Haiti Donations

As with everything else on this blog, this is about my beef, in this case, with Haiti donations. Thing is, I have no beef with people opening their hearts and wallets to people who have been made destitute by a terrible natural disaster, and certainly the people of Haiti appreciate the love coming in from all directions. That said however, money, from all the reports coming in from Haiti, is not an issue. The issue is that people are making roadblocks out of dead bodies, and people otherwise accidentally or on purpose blocking the roads and are keeping the tons of help from reaching those who need it. Not a lack of resources, an inability to effectively deploy them. That's where the help is needed. So overloading the Red Cross' servers with donations will not help the Haitians, not now. They need to use those resources before more resources would be of any use.

I really hate it when people think they see something atrocious in the world, and all they need to make themselves sleep well at night is to donate a couple bucks in their direction. As someone who's worked in the charity fundraising industry, I know that charities essentially don't care why people are giving so long as they are, but I don't think that's a good long term approach. Guilt will only take people so far. I doubt there will be an increase in long term donors to programs such as child sponsorships for children in Haiti. These are all short term, while they're thinking about it donations. Until charities make people care about these people's lives (through more than just guilt) and prove to their donors all donations are stretched to the nth degree, they will never have enough, and continue to having to rely on these tragic events to generate the bulk of their funds. That said, scientists say the severity and frequency of these will increase, so maybe they're just counting on that.

Well, that rant went in a wholly different direction, but yeah, it's not really Haiti specific. I mean, where did all those donations go a year after Katrina? New Orleans is still in many ways in the same place we left it for the next donation fad.