to think that if you donate money to stop people drowning, you shouldn't have an issue if aome of that money is used to stop people drowning in poorer countries

[chomalungma]

Yes - the RNLI

They have been spending 3% of their income on supporting projects in poor countries to help prevent people drowning - even though it has had to lay some staff off.

They give a project to buy burkinis so women in Zanzibar can learn water safety skils.

They help support a creche because children are often left unsupervised as their parents have to work and many children drown each day. The creche project has helped reduce drowning deaths by 82%.

I can see that some people would be annoyed that a tiny percentage of their donations is going towards supporting poorer people in foreign countries and reducing their chances of drowning at a time when the RNLI lay off staff.

But it's a good thing to teach people water safety even if they are not in this country, isn't it?

I work for a charity. One of life's typical white middle class do gooders.

I've had a bad day and this thread has exasperated me.

Charities exist for the good of others. People who work or volunteer do so for the good of others.

Yet it has become quite a popular and easy pastime to knock charities and the sentiment behind them. Workers are often thought of as 'in it for themselves' or for their own ego.

It's a thankless task. It can heartbreaking work. It's depressing feeling the need to defend the sector.
Yet we know that we are thought of by some as towards the lower end of respected professions.

I had no idea about the international work that the RNLI does before the hooha on twitter. Gads, there are some deeply deeply 'anti furrin' comments. Goaded by the press articles over the weekend. It's excellent what they are doing and it it very clear on their website that the majority of their international work is supported from a specific funding source.

Why are the RNLI funding burkinis?

The Panje Project teaches women swim survival skills in Zanzibar. The burkini, which is a full length swim suit is an innovative (and cheap) way of enabling girls in strict Muslim countries, to get into the water without compromising their cultural and religious beliefs. The RNLI have been involved in the Panje Project with the majority of the RNLI’s involvement funded by a donor who specifically wanted the money to go towards this project

rnli.org/news-and-media/2019/september/15/information-about-the-rnlis-international-work

Call lack of time a cop-out if you like, but I have a job and DC 🙄. You seem to be a little hard of thinking, so I will rephrase using little words for you

Unnecessarily rude comment.

I live on the coast next door to a lifeboat station.

I give money to the RNLI both by DD and bucket during fundraising events at my local lifeboat station.

I had no idea there was an international aspect to RNLI’s work, because I assumed (based on what I learned/was told about the RNLI at its fundraising events) that every penny was needed to maintain even a basic U.K. lifeboat service. I also inferred from the charity’s name that it was solely a national effort.

I was wrong on both counts.

I could have educated myself via Google but I didn’t.

This is all very apparent from your posts. What I consider ridiculous is the fact that you are holding a charity responsible for your incorrect assumptions about that charity, despite you admitting that your incorrect assumptions are the result of you not educating yourself. You aren't forced to donate. It's a choice you make of your own free will. It's your responsibility to educate yourself about that choice, or to accept the consequences if you don't.

I don’t consider that the RNLI’s efforts outside the U.K. have been made clear (and this is pretty self-evident from the public reaction

A large part of the 'public reaction' is dog-whistle racism based on a fundamental opposition to any form of foreign aid, so I don't think too much weight should be placed on it as a means of illustrating apparent failures on the charity's part.

I don't know how much clearer a charity needs to be than to share information about all of their projects on a publicly accessible website.

I don’t care and will continue to give them money as before.

Good 👍🏻

I would be interested to know how much you give to charity - I give 10% of net income and have done for 2 decades.

No problem. Here's a list:

• 8% of salary per month via salary sacrifice scheme to the charity I used to work for
• standing order of £10 per month to the RNLI, every month since my gran died 10 years ago, because she was a historian with a special interest in the RNLI and volunteered with them for many years in her lifetime
• sponsor a guide dog puppy, can't remember how much it is per month - maybe £5?
• £3 per month to cats protection league
• £10 per month to my former university's charitable trust

I also volunteer, by:

-sitting on the board of trustees of a rape crisis centre

• befriending service for the elderly
• regular bucket shaking at events for the charity I used to work for
• head of work CSR committee
• help at events run by charity I used to work for.

And for the record, I am comfortable with where my time and money goes for all of these various organisations, because I've taken responsibility for myself and done my research into what they do.

It is all very well people trying to defend the racist targeting of the times and daily mail by claiming that they thought the RNLI was only doing UK work.

I call bullshit because people have made this a story simply because the charity is doing something, well within its charitable aims, that they don’t the sound of. And why not? Because brown people are benefitting and they don’t like it.

It’s not at the expense of UK (white) people. It’s in addition to.

So stop with the defence of the ultimately racist arguments being used to bash RNLI.

Yet it has become quite a popular and easy pastime to knock charities and the sentiment behind them. Workers are often thought of as 'in it for themselves' or for their own ego.It's a thankless task. It can heartbreaking work. It's depressing feeling the need to defend the sector

This. I also work for a charity. I don't get paid as much as I could elsewhere - even everyone thinks we get paid too much.

I am one of the 'admin' people - and some people think admin people aren't essential and don't donate to charities with high admin costs. Yet service delivery would be very difficult without people like me in the organisation.

We provide a service that many people on here need and don't even realise it yet. Yet many of you will eventually end up contacting us. We fight to get money, we always worry about funding and we are doing things that the statuatory organisations aren't doing because of 'the big society' and a lack of Government funding. Austerity is still real and we work at the coal face.

I am glad to work for a charity and I get really pissed off with all the anti-charity comments on here.

People who work and volunteer for the RNLI are 'do gooders' - and I wish there were more of us around. Helping to make the world a better place.

I am glad to work for a charity and I get really pissed off with all the anti-charity comments on here

I’m not surprised.

People are ultimately angry because they feel like someone (they) are missing out because others (immigrants/feckless poor) are getting something at the expense of them.

I understand the fear. However the anger arising from that fear is misdirected. We have less because the greedy rich have taken way more than their fair share. If they stopped hoarding all the wealth, there would be more for the rest of us and we wouldn’t have to fight each other for scraps.

People who think it is a UK only charity may also be dumb enough to think Ireland is part of the UK. Or some sort of mini me subordinate in some kind of undefined way. Idiots.

I appreciate this post, and the charity workers. Definitely more likely to support RNLI now that I know this.

I am a bit confused by the PP who says she lives by the sea and donates monthly. If that is the case, do you not get the magazine? I think it's quarterly. In which case, in the last year there have been articles about some of the projects overseas. So they are very clear to people who do donate regularly about the overseas work.
Until I started the direct debits and got the magazine, and opened it and read it of course, I had no idea that a portion went overseas. But a) it doesn't bother me and b) it is such a tiny amount that it doesn't stop them funding the UK work.
They really aren't hiding it. If it is so important to you to know where every penny in your money goes, you need to do a bit of research before you donate. Not hours and hours but a minute or two - it doesn't take longer than that because they are upfront about it.

If 98% of their money is spent in the UK, then 98p in your pound is still helping people around the UK.
It''s the thing about rights and responsibilities - you have the right to know but the info is right there - the RNLI don't hide it. So you also have a bit of a responsibility to find out more about what you are donating to, if it is that important to you that you understand exactly where every single penny in every donation might go.

*The arguments presented here are ridiculous.

No charity is actually entitled to people's money. People can withdraw their voluntary contributions anytime they like for whatever reason they like, whether those reasons are perceived as petty or not. And they do not have to justify their decision to anyone else, or be vilified for doing so. The fact they give at all is a privilege.

Do those going on about how racist it is think charities that only concentrate on funding for a specific culture or sub-community in the UK are racist too?

There is actually nothing morally wrong for wanting to support a charity with a strictly local focus where the entirety of funding will be distributed locally (in this case nationally). Or even dare I say it, being against foreign aid. It's not my view, but there are arguments for the idea that overseas charity is back door colonialism, whitewashing, white saviourism (again not my view) a form of non-christian ministry or humanistic evangelism, western conscience cleansing, voluntourism, cynical career boosting, is subject to being wasted by corruption, helps regimes stay in place, backdoor bribery, a tool to accommodate political ambitions, etc etc etc. See for e.g. the discussions around China's foreign aid in Africa and how it has secured votes in the UN.

Certainly one could argue that there are plenty of children in the UK whose parents cannot afford swimming lessons and 3 miliion could certainly help them. There's an argument that some poor people in the UK due to poverty cannot even afford the clothing in shops like Oxfam who concentrate on helping others abroad. It's a nuanced subject.

But I appreciate simply calling everyone racist doesn't require as much thinking and is a far easier path to feeling morally superior.

And saying go to the website is a total cop out. It's called the Royal NATIONAL Lifeboat Institution so to imply one is supposed to hear it but then question if national really means national in the absence of any representatives telling you otherwise is nonsense. People make assumptions and the charity clearly hope for exactly that.*

All of this.

National? But it's international because it works in Ireland.

It was set up when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom or Great Britain. When Ireland got independence they could have set up an Irish Lifeboat Service, but did not.

The circumstances of irish independence and they way Ireland was treated is for another thread/tome.

It is to everyone favour that the Irish government and RNLI continued as they had been.

I wonder if anyone in UK/ England got their panties in a bunch when they found out they were funding Irish rescue services/ help for Irish sailors in distress, and if they did if they were called "racist?"

( I'm aware Irish and British are not races but for the purposes of the Equality Act which covers Enthicity so still a Thing.)

Obviously. If a scottish society uses its money to help people in Scotland then it is reasonable to assume they are helping white people, black people, brown people and blue people WHO ARE IN SCOTLAND. That's not racist.

I think it’s very clear- if you stopped and thought about it for even a second- that the RnLI have been rescuing non British people in British and Irish waters. French sailors is the obvious, with there being a very small mileage between us (I once watched a nail biting real rescue thing where they winched down to rescue a French man whose pacemaker was malfunctioning on his yacht near Southampton- made slightly worse because when he arrived at hospital in Southampton they didn’t understand how to use the French pacemaker. That and it was giving both the man and the winchman electric shocks as they came up the winch 😭)

However, I think anyone with half a brain knows rescuing a brown person off the coast of Norfolk and sending employees to Bangladesh To do so are very, very different operations. I don’t know why posters think they’re smart pretending to confuse them.

However, I think anyone with half a brain knows rescuing a brown person off the coast of Norfolk and sending employees to Bangladesh To do so are very, very different operations. I don’t know why posters think they’re smart pretending to confuse them.

I don't think people are confusing them. I think people defending the RNLI have a much better idea of what it's doing then those criticising it. Most people are simply pointing out that if you genuinely have a problem with the RNLI spending a tiny proportion of their budget on projects in other counties, it's hard to think of a non-racist reason for that. I don't know how much you have seen of the response to this 'news', but a lot of it has evidenced very obvious dog-whistle racism.

And as has been made clear several times already, the RNLI are funding existing projects in other countries, not simply parachuting people in from the UK.

I wonder how many charities out there have names that don't fully reflect their current work?

OX(ford) FAM(ine relief committee) no longer operate solely from Oxford, no longer just deal with famine, and no longer just help occupied Greece (the original purpose of the charity). Arguably they did alter their name more recently than the RNLI last changed theirs but it is still obviously linked to the old name, and there must be other charities out there that haven't updated their name.

Being completely facetious, the RNLI was founded specifically to save lives from shipwreck so why are they now saving dogs that fall down cliffs or drunk people who fall into the Thames in London? Patently ridiculous obviously but the point is that the purpose of charities change and their name can't necessarily reflect everything they do.

And in the case of the RNLI, their current name dates to the 1840s - that is a lot of brand recognition (which a pp mentioned earlier) to forgo over a relatively small amount of international work (some of which is funded by specific donors and DfID so can't be used in the UK) and collaboration.

Well I guess you’ve answered your own question- that is presumably why oxfam is no longer called oxford famine relief

No charity is actually entitled to people's money. People can withdraw their voluntary contributions anytime they like for whatever reason they like, whether those reasons are perceived as petty or not. And they do not have to justify their decision to anyone else, or be vilified for doing so.

All of that is true. However, if someone regularly gives to a charity and stops doing so only because they discover that that charity is using a small proportion of its funds to help people of other races, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that their motivation is racist in the absence of any other explanation.

if someone regularly gives to a charity and stops doing so only because they discover that that charity is using a small proportion of its funds to help people of other races, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that their motivation is racist in the absence of any other explanation.

I couldn't agree more.

It's not about other races

It's promoted as a Royal National - not international charity

My dear @HadT0CancelAga1n , it operates in the Republic of Ireland. That is international.