Cynical Philanthropy: Overcoming Giving with Guilt

    Most people have never experienced the saddening visual of looking in to the desperate eyes of a starving child that is living in extreme poverty on a personal level. There is not any amount of research or story telling that could help anyone understand the pain or feel the agony of what that child is going through. When a late-night infomercial confronts us with the very real idea of starvation we find ourselves blindly turning the channel on our television sets because the heart wrenching images are just too disturbing to view. They leave us feeling overwhelmed, helpless, guilty, and unable to finish whatever indulgent snack we are eating at the time.  Yes, these infomercials are excellent tools that educate people. They reinforce our voice when we tell our children to finish their dinner because there are people starving in this world, but we really have no idea what it is like to starve to death. I am not even sure if we even know what it is like to be hungry. We live in blissful suburbia behind empathetic walled environments and the most we think we can do is to send money to some charity in hopes that it reaches it’s intended designation. We just do not worry about food the way the impoverished do.  We want to send contributions to charities that battle starvation, or any other worthwhile cause, but we refrain because we need educated answers, real solutions and results, and quite frankly we need something tangible in return. We need more than just a smiling TV host holding a confused child’s hand. We need something or someone credible in exchange for our trust. We need to know what we are doing, what our dollar is doing, and who informs us of this is just as important to us as the end results of our donations. We want smart charities that are cost efficient, well organized, and one’s that don’t use guilt as part of the process of collecting sponsorship dollars. Yes, we all know there are people suffering, but what are the charities doing to resolve the issues? 
I am happy to tell you that there are charities that you can trust with your dollar. The award winning organization, Heifer International, helps out by providing livestock and seed grain, along with the proper education of its use, to poverty stricken families and communities around the world. These smart contributions help over (number of people per year) by providing and promoting renewable healthy eating habits that are used week after week and month after month. Charities like Heifer International provide the types of gifts that keep giving long after a spokesperson and his film crew have left the area. Their giving has more impact on the community they are trying to help. Even their advertising uses a smarter approach. The sad eyes of a desperate community are now being replaced with the newly educated farmer of a happy impoverished free future.    Former President Bill Clinton spoke at the dedication of the Heifer International headquarters and he had this to say: “You have to have a world with more partners and fewer enemies—and one by one that’s what Heifer does.”
He  also praised how Heifer offers the education to back up their contributions 
“This great enterprise that we honor today started with an adage that we all learned in childhood, that it’s better to teach a person to fish than it is to give them a fish, but that it’s then their obligation to pass it on.” 
And an ‘obligation to pass it on’ is exactly what Heifer teaches. They use gifts of livestock and require the recipient to pass along the gift of their offspring to others.Now that’s a smart charity, one that understands the true meaning of re-gifting.