money is being spent and the good they are doing.
The only other charity I support is 52 Lives, they literally change the life of a person or family a week, check the heartwarming stories out on Facebook

www.facebook.com/52lives