Charities

So what is the deal with charities?
At the moment there is a famine going on in Africa. Potentially hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, with a huge chunk of these being children.
If you have read any newspaper or watched the TV recently then this will be pretty obvious.
I will hold my hand up, I give nowhere near as much money to charity as I should. For this current famine, I think I texted £3 and convinced myself that was great. I do give some more on a monthly basis to other charities but when I think about it, it really is nothing. I do go through the usual ways to make myself justify not giving more, for example every outgoing matters, or that I do enough anyway, but really they are just stupid excuses.
Now please, this is not some way of me subtly trying to show of that I give something at all, because trust me I am not proud of it. But the point I do want to raise is actually there is another reason, which isn’t entirely selfish, as to why I don’t donate to every cause I believe in.
Very simply I don’t trust charities.
Now whether this is right or wrong I have no idea. This argument is absolutely not based on any fact or statistics but it is based on what seems to me like a pretty widely held view.
I was walking down Carnaby street like I do most days and for once spotted a t-shirt of one of the charity workers I do believe in. I must say some of the charities, whilst I am sure are important to many people, are quite far down in my pecking order. It was for the RSPCC and their full stop campaign, which I wholeheartedly believe in. I have been meaning to donate to them for ages, and whether I was in a good mood or something I don’t know, but I stopped and pledged £10 a month. When I went back to the office, a really nice guy I work with asked me what I had in my hands, and I told him it was a pack from the RSPCC because I just donated to them.
He looked shocked and gazed at me like I was an idiot and there was something he knew that I didn’t. So I asked him what was on his mind.
He then went in to one about the corruption of charities, how do we know where our money is going etc etc. It seems the more people I talk to, they also share this view.
It does seem that people generally don’t trust charities, and to be honest I can kind of see why.
If we take comic relief for example, the kind of money generated, its amazing. But it does seem year in year out that the steps to making any change are quite small, and that even £70 million doesn’t really do that much. Again, rightly or wrongly, sometimes I do sit there and think where the fuck is all the money going? Why are we back in this situation again?
Whether its charities, or the actual people on the ground who are the problem I am not really sure, but whatever the case, it seems to me that aid does not get where it needs to. Particularly in Africa’s case you hear so much about corruption, that my conclusion now is that if I do donate, the aid is just going to be sold for profit, and the people who need it the most are going to suffer.
This perception has to change. The public need to understand where every penny they are donating goes to, particularly overseas. There needs to be watchdogs in place that tracks aid the whole way and there needs to be 100% reassurance that every single penny is going in to the correct place.
I want to know that if I give £20 quid a month, its going somewhere, because then I will be tempted to give more, and I would think a much larger % of the population would also give more.
There is also another thing I would like to add, asides from donating, what else can we do. To me people who cannot even drink water whilst I swan about trying to figure out whether or not I drink the Malbec or the Montrachet is unacceptable and unfair. Shit like this should not be happening in the world we live in.