Be forewarned: this is somewhat meandering. If “brain diarrhea” really irritates you; kindly don’t read (and subsequently don’t comment that you hate meandering posts). I’m looking for a dialogue.
As I mentioned in one of my posts, I think sometimes activists worry about making a real difference in the world. There’s writing letters, and calling our friends and families on some of their behavior, and if we can spare it, maybe a few dollars to worthy organizations. But sometimes I wonder; does this behavior actually DO anything?
I thought of a friend-of-a-friend I know, that collects donations, and with that money she makes school sets that she sends to a church in Armenia. It’s not terribly expensive stuff; notebooks, pencils, erasers, tissues; but it has a real impact in the quality of education of the students. Every week, she takes her donations collected, buys the materials, and makes little “school boxes” to send away.
But the thing is; these donations don’t last long. The stuff gets used, broken, and stolen. There’s always more that needs to be sent. So what good does it do?
Then I thought after that; what good did the tissues in my school do? Those we went through too, and needed to be replaced all the time as well. What good they did was kept people who went to school with the sniffles from distracting other students and kept other kids from being sick. It’s not that the donations are good because they are permanent; it’s just the donations are more useful if they’re consistent.*
So, for this post, I was thinking it would be a nice idea of Punkassers could make a resolution this year to donate at least once a month to whatever organization floated your boat. This donation could be time, money, or the extra set of pens in the buy-one-get-one sale. The point of this resolution is not to break the bank; but rather make the world that slightly better place in a real, tangible way. Ideas of how to tackle any particular problem would be welcome in the comments, and stories of volunteering are also welcome.
As for myself, I was thinking about small, cheap donations that would cause immediate, real-world help. And I found myself thinking about textile industries across the world, and how many don’t have even basic safety standards, and people have a lot of respiratory problems because of it. I keep thinking the best way to fix that would be to boycott countries that don’t have US-health standards, and to apply pressure for the US to not trade with these countries, but the problem with those solutions are 1) they’re incredibly long term 2) probably not going to actually help anything and 3) come with the problem of putting poverty-level workers out of a job. But if we donated safety equipment, then it helps alleviate some of the problems right now. What does everyone think of trying to set up Dust Mask donations for workers? These are cheap masks, but their ability to reduce respiratory problems is quite high. A few problems I can think of off the bat are a) finding a company that would take them, or someone to distribute them to b) finding a company that would allow it and c) I have no idea how to start a non-profit. Ideas?
*eHow.com has some good advice on how to donate to schools in your area, if that is what you’re inspired to do.
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