How to refuse without causing upset

[meddie]

I have a young relative who is always doing fun runs etc and each time asks for charity donations. on the whole I don't mind donating to these as they are for a well known charity I would support anyway.
Yesterday she announced she is raising funds to go to India to help build schools with an international charity. The total cost is 2500 pounds. I am close to her mum, she is a wonderful person though somewhat over indulgent towards her daughter. This is the second time this young woman has signed up for this type of trip. The first time she 'got bored' of fund raising and approx 1k of money was lost (similar set up to camp international). Most of the money came as a direct donation from family and friends and apart from one car boot which she did, she didn't actually do much fundraising.
She has a habit of bailing out if stuff gets too inconvenient and usually her mum picks up the slack, which will be difficult this time as she has recently lost her job.

I don't want to donate again this time, Any donation would have to be a reasonable amount and to be honest I don't think this young woman will get the total she will need and once again money will be swallowed up towards admin costs and the trip wont happen
(She has form for jumping from one 'exciting idea' to another and mostly fails to follow through.)

I can't plead poverty as she would know I was lying, I just dont want to contribute to another of her pie in the sky projects, but I obviously cant say I have no faith in her without upsetting her mum who I love to bits

[WhoaCadburys]

Great idea tooold and huge envy at your name!

[OurBlanche]

Many of the projects do use locals. Either as the expert passing on skills or being taught skills by other volunteers - or paid local tradesmen who have already been trained through the project.

Odd as it might sound, some of the charities who run such projects actually know what they are doing!

[PanGalaticGargleBlaster]

Personally I feel very uneasy about any of the sponsor me to climb Kilimanjaro/Sky Dive/Walk the Inca trail/pay for me to have a trip of a lifetime type of schemes. You need to look at two things, how much of the raised sum actually goes to the charity (after flights/local tour operators/accommodation etc), and second, how much of the money that the charity receives actually goes to front line aid, chances are that it is not a lot. £2500 donated to the local homeless hospice will go a hell of a lot further then putting it towards the building of wells and schools in Africa or India, one thing these places is not short of is unskilled labour and I really struggle to see what benefit a bunch of unskilled middle class kids can bring to the table when they descend on some village. Of course the elephant in the room for all these foreign aid charity jaunts is the ‘look at me’ factor. Volunteering to serve soup and bread at the homeless shelter or spending time keeping a lonely OAP company is just not sexy enough to compared to jetting around the world to ‘work’ in a chimpanzee sanctuary or teaching orphans how to play football.

There are hundreds of reports online that detail what impact these charities have on their supposed target recipients……it is not pretty reading. Maybe present some of these reports to your young relative to help strengthen your position.

Yes I am being cynical, but I have travelled around most of Africa and seen how these things operate on the ground and it is not encouraging. There are some very good charities out there doing some amazing work in developing countries, most of them don’t involve shipping in unskilled western kids in who are more interested in virtue signalling on facebook than actually ‘making a difference’