Also keeping the donations as food ensures the donations go directly to helping your community. Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor.
Most of the foodbanks we went to were churches and local groups. They weren't interested in managing accounts for foodbank replenishment they just did drives when the needed more. It's immediately easier.
When you give a physical thing it has purpose. It's not 5 dollars going who knows where. You know someone somewhere got a can of creamed corn. Most of these people donating I would say aren't going to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. But they will look in their pantry and see if there is anything they are not using.
Depending on the source they bought it from, that money also goes directly back to the community.
So there are a lot of benefits to donating food. If you want to donate money fine. But I'd wager if the only choice was donating money less people would donate.
2. Margins on food are VERY thin. The local supermarket makes a few percent in profits. Unless you're buying directly from the farmers (most arent), that money isnt staying in your community. It's going to go thousands of miles away where it's being grown.. and then the remainder is going to go to Kroger/Walmart/etc corporate bank account so that they can pay their managers that 100k+/year that you so oppose charity workers making.
Ok, but what if they spend $4 on food, and $21 on "costs"? You can't just make up numbers.
[1] https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios...
I believe canned good margins vary around 50 to 100% markup.
Do you think this factor outweighs the efficiency factor from the article?
Worst of all, the average consumer is buying their canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself.
That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible. The savvy buyers at the Calgary Food Bank, for instance, promise that they can stretch $1 into $5.
For their annual events they would go around trying to get local businesses to donate goods or at least sell us supplies at wholesale prices. In some cases they could write it off. And we'd do the same thing every year, starting with places we had previous success with, but often with different people on both ends of the transaction. It was a crap shoot, and every year the game plan was a little different depending on what we got and how much.
Now if I were much bigger, and I needed 100,000 cans of something, and I wanted that to be reliable so people don't starve, I skip the locals and I go to the manufacturer. Now my alternatives are 'free or 75% off' instead of 'free, 10% (employee discount) or 50% off'.
I could end up saving $20,000 a year just on peas. You going to begrudge someone drawing a salary looking for deals and relationships like that? Logistics is hard. Everyone discounts just how hard, but Software Developers are exceptionally bad actors about this.
Reminds me of a story I read about Microsoft millionaires starting their own companies and totally screwing the pooch on logistics because the MS logistics machine worked so well that it was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Offices don't magically appear for new employees. Neither do desks or machines or ethernet jacks. All that shit is some support person dotting a lot of i's and crossing an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of t's.
I've volunteered at the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Do you want to know where your churches and local groups get their food? They come to a central food bank like the ACCFB, where they can load up. The ACCFB does not directly distribute food to people in need, instead trusting smaller groups to know their community's needs better, so they invite those groups to come get food. Staples, fresh produce, baby food and formula at exactly zero dollars all day long, more "premium" products at a heavily subsidized price.
Do you know what the ACCFB spent money on that wasn't food? A gi-fucking-gantic walk in fridge and freezer, so that they don't have to worry about bulk donations/purchases spoiling. And a large warehouse so that they can take in fresh produce from farmers (often stuff that cosmetically won't sell well) and re-sort it in a way that local organizations can use.
You can see what the executives of non-profits make. The Executive Director of the ACCFB was paid $256K in 2017, for overseeing an organization with $64M in revenue. The rest of the individuals on the Form 990 were in the $103K-$150K range. For full-time Chief/Director work IN THE BAY AREA. In case you've been living under a rock, that's not a good salary.
Every "benefit" to donating food is that you get to feel like stopped someone from tricking you and you're smarter than "all of those rubes" who gave cash. Turns out you're actually being the least helpful donor, and now write smug comments bragging about how you're the least helpful donor trying to reduce the helpfulness of other donors.
ACCFB's Form 990 for 2017: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/942...
My personal bias had previously been shaped by the example of the the Susan G Komen for the Cure scandal. In my recollection they were hardly donating any of the funds raised. Perhaps I am mis-remembering at this point.
Distributing food and clothes is much easier to do and measure than "cure cancer" so I'm not sure why I thought the outcomes would be similar.
This attitude frustrates me. Having the infrastructure in place to redistribute goods is work. It takes people's time and effort, and that does not come for free. The larger the scale at which a charity operates, the more true this becomes.
If you're concerned that a particular charity is abusing your goodwill and not using enough of its funds for its mission, research it on https://www.charitynavigator.org.
If you're not willing to pay for that ability, and you can't find someone with that ability who is already independently wealthy and willing to work their butt off for no compensation, then you're going to end up with someone who is absolutely not qualified, which in my opinion, amounts to saying that you don't believe charities should be large or efficient, which I suppose is a valid opinion, but doesn't seem like a better use of resources than paying a competent manager.
CEO's making market-wages (100k+) "working for charity" frustrates me. At that wage, they aren't charity workers at all. Every dollar they accept is someone remaining underfed, while the CEO gets resume-flair.
Protip: Charity's do not need a CEO in the sense that a company pushing a product to market needs a CEO to manage various business units. They need someone who cares about the net impact to the impoverished at reasonable expense to themselves.
Neither does the work of the people donating food and/or money.
"Nationwide, the mean salaries of chief executives at nonprofit hospitals rose 93% since 2005 to reach $3.1 million in 2015, according to an October 2018 study in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nonprofit-hospitals-criticized-...
But I personally don't have much money. I would rather give my local church food to be distributed than money to organizations. It's not that the CEO doesn't deserve to be paid, it's that I don't want my money to go to him.
This is addressed in the article. Charities specifically do not outright ban food donations because they don't want to dictate to people how to donate. But receiving a bunch of random food items is logistically harder to organize, store and transport. They prefer monetary donations because they hire logistical specialists who can buy bulk food items at far lower rates than what consumers pay at the grocery.
> Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor.
You should look into the annual reports of your local nonprofit; you may be conflating what CEOs of national/global orgs like Doctors without Borders or United Way get paid vs what a local charity head does. You'll probably also notice that a significant portion of NPF revenue comes from corporate donations. Guess what? They don't give out of the goodness of their hearts. They give because the suits have connections with people in those spheres, and convince them that giving is good for their brand.
Right and I addressed it at the end of that comment. Saying its fine to donate money if you want. But people shouldn't be ashamed of donating canned food.
>>You should look into the annual reports of your local nonprofit;
This whole article was about efficiency and how much further your money goes if you donate cash. Putting any middle man in there with any budget for operation cuts away from the gains. And if they are getting donations from corporations, then fine, use that money for operations. My money won't be going to them. I'll donate to a church or whoever who is actually doing it from the goodness of their heart. (Note I keep referencing churches, but there are other non religious groups that do it for free not under a non profit corporation, specifically I know for a fact in LA at venice beach there is a group that helps homeless youth by feeding them and offering them a place to sleep, they even hand out condoms.)
But the point was you don't know that. If they get deluged with creamed corn, it might just sit in a warehouse, get shipped to a different community, or even get trashed. Donate a can if you prefer, just don't fool yourself with false guarantees.
Now, you might not have heard of them until now, but read this description of how a lot of food bank systems work: https://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/food-bank-network That's Feeding America, a massive network of food banks as in #2 charity in the United States in 2018. What's bigger? United Way.
The churches and local groups? They're name in this model is a "food pantry". Somewhere, especially in metropolitan areas, is one or more organizations that are basically giant warehouses of food. They're the "food bank" of the model. They take in donated food and donated money, buy huge amounts of food in bulk, and distribute it to the "food pantry".
What happens is the food bank takes a $10 donation and buys 100+ cans at wholesale prices, then distributes them to the food pantries, sometimes for a tiny fee (think: pennies) to discourage waste.
Its one thing when you clean out your cupboard of cans and another when you willingly buy a few cans at the grocery store to donate. The latter is wasted a bit, because you didn't get a good deal compared to what the food bank could get in bulk. The entire article is on this.
A picture in the article is the perfect example of this. These people wanted to "feel good". Well, even with a few percent of overhead for the "CEO cost", that warehouse-level food bank could've probably bought double the food with $500.
I get it is feel good for sure and I get the anti-corruption angle. But an honest to goodness food bank known to service an area, one that is well audited(!!) should be on your cash donation list. They're the ones supplying the small local groups with the food you got.
If the figures in the article are correct, three out of four people would need to stop donating in order to make that a net loss.
(Three out of four people would not stop donating. Give them an easy way to pay and those contributing to a food drive appreciate not schlepping around food.)
I get that money's always bets, but also encouraging people to get rid of excess purchased food before it expires and goes to waste can't be a "bad thing" altogether.
So, like all charity interactions, know the folks you are actually dealing with and what their needs and abilities are.
A lot of people don't eat it, or really know what to do with it.
The other big failure was someone who donated 50 frozen turkeys. We had to give them away immediately, as we couldn't store them. Later on we had people tell us the turkeys didn't come out right, or they didn't have the right roasting pan or even oven to cook one in. You can't microwave a turkey or cook it on a hot plate.
http://www.econtalk.org/canice-prendergast-on-how-prices-can...
Here is the description: "If you have 250 million tons of food to give away every year to local food banks how should you do it? Canice Prendergast of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how he and a team of economists created an artificial currency and a daily auction for the national food bank Feeding America so that local food banks could bid on the types of food that were the most valuable to them. Prendergast explains the results of the new system and the cultural and practical challenges of bringing prices, even artificial ones, to a world accustomed to giving things away."
But yeah, I get your point! I do know someone whose charity gives away turkeys every year for thanksgiving dinner successfully (along with ingredients for the rest of a thanksgiving dinner) but it’s planned in advance and families come knowing what they are going to get.
Yes you can, you'd slice it up and cook it like bacon. Other parts you can use for stews etc. You can't cook the whole bird all at once, but if the alternative is no turkey at all I bet a lot of people were happier with it than without.
Plus, that's a really cynical way to look at people who want to help their fellows, and shows the difference between professional nonprofit workers and people who are just trying to help their fellows. At the point that advice is practical, you are in the NGO world.
* Cans have to be sorted and warehoused, which costs money.
* Can donations are effectively randomized, which makes it harder to fit them into a coherent meal plan.
It's really hard to see how cans could ever be better than cash.
Or Last-Mile delivery, getting the food to the people who actually need it. They're not always in shelters, and not always amenable to regular schedules or fixed feeding times.
Do you know this to be true? Time spent purchasing seems like it would be dwarfed by stocking shelves, dealing with the public, and administrative tasks.
The key is that someone is making a shopping list based on demand, rather than guessing.
[1]there's a lot of stuff actually going on behind charity, for example here clothes bank don't donate clothes around to the poor, clothes get sold in bulk by weight and the earning go toward sustaining the charity operations first and what's left is sent to the poor in various ways. which is fine, as long as 'operations' are kept lean, but nobody really looks so there's a bit of everything going on.
It isn't just cash vs goods, they also want to feel like they have made a personal contribution. I loved eating canned corn as a kid, same thing for canned string beans (don't judge!).
I, and others like me, want to feel like they are doing that personal act. Be it donating kids clothing that has been out grown, or our favorite type of canned goods.
When I was in college and had very little money to spare, I still donated canned goods because I wanted to help out. If I had been given an envelop and a form to fill out my CC details or drop cash in, I likely would have done nothing. And I suspect many other people are the same way. And honestly, back then as a poor college kid, spur of the moment I could go into my pantry and grab a couple of cans I got on sale last week. It'd be harder to donate money that has to be spent on future needs, which are much less certain than needs that have already been met[1].
Charities, and all human organizations for that matter, have to work within the bounds of human psychology, and humans are rarely creatures of optimal habits.
[1] I wonder how much of canned goods is new purchases versus existing purchases? I personally have gone out and bought canned goods specifically for a food drive. If the majority of donated canned goods are from existing supplies, than the article's entire point is invalid.
> And lastly, something that is probably the most uncomfortable fact about all this; it doesn’t feel as good to donate money. As much as we like to pretend that charitable giving is a selfless act, a lot of it is driven by the human need to feel special and magnanimous.
> As donations go, it’s much more satisfying to donate a minivan filled with Ragu than to send a $100 e-transfer.
> Charities know this, and it’s another reason why they are so hesitant to pooh-pooh canned food drives, despite the extra logistical cost. Non-profits know that people get a buzz from loudly dropping $6 worth of cans into an office hamper, and they’re happy to channel that urge towards something good.
I personally donate cash to GiveDirectly. Money is always best.
To do that he would either have to prove that money donations would increase in lieu of canned goods and/or that the administrative costs are higher than the value of the canned goods (which maybe true for very specialized and/or very corrupt charities, but not for your local volunteer run pantry)
Partially, I am also saying that the food we donate is what makes it special. Part of it is donating a mass of Ragu sauce, as the author says, but part of it is that the person who donates all that Ragu sauce probably really likes ragu sauce and wants to share that joy with others.
And in reference to winter food drives, the holiday season is all about sharing joy. Be it sharing one's favorite dishes at thanksgiving, or giving the perfect gift. American society values putting thought and effort into ones gifts, and canned food allows people to do that.
For some people it likely is about feeling good over sheer quantity (and local news reports do show off the mounds of donated cans!) but I do think another part of it is wanting to do something more personal.
My 2ç:
I noticed that there is a strong tradition there to favour charity over social welfare and one of the recurring argument is about how the receiver should feel grateful toward the giver because it somehow attaches a moral debt to the help which the receiver wouldn't feel the burden if the government was the proxy (through taxes) for helping those in need.
I am a European and my first thoughts are always "What a nasty way to help others, adding moral debt to being helped, to put conditions on what should be an act of voluntary uninterested generosity (as opposed to an obligatory act through an inhumane government). That must have something to do with the protestantism cultural background in the US but I can't put my finger on it.".
Likewise, in Europe, I also hear a lot of "I don't give money to beggars but if they want to eat then I can buy something". I disagree because to me it's part of a larger dehumanization process: who are we to tell people what they should spend their money on ? If the guy wants to drink it or buy a night in a cheap hotel or buy a blanket or food or whatever... it's still up to him. I don't have the `right` to control what his priorities should be.
Personally I don't give money to beggars. I did some volunteering and I regularly donate money to some very specific charities I support because:
1. they are going to do a much better job than I and
2. in the city, once you get tagged as a coin giver then words get around pretty fast. It got so bad at one point that I couldn't walk some streets without having two people coming up to me and
3. my government (which has some decent support for homelessness) don't support those specific charities with its welfare system so...
Edit: format and light rewording.
I believe this has to do with everyone's specific set of values. I am not saying Americans are bad people and manipulative moralistic individuals (and I just found some arguments that support the idea that the american charity style helps poor people better than the euro style).
The reason for this one is that in the US some of the "beggars" aren't really struggling at all. When offered food or whatever else they claim on their placard they're lacking, they will decline. Where I live we have a beggar woman standing on the corner with a placard. Behind that placard, though, she's watching YouTube on her iPhone XS. She's been doing this for at least 5 years now, swapping phones more often than I do. Nearly all of those guys who "ran out of cash to get home" will decline an offer to pay their fare, too.
If someone is living off a welfare check, I do not want them using that money to buy things I consider luxury goods with the money I worked to earn (tax dollars).
This is more a comment to your 'drink it' part, but also applies to people who buy soda/candy bars/junk food on food stamps. When I was working minimum wage I didn't buy that stuff because it was a waste of money that I couldn't afford.
I would never tell someone what to spend their money on. if I'm going to spend my money to help them out, I'd prefer it not go straight to a pint of liquor. is that unreasonable?
Canned peas are terrible.
Canned mandarin oranges (Google turns up no results for canned tangerines?) are actually an essential ingredient in quite a few recipes, well unless one wants to peel a bunch of tiny orange wedges by hand.
Canned Vienna Sausages likewise have their place, rare as that place may be, and there are actually higher end canned brands that are rather edible.
So, fun fact about sense of taste over time. Kids have a more sensitive pallet, food tastes super strong to them, so it is often more bland or has simpler flavors. This is why kids can't eat lots of bitter or sour things, they taste really bitter or really sour. As we grow older, our sense of taste starts to die out, and so flavors are less intense. This means overpowering flavors become less overpowering, and we can taste more "refined" foods. And we can also tolerate pickles. (See: Tendencies for older adults and red wine[1])
Exact same goes for our sense of color and taste. Again, as we get older, brighter colors, and stronger perfumes become preferred.
Back to food, simple kid foods either taste bland, or have one dominant flavor. In American famously it is mac and cheese. The texture is simple and the flavor is simple.
[1] IMHO most red wines taste horrible, but at a certain age we just can't taste how horrible they are and they become tolerable.
single data point, but I've helped unpack/sort for several different food drives of the years and I would say that its somewhere between 50/50 and 70/30 on previously bought vs existing.
Like, maybe there's some kind of societal rot where our problems are all abstracted away.
- Some government program takes care of that, and payment for that was taken out of your paycheck before it got to you.
- Don't collect items, no need to volunteer, just cut a check and let the pros handle it.
- Don't talk to the homeless man, except to tell him that there's an agency who can fix all of his problems.
- Don't bake a loaf of bread for a family; we can't trust that the bread is safe, and that dollar of ingredients could have purchased two loaves of the cheaper stuff.
All while suburbs and cars physically insulate us from those problems. We don't have to meet or know those people; just drop a few bucks in the plate and don't think about it again.
Just seems like it all has a cumulative effect, turning real problems into abstract ideas. Maybe it's selfish to want to feel like you're doing something directly, but I wonder if there's a difficult-to-measure aspect here of dehumanization on the side of those in need? Is "maximum efficiency" some side effect of extreme capitalism, and not the be-all and end-all of charity?
If you're feeling charitable you can virtually always find a charity amenable to you which has outcomes they'd like to cause in the world but for lack of money and help them vis the lack of money.
I say this as someone who was involved in organizing many large events for an animal advocacy org in the Twin Cities metro.
Volunteers are also better at many other tasks such as outreach, for example handing out leaflets. For that sort of thing you need a lot of bodies, and people who care about the cause will do a much better job.
I say this as someone who spent about 19 years helping run a local animal advocacy org in the Twin Cities metro. Ironically, what we could have spent money on was hiring staff to reduce the load on people like me ;)
The only argument against it is that people tend seek out and perform charity work for their own sake (eg. vanity, restitution, relaxation).
What should I give a panhandler?
A sandwich? Maybe he's has celliac's. Or diabetes.
A gift card to the coffee shop? Maybe he needs gloves.
Money to buy gloves and a sugar free lunch? Maybe he's an alcoholic.
Instead, just donate. Just help. Just see the person lying on the floor as a fellow human being fully deserving in dignity. If you're Christian, see Christ sprawled on the floor and make sure your right hand doesn't see your left hand.
So giving money to an alcoholic merely means they die of liver failure a little sooner which is "offensive" but giving money to people who are generally poor mostly helps non-addicts.
Note there are local issues. In big cities the working poor are too busy to take a monetary handout (panhandle) so virtually all opportunities for urbanites to hand out money, involve feeding an addiction, even if the vast majority of the poor people in the city are working poor.
This is why I donate dry goods, canned goods, and labor.
Number 1, I'm lazy and don't want to do that. Number 2, I'm not a business person and don't have any idea of what an ethical administrative budget would be. 5% of donations? 50%? I have no idea.
But having done a lot of volunteer work over the years and also spent several years homeless, I would rather see a whole lot more emphasis on creating a world with less need for charity.
We will always need some charity. This article talks in part about charitable giving following a fire. Stuff happens. The world will never stop having crises.
But some problems would best be served by social justice, not charity.
"Give a man a fish, feed him for the day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime." We have a world in which we glorify giving away fish while often actively refusing to "teach a man to fish."
Example:
Discussions of homelessness routinely dismiss the idea that such people can be meaningfully helped to resolve their problems. They get dismissed as crazies and addicts who simply can't be helped.
Meanwhile, my efforts to develop useful websites while homeless and monetize them was snidely characterized by someone as me "panhandling the internet" and people generally didn't want to hire me. I was clear I needed more earned income to get off the street. Charity wasn't going to give me my life back. But I couldn't seem to get taken seriously by anyone.
>They get dismissed as crazies and addicts who simply can't be helped.
How can we identify which people are in which group? Is it simply a matter of advertising a path out, and those willing to try will follow up?
Obviously, this assumes someone has a functioning path out, which I don't.
I have a functional path out. No one cares and I can't get support for further developing it.
I posted this to HN. It got no traction.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-people-fi...
I am actively working on developing additional resources, for example:
https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/
Explanation:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/lgbtq-indiv...
I would like to also put together information related to understanding and resolving our current housing crisis (because that's one of the root causes of homelessness). I've made multiple stabs at starting a website to gather such data. The latest was started yesterday:
https://americanhomeworks.blogspot.com/
But ad income for websites generally has tanked in recent years and I get endless excuses and justifications for why writing shouldn't get paid at all and I get told I should get a real job and stop whining.
I don't feel like rehashing that in detail for the umpteenth time on HN. Short version: there are enough people here with money to spare that it really shouldn't be hard to adequately fund my Patreon for me to be able to blog full-time instead of spending time trying to come up with money to survive doing writing of a sort that people here decry as "ruining the internet," but almost no one wants to put their money where their mouth is. They are all too happy to watch the world burn while loudly decrying how it can't be fixed and once in a while patting me on the head for making my life suck less but not actually taking me seriously as someone with anything of real value to offer cuz Reasons.
Meanwhile, I'm nearly broke as usual and wondering how the hell I'm going to get through the rest of the damn month because doing low paid writing for clients is harder than doing quality writing on my own sites, but developing my sites mostly doesn't pay. Too bad, so fucking sad. It sucks to be me.
I don't know where you are or how it's done there, but as a single data point the food bank for Alameda County (a fair bit of "East Bay" in the SFBA) would work with an organization like yours by having you come in and pick out piles of food from their warehouse for free or hugely reduced prices.
> That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible.
Charities can get the same goods for much cheaper than you or any needy person with no connections can.
Sure, if it's unasked for, huge donations of canned goods can be less useful than money. However it's not as if they can't use or don't need canned goods.
Am I so naive to assume that any organization that accepts cans must be OK with them and any that doesn't want them wouldn't accept them?
1. Promote Awareness of the Food Bank, and to create connections with either potential clients or donors. Having a presence that you walk by on your way to buy lettuce can have a long term benefit on name recognition.
2. Improve store relations. Donors buy products from the store at full-markup, and the store has more incentive to continue to support its own community initiatives from the reminder that the store supports the food bank. Grocery stores tend to have some autonomy on the causes they can support.
3. Some people genuinely do not like the idea of donating money to the food bank. They prefer the physical act of buying something to donate, whether it be because they're worried about mismanagement of funds, the money going towards paying staff, or wanting to have a direct impact on the program itself (I only want my money to go towards food). Some people limit their contributions to stuff that's about to expire in a month from quarterly pantry clearing, or when they're about to move.
On a side note, some people don't want to end up on a fundraising list or hassled for donations. Cans are effectively anonymous. A small donation of $10 to a food bank that sends out quarterly fundraising mailouts can mean $6 of your donation went into fundraising.
(I'm just focussing on job creation and improving accessibility)
But it is not ""newspaper" filled with misleading articles and half-truths." any more than any other leading Canadian newspaper.
The food is part of my pantry management. We don't eat too many canned goods, so we regularly donate it after a few months (well before expiration). We keep canned food for, among other reasons, emergencies.
Also, we buy - and therefore donate - very high quality food. Mr. NationalPost might not taste the difference, but in our family, we do. Am I any better than the poor that I get to eat the fancy stuff?
The donation of food has an aesthetic appeal - I'm literally giving sustenance and therefore life to the less fortunate. When I donate money I give the mere possibility of sustenance. Assuming the charity is honest.
I would not donate more money if I didn't donate food. I'm not homo economicus and the increased money signal from purchasing less canned goods doesn't tug on my donation levers. I.e. I don't take partial derivatives of my (woe me, undefined!) elasticity and demand functions.
I even keep wool Costco socks in my car to give out to panhandlers in the winter. Surely the $15/pack could have been put to better use! But imagine the joy of a panhandler receiving a small package from a more fortunate.
Hopper was full of it when he posted this a few years ago. He's full of it today.
On the other hand, if you're cleaning out your kitchen, it's nice to have something useful to do with food that's still good, rather than throwing it out. Better to have avoided buying it in the first place, but purchasing mistakes happen.
If it's letting your kids spend their allowance on canned tuna for the food-bank then so be it.
1. Canned foods are heavy.
2. Canned foods usually aren't very appetizing, especially the pantry and seasonal rejects people usually donate.
3. Canned foods usually require eating and opening utensils.
Canned foods aren't what the homeless want or need. Instead of "beggars can't be choosers" arrogant rationalizations, maybe donors should do some research to figure out what recipients actually want and/or need?
As mentioned, shrewd food bank buyers will likely do far better at making use of funds on behalf of recipients than any consumer would buying small quantities not on sale at Whole Foods.
It isn’t about hampering the buying efficiency for the charity, it’s about the fact that it’s easier to convince people, who may not have much money themselves, to go into their pantry and donate food that they may never use or is close to expiration versus handing over cash.
This also provides the benefit of potentially less food waste in the community, which is always a plus.
Yes, buying in bulk is more efficient to stretching a dollar for charity, but if a person will never donate that dollar, but will gladly donate their food, then you aim for what you can get.
Simply change the name "food bank" to "food fund" will solve the problem.
Monthly donated food pickups are important as are cash donations and especially grocery stores donating unsold fruit and produce. We have two paid workers and many of us volunteers. Everything seems lean and efficient.
My wife and I have donated to charities for ever, but it is so much better to show up and do some work. I am grateful for this opportunity.
If you want to know what's best for your food bank, perhaps ask them directly?
I still think the need for charity is the hallmark of a deeply broken welfare system. In that situation, the person giving and the person receiving charity become happier, but this is a very limited effect and only servers to fool yourself that the problem is not solvable so you just do what you can. I pretty much prefer to vote for left wing policies that will raise the taxes and then everybody will get to be happier.
