Once in a lifetime trip disguised as fundraising for Charities

[staveleymum]

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for people raising money for Charity. People asking for sponsorship for things like Marathons, 1000 miles walked in a year, midnight walks, etc. I'm also on board with Red Nose Day, Children in Need, PTA fundraising, kids clubs fundraising and everything else that seems to constantly need money to run.

BUT I just don't get fundraising for things like hiking up Kilimanjaro or funding a trip to Borneo (for a 16 year old) to build a school or some such similar. Both these events need to raise £4,000 so they are on facebook, justgiving, etc trying to raise the money. My issue is that of the £4,000 needed how much will actually go to charity. This covers flights, accommodation, food, guides, etc - surely this is just something that they want to do as a personal thing and wrapping it up in Charity and getting others to pay for it?

I'd love to walk over Sydney Harbour Bridge but I wouldnt dream of masking it in Charity and hoping others will pay for it with perhaps 5-10% of the money raised actually going to the Charity?

I know I don't have to sponsor but I'd rather just give the donation directly to the Charity. AIBU?

Can anyone explain more about how marathon places work? My colleague is doing it this year (she's a keen runner anyway) and has been talking about fundraising

You can apply for a place in a maranthon yourself, costs vary but perhaps £25-45. Of course the better known ones are more expensive but they are all the same same length!

Some of the bigger ones are over subscribed so there's a ballot for places.

If you don't get one in the ballot, you can get one from a charity, which means that you agree to raise a minimum sum for the charity. So people ask you to sponsor them for that charity , so they run in the race. I have no idea how much the charity plays for the place.

Some people just get a place themselves and then ask you to sponsor them - in that case usually all the money is going direct to the charity .

So it depends what your friend is doing .

There are lots of marathons all over the uk , often about 20 a month. So you can just get in your car / on the bus, book a couple of nights in a travel lodge and do one. You don't need your pals to raise £2k.

I won't

We've just had a letter handed in at work from a 14 year old boy from the local school asking for £4000 to go to Africa to build houses or something. I looked at the letter like it's just so bloody cheeky. And appealing to local businesses by saying he was taking some tshirts and hoodies with him that could be emblazoned with the company's logo if they sponsored him and he would have his photo taken with said tshirt/hoodie on to promote the businesses that sponsored him and would mention them on social media.
It's basically just a very expensive holiday dressed up as charity so he/his parents/ the school don't have to pay for him.
Not sure what skills he would have, to actually be anything more than a pain the in arse getting in the way.

We threw the letter in the bin.

Notice these trips never happen in the winter. Always somewhere hot.
But anyway if the lack of skills teen needs to have an idea of what it's like to be in poverty, they could donate the 4K or whatever to a charity to help locals learn these skills to build houses and schools etc. And they could go and volunteer at shelter, st mungo, food banks, other place in this country. But I suppose building houses in the cold isn't the same as in he sun. Helping out at GOSH or similar doesn't have the same appeal as somewhere hot.

I am not talking about the surgeons and other professionals who give up their time and money to go to other countries to treat people, and help train locals skills. This is what model should be followed. These don't do it for the clap on the back, and to chuck all over social media. They do it because they genuinely care and want to help. If these pay for my holiday mob really cared they would be doing it and funding themselves. Any donations from friends and family of course appreciated to help pay for tools etc on the other end.

Oops posted to soon

So how does the 4K to fund the holiday/experience bullshit help? When someone else with skills goes and is more beneficial? Can one of you saying how wonderful it is explain this, because it makes no sense. Even more so when a two week self funded trip wouldn't cost this much, so locals would gain more.

I agree with much of what is being said, but short term trips can bring more long term benefits in terms of support for a charity.

For example, about 13 years ago I went to a Central American country for 2 weeks to visit a charity/project run by locals supported by a small charity in the U.K. I can't remember but think it was about £800-900 to go, I probably raised some and used savings to go. Whilst there I helped paint an out building and lay bricks on a patio area at a residential home that housed ex- street children. I don't expect my work was very high standard!
Going there and seeing the work meant that I gave donated monthly to the charity ever since, and jointly with my husband since we got married.
I'm now a trustee on the U.K. Board for the charity and help raise awareness and funds for the work.

tankerdale - A friend of mine has a similar exlerience. He is now involved in supporting the UK end of the charity. It changed his view of charity and giving.

Haven't read the full thread OP but climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge is overrated (it looks awesome but in actual fact you are just climbing steps and scaffolding in a non flattering grey jumpsuit).

Isn't there also a question around how motivated teens are likely to be once they arrive in developing countries and find their living conditions are perhaps not quite what they expected?

Obviously this doesn't apply to all, but those I've been approached by personally have been the type who've always been mollycoddled at home, loud in their insistence about what should be done (generally by someone else) but not always keen to actually do it

I might be completely mistaken of course, but it's hard not to wonder how they'd have coped if they'd actually gone, and how much use they'd have been once here

Regarding world challenge - they are a company providing adventure holidays to school groups. They are expensive because taking kids on these trips is pricey.

They are not a charity or a do-good organisation, just a holiday company with a clever sales model to a certain market.

Nothing wrong with that - but all the places they go can be accessed more cheaply by older people, who can also pay for their holiday by going to work.

Sorry I disagree - yes the charity doesn't get all of the money - but it's extra they are getting because the person is raising money. Besides I think for teenagers building schools etc - it's a wonderful experience for the teen and a wonderful opportunity for the community who is getting the school.

The community actually get very little 'bang for their buck'. Untrained teenagers working on a building site need very strong supervision at all times, their work will not be to a quality standard, they are likely to provide a lot lower output than a tradesperson and often only want to do the 'easy' jobs. So it might cost $5000 to send them and cover all of their costs and you might need 10 of them to get the work done. So about $50,000 to build a one room shack of dubious quality as a 'benefit to the community'.

One highly qualified tradesperson with training skills will still cost $5000, but they will be able to train local tradespeople to undertake this work, thereby leaving the skills in the community. Ten local tradespeople, even at a very inflated rate of pay for many of these countries might cost $2000. So they get their one room building build to an appropriate standard for $7,000, but they also are left with the skills that they can keep in their community, extend their one room shack to a ten room school house, give them skills that they can use to work to feed their families, and develop those skills further by local tradespeople teaching new local tradespeople. That is how you 'benefit the community'.

Kr1stina I feel stupid now for not specifying; I meant the London marathon. I actually did forget that it isn't THE marathon. Thank you for your explanation!

There's a ballot for London as it's over subscribed. So I I'm guessing that your friend didn't get a place and she wants to run it so she needs to raise money to pay for a charity place .

Here's another 131 other marathons she could run instead this year .

www.runnersworld.co.uk/events/foundevents.asp?v=2&evntTitle=&evntDate=a%3afut&distance=41-43&county=&area=&distanceFromHome=&evntSurface=&evntGround=&evntWheelChairAccessible=

Some other ideas

www.runnersworld.co.uk/events/15-amazing-uk-marathons-that-arent-in-london/14467.html

Oneiroi - your points re: children living in abusive situations are already addressed in the Lumos article.

The environment in many children's homes has been shown to have an even more damaging effect on children than abusive situations.

The harmful effects of waves of volunteers coming over and helping out for a few weeks at at time should also be considered.

The point is that orphanages are absolutely awful for children, even well run ones, and we should be doing all we can to move countries around the world to a foster care system & family care. By supporting orphanages you make it harder for this to happen. The best thing for the children currently in orphanages if for those orphanages to close down.

Children's homes are incredibly rare now in the UK, as they should be.

I think this thread will be enlightening for a lot of people. Try not to be too rough on them, I think some of them genuinely believe that they are doing something that will make a difference, and that will be backed up by relatives and members of the community praising their charitable efforts. It will probably be quite sobering for them to read things from the perspective of this thread.

I do hope reading all of this will have sparked a new way of thinking for some people though. There is an episode of the tv programme Adam Ruins Everything, about misguided charitable donation, that I would highly recommend. Here is a segment about Toms shoes, that is very interesting - and echoes the sentiment about some charity inadvertently taking away from the local economy

Totally agree - esp teenagers teaching/building schools often hurts the local economy and the "teaching" that happens by untrained teachers teaching them the same songs all over again giving some sweets and taking selfies then leaving and it starting all over again is awful for the education sector in those countries, I think voluntourism is awful tbh, very little benefit for the host nation often and the money that is raised very often doesn't trickle down to the actual people in need, just the companies offering these type of trips

Let's hope it does enlighten.

Plenty of useful work to be done in the UK, although suntan won't be as good.

For the rest of the world, send money not teenagers.

Totally agree, OP. I knew someone who did a huge, highly publicised event for charity. What no-one knew was that no money ever got actually given to charity because the trip ended up being incredibly expensive - all the donations basically funded an amazing holiday and world record attempt for this individual.

I'm a trustee of a small national charity and every year we get people asking if we have London marathon places. They get my usual slightly stroppy email back that we can't afford them. Gold bonded places are around £500 each and you sign up for something like four places every year. That's why the charities that have them ask for a minimum of £1500 sponsorship, as a third of that goes to cover the cost of the place.

Try asking the big charities how many bonded places they have, they just won't answer. It took me two years of asking to get one to finally answer, and that was only because I complained to the CEO on Twitter.

For the rest of the world, send money not teenagers.

Great slogan

In the poor regions of the world there are families struggling for shelter, for light, for heat, for clean water and for food. What can you do to help? Send a monetary donation that funds this work, that pays for wages, that boosts the local economy or send a child with no previous building experience to build a house?

Please... Send money, not a teenager

London marathon is very hard to get into; I've applied for a ballot place for the last eight years and have never got in. Every year I get spammed by charities offering me a place but I don't have anything like a big enough network to raise the £2000 plus required.

You can get good for age places if you are a reasonably fast regular runner and clubs get places too but they are in high demand.

There are a lot of other marathons and the two I'm entered into this year were £100 and £45. I do dream of running London but I know I can't raise that amount of money. Annoyingly a friend did it last year, for a charity they didn't really care about just to get a cheap place. They spammed everyone on Facebook, by email and text everyday for a few months begging for a tenner. I just st couldn't do that!

averythinline - re the CV and applying for university - we saw a pretty worrying trend of people applying for midwifery places in the U.K., who had been taking up voluntary placements in developing countries where they acted as a 'volunteer midwife' (bear in mind most who were doing this were in their late teens with no previous health care experience). It was sold to them as something that looked great on their CV when they were applying but that was absolutely not the case. If I saw someone at interview who was gushing about how they had delivered babies, and had no appreciation about how completely inappropriate and disrespectful that was, then that would absolutely count against them. The thing is that these companies are manipulating the person taking up the placement (who genuinely believes that they are 'doing' midwifery and putting themselves in a better position when they apply) and the locality (who gets young women with no skills bumbling into someone's labour and delivery, unbelievable).

Alyosha children's homes are not rare in the UK. As someone who suffered from child abuse myself I can tell you that you are wrong, often family environments far more damaging than being in care. There is a huge shortage of fostering and adoption places even in the UK and abused children still need refuge. To claim that children in countries where there is no state system of support for children at all would be better off if homes run by volunteers were shut down is utterly irresponsible. The children I was looking after would have been street children without the NGO's help, not receiving medical attention, education and somewhere safe to sleep.

I've done some charity walks and bungee jumps, but the walks were local and I cover all costs myself.
I always make sure to write that all money raised goes to the charity.
I'm thinking of getting in to shape and doing the 3 peak challenge this year with a couple of friends. So since I'm doing it anyway and already covering costs, why not add a fundraiser for a charity?

Isn't there also a question of terminology here? When folk are told that "all the money we make goes to charity", that can mean different things to different people

Some might take it to mean that all the money goes directly to the good cause, and others - perhaps more accurately - realize that "all that we make" means what's left after "expenses", a term which isn't always clear and can often involve huge sums

Maybe it doesn't matter when just chucking change in a tin, but for larger sums it's worth bearing in mind