I confess I hadn’t thought of that particular aspect of a canned goods drive—which may or may not be true, e.g., donated cars are sold rather than given to the poor. I had written it off as a desire to purchase moral satisfaction.
But anyone who works in the nonprofit industry knows this fact, sad but true: Volunteering money is much more helpful than volunteering time. Unless you’re a professional and you’re willing to volunteer large blocks of concentrated time with high work priority. The power of work concentration and specialization is the elementary reason why the whole economy runs that way.
The young idealistic people don’t have enough money to devote large chunks of time.
I’m not sure what the organisation that must not be named actually needs to be done at the moment, why it needs more funding.
If you are looking for people to do things you might be able to get people newly out of university to work for you for a couple of years for a living allowance. Which would be the equivalent of donating the difference between the living allowance and the market rate for their skills. People do sacrifice potential earnings for experience all the time, PhDs for example or getting minimal wage working somewhere exotic, What people don’t like doing so much is going backwards...
Is one or two years not large enough blocks of time or are graduates not professional enough?
I agree that donating an hour or two a week is not efficient, I was trying to point out that there are groups of people that can donate large amounts of time/skills, iff they are given minimal money to support themselves.
I confess I hadn’t thought of that particular aspect of a canned goods drive—which may or may not be true, e.g., donated cars are sold rather than given to the poor. I had written it off as a desire to purchase moral satisfaction.
But anyone who works in the nonprofit industry knows this fact, sad but true: Volunteering money is much more helpful than volunteering time. Unless you’re a professional and you’re willing to volunteer large blocks of concentrated time with high work priority. The power of work concentration and specialization is the elementary reason why the whole economy runs that way.
The young idealistic people don’t have enough money to devote large chunks of time.
I’m not sure what the organisation that must not be named actually needs to be done at the moment, why it needs more funding.
If you are looking for people to do things you might be able to get people newly out of university to work for you for a couple of years for a living allowance. Which would be the equivalent of donating the difference between the living allowance and the market rate for their skills. People do sacrifice potential earnings for experience all the time, PhDs for example or getting minimal wage working somewhere exotic, What people don’t like doing so much is going backwards...
I think E’s point was that, contrary to charitable instinct, they would be better off working and tithing, in terms of charitable results.
Is one or two years not large enough blocks of time or are graduates not professional enough?
I agree that donating an hour or two a week is not efficient, I was trying to point out that there are groups of people that can donate large amounts of time/skills, iff they are given minimal money to support themselves.