Charities.
Most mean well. All donors mean well. It’s unfortunate that like retail stores eager for “Black Friday” – when their operations move from loss to profit in the year – charities are also dependent on the holiday season to boost their collections. Also more than enough people offer to volunteer to serve a Thanksgiving meal to the hungry. As if they aren’t hungry the other 364 days in a year. Consider year round giving to whatever charities you support.
My focus here is on those Christmas centered charitable programs.
One with the very best intentions that gets it wrong is Toys for Tots. Not wrong in the collection of massive amounts of toys but in delivering those toys. The children show up before Christmas and are handed a gift that they unwrap on the spot. For the poorest of children, that leaves them with nothing to open on Christmas. For the not quite as poor, it’s just an additional toy.
Ethically, also find it problematical that Toys for Tots is a United States Marine Corps Reserve program. Is it such a good idea to have the poor children at a young age associate getting a toy with the military? However, the major alternatives aren’t unproblematic – there’s the Jaycees and there’s The Salvation Army. Capitalism or Christianity. Oh well, it is Christmas after all.
Whatever the Jaycees do, it appears to be extremely localized. Some limited to accepting “letters to Santa” and writing a response. Some go a step further and collect and delivers toys.
For well-branded and organized Christmas giving that is also localized, the Salvation Army does an excellent job. (It’s Back To School Assistance programs are also excellent. If you want to see happy children, be a “Shopping Buddy.”) If you have some spare cash and can’t be bothered with much of the Christmas frenzy, nothing too much wrong with dropping some cash in one of those red buckets if one can consider good deeds as on a higher plane than very bad words.
A program that does toys for children better than Toys for Tots is the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree.. The toy selected is, or close to, what the child has asked for, and it’s delivered to be opened on Christmas morning. The child doesn’t have to publicly appear and be identified as poor. The Army works with other social service agencies to identify those in real need.
For the more ambitious, there’s the Adopt a Family program.
There’s one slight deficit in these programs – not for the beneficiary but some donors. Before getting to that allow me to describe an adopt-a-family for Christmas effort with the very best intentions that got it wrong.
A women living in an upscale retirement community (what I half-jokingly refer to the more bucks than brains geezers) spearheaded this a few years ago. She solicited one gift for each member of the destitute family from her neighbors. That’s not one gift for each of those in the sponsored family, but one gift for each from each donor. She also let it be known that she was donating two gifts for each family member, not so subtly raising the ante for her neighbors. The neighbors didn’t balk. They ended up with half a truckload of gifts for one family.
The donor neighbors were never entirely clear how this family came to the attention of the organizer. (It wasn’t through the Salvation Army.) Nor exactly how destitute they were. They were living in temporary housing at the time. It was an overwhelming amount of stuff for one family. Stuff that would have to be carted to their next house. One woman that participated in the gift delivery wasn’t convinced that the family was even poor. The donors each probably spent between $75 and $300 and was easily affordable for all of them. But the whole effort left a sour taste for most of the dozen or so donors.
What the donors got that the Salvation Army doesn’t offer is the opportunity to meet the family. (That’s also what many of the Toys for Tots volunteers get.) What they lost was the goodwill that could have turned a modest collective effort into an annual neighborhood tradition.
One formal adopt-a-family story.
When I floated the idea in the office I was working in, all but one of my co-workers walked (ran?) away from me. One of the “Ts” was eager to help and welcomed the opportunity to buy a toy for a poor child. She contacted the Salvation Army that supplied a list of families remaining in need for “adoption.” As most of the cost would fall on me, “T” agreed that we would only consider the small families. We eliminated from our consideration those requesting expensive gifts. (Today’s version of i-pads and i-phones.) The most modest of all families had our hearts. The little girl wanted a doll and the boy a truck. The mother some perfume and the father a shirt. I could do that with or without “T’s” help.
“T” did the shopping. I only added some some nice soaps to the list of what the mother had asked for, a package of Christmas cookies, and a small grocery store gift card. “T” stretched our dollars to get just a bit more for the children. We would wrap the gifts later in the office conference room. One by one our co-workers checked out what we were doing. A couple of the guys said, “Here’s ten bucks to make that gift card larger.” One woman said, “I was thinking that a new wallet would be nice for the mother.” Encouraged by “T” and my positive response, she went and bought one. (Please understand that this was the first time this mid-fifty year old woman had ever donated to anything.)
The next day, the office tightwad, showed up with a ceramic angel she’d made that she wanted to give the little girl. Then added, “I was thinking that the father could use a new belt.” That bowled me over. Another guy handed us some money saying, “Get the kids a bit more.” The other “T” helped wrap. One of the other guys offered to deliver the “pack” to the Salvation Army. Everybody in the office ended up contributing in some way and only in a way that they were comfortable doing. Collectivism has a way of making we mortals just a bit better for a moment.
Still, we would have liked to have met the family. Not for any thank yous from them. Not to be present when they opened the gifts. Nor even to be identified to them as the donors. Just something more than our own imagination of “our family” that also preserved the dignity of the family.
Something more like what may be but a once in a lifetime experience: A Magical Christmas
I don’t mean to continue name “stories of seabe’s Christmases that look like boasting,” but this also fits in with another Christmas I did.
So I am an Eagle Scout. Despite the scouts’ bullshit, I still broadly like the organization and would like to get involved now as an adult. It instilled in me a commitment to community and service that I might not have gotten elsewhere. I also recently met with my old scout master at a wedding. I asked how the troop is doing and he said we lost a lot of kids. I asked why, if they all aged out or got eagle. He said, “no, they left because I refused to turn away gay scouts, and the parents who invested years in my troop saw things differently.” I’ve always respected him as a man — I think he currently writes briefings for the Secretary of State, and occasionally for the president — but that was just so awesome to hear that he stood stron in the face of losing half of his troop. Wow. Anyway, back to the story.
For those who don’t know, prospective Eagle Scouts need to plan and lead a service project that is preapproved by a higher up on the organization. You can do it without approval, but later in front of an Eagle Scout board you better be damn sure they’ll approve it lol.
Initially I planned doing a toy collection thing with a “Christmas in Summer” motif. Well, toy collection was slow, and I barely had any. I moved it to Christmas Eve instead, and focused specifically on homeless children. I went to the local shelters to find where the kids were, got their ages and gender. I listed about 40 kids from 25 families. After summer collection went down, I pulled all the stops: have speeches in front of classrooms at school, put fliers in teachers’ mailboxes, libraries, churches, etc. this was far more successful. I had over 150 toys now. This was also after Katrina, so I shipped the remainder down to New Orleans. Anyway, it was definitely a lot more successful than I planned. And IMO more meaningful than many other eagle projects I saw.
I’m in the gray sweatshirt with the clipboard. We’re in a motel parking lot, where a lot of the homeless in that area reside.
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/magekillr/Scouts/DSC02229.jpg
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/magekillr/Scouts/DSC02219.jpg
You and I are lucky to have had opportunities to let a few children know that the world sometimes cares.
And even though you said not to be there when they opened gifts…it was still the best part. Who knows the last time they even got a gift? Their faces said it all.
They weren’t the greatest gifts in the world; the average present was an action figure, doll, or toy truck thing. Still, it didn’t matter to them…they loved it anyway.
The best part for me — if you read through the linked “A Magical Christmas” — was meeting the children. They were happy just to have wrapped packages under their trees for Christmas morning. Didn’t doubt that they would be thrilled and that was confirmed by the letters we received after Christmas from a couple of the mothers.
Still felt that our effort fell a bit short. What I like about the Salvation Army program is that it allows the children to think the presents are from their parents. That somehow even though they are poor, their parents managed to provide a Christmas for them. That’s also why it’s important for donors not to go overboard for a family. Keep it within the range of possible for the parents to provide. Perfect would be some sort of open house for the donors and the families. Meet and greet. Then get the pack of gifts to the parent(s) without the children seeing it.
A postscript to “A Magical Christmas.” I returned to two of the families that Easter. Easter baskets for all six of the children and dresses and hats for the three girls.
Not a charity and wouldn’t even have factored into this diary, if not for its attempt to hijack a bit of Holiday good cheer and moola.
So are so good. Then a nice hook:
Oh, goodie. We love deals. What could it be? A $99.99 i-pad? Uh, not exactly:
wtf?
Because everybody knows that what kids are thinking of this time of year aren’t cool new toys but taxes on income and property that they may have a couple of decades from now.
Then for the wafflers that might be listening to their kids:
Gee, and parents don’t already know that bit of useless information?
Given a choice between buying toys made in Asian sweatshops or donating to Scott Walker, ask a kid to get the better answer.
Oh Jesus he did not really do that. Oh my god he did.
jaycees do various things…I got roped into something years ago in which I went shopping with a little boy and helped him pick out items from a list provided by his mother. I never understood why his mother couldn’t do that with him. Was a little weird. But it did give the boy a sense of being in charge of the list, which he seemed to enjoy. That’s the only encounter I’ve had with the jaycees, but I sensed they do a variety of stuff like that.
Adopt a foster chile trees are fun, but it is very important not to go overboard like the example in the diary. I’m generally careful not to give them more than they’ve asked for, because I figure they know what they can handle (and usually these requests are vetted by someone who knows the child). Teenagers are the most in need. It’s a bit heartbreaking how many of them just ask for basic items like clothes. I will often slip a book in for younger kids but it’s harder to do that for the older ones, not knowing their taste.
As I noted, Jaycee programs are local. It was letters to Santa collected by the Jaycees that led co-workers and me to adopt several families as I wrote about in “A Magical Christmas.”
If being a Jaycee Christmas shopping buddy is anything like the Salvation Army back-to-school shopping buddy, the purchases are funded through the charity. Although they do appreciate it when a “buddy” donates money in addition to time.
Yes, teenagers are more difficult. In part because stuff for teens costs a lot more than toys for the little ones. And they are more conscious of wanting what their friends have. Maybe it’s best for charities to go the gift card route for teens. (My parents were mostly hopeless at selecting gifts for me; so, I finally asked for cold hard cash. It was cool to get a box of frozen silver dollars.)