One of the things those of us with any disposable income try to do, is to give it to good causes. About once a year I review who receives what I give. There are some obvious stalwarts: my old College, which is not one of Oxford’s richest, and gave me so much, that I want to give something back to each new generation; and then a series of charities. Some of these are secular charities, but the majority are religious ones. It was, therefore, sobering, to put it mildly, to see the news about Oxfam. As my friend Neo has written elsewhere there is a very considerable iceberg underneath this tip.
That aid agency staff commit abuses seems further proof of the axiom that bad people will find a way of working with vulnerable people. We see it in every Church. This leads those with an agenda to criticise my own Church, or someone else’s church; for believers in original sin, that seems a culpably blind attitude. Some of the things described in Neo’s piece are heart-breaking. For the Director of Oxfam to say ‘it isn’t as though we murdered babies’, shows, alas, that he still fails to grasp the scale of the outrage. His detailed excuses as to why they behaved as they did once they knew the details of the scandal, shows a concern with preserving the institution at all costs. As an expert on disaster management, he should have consulted an expert in media relations on when not to bring a mechanical digger to a hole-making party.
Charities have become big business, but unlike other businesses which pay their CEOs a fortune, this business does not make anything or sell anything, it raises funds and then tries to spend them in the best way possible. It is a business that relies on reputation. The Charity sector is not coming well out of this, or indeed, other investigations, such as phone fund-raising. There is something deeply disturbing about the pattern of behaviour being revealed. I stopped one long-term donation because a phone fund-raiser aggressively tried to make me increase the amount I had given. He seemed oblivious to my argument that I gave to a number of charities and had worked out what I could afford to give to each; the result was he managed to lose his charity a regular amount, plus a legacy. Of course, he did not work with the charity, he was a professional fund-raiser paid by results. I hope he was not on a bonus.
In all this sorry story, it is good to recall some charities do work no one else would. The Aid to the Church in Need charity is one. The work it has done with the victims of ISIS/Daesh is exemplary. In places no one else goes, ANC goes. It is helping thousands of Christian who feel abandoned by the UN charities working in Jordan. £3.6 million has just been given to Iraqi Christians to help rebuild houses in the Nineveh Plain. This is something no one else would do. NGOs tend to take a relentlessly politically correct line, which in places like Jordan means that Christians are at the bottom of the list. A quarter of Iraq’s Christian have now returned to their homes. This is real charity. It is not about trying to help make the refugee camps more permanent, but about making them unnecessary. So far, £28million has been given to Christians in Iraq.
But ANC is in the Sudan, Russia, Syria, and raising the alarm wherever Christians are persecuted. At Lent we are encouraged to give of our charity. I have made my decision, and hope that, despite the scandal engulfing the ‘charity sector’, charities like ANC will continue to be supported.
All Along the Watchtower 
I do worry about money given to various charities not being spent where it should be, which is why I prefer, when I give, to give to charities I know and trust, which tend to be Christian ones. The thing about voluntary donation is that it is an expression of your beliefs, values, and priorities, which vary from person to person.
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Indeed. It was precisely the refusal to accept that by the fund-raiser on the phone that led to my cancelling my donation.
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My biggest pet peeves with NGO’s are those that spend my donations for advertising and tele-marketing . . . not to mention redistributing funds to other NGO’s that support abortions and all sorts of unsavory things. It is why I quit giving to the USCCB’s pet charity Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). Catholics are urged to donate to this sham once a year and they even have an envelope provided for that use. I think I can find better places to use my money and I indeed I have.
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I agree Dave. My own money goes to ACN at the moment – it does great work for persecuted Christians
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I can’t help wondering whether abuses like those you describe constitute a breach of trust. I have been studying trusts and equity and company law only for a few weeks, so I’m not qualified to say.
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Whether or not they violate corporate trust, they certainly are selling hiding from their donors where much of our money is being spent. Thank goodness we do have accounting records that are made public and we can find this out on our own . . . but who wants to pour over such documents each year before we give our money to them? At least I have seen the records and know CCHD gives money to many Soros founded groups and many which support and advocate abortion and euthanasia plus a host of other political aims that are not in keeping with my conscience.
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It’s disgusting. This is why I rely on authoritative word of mouth: I prefer to support evangelism ministries that clearly repudiate the Prosperity Gospel and other betes noires.
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Indeed so. I find myself giving to the actual church ministries in various countries or to food banks or shelters in my own community.
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I imagine the Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Catholic churches are much on your heart in this time of trouble. They have much suffering and a great work of rebuilding to do. My reading suggests that ISIS is not finished, though; rather, it is changing form.
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The serpent of old never goes away but only changes form.
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Indeed the Oxfam mess is quite troubling, not helped yesterday when I read that Oxfam is appointing an ‘independent’ committee or some such eyewash to investigate. Wouldn’t work for me. But there’s no real point in casting too many stones at them. Compared to the Clinton Foundation a few orgies with underage girls seems somewhat less important. Seems a competition to reach the bottom.
As I said still somewhere else, the only charity I give to anymore is the Salvation Army. Aid to the Church in Need I will look at, but the Lutheran ones that I used to give to seem to have caught the virtue signaling contagion going around as well, although there may be something over LCMS way that I’ve missed.
In some ways, the situation with the charities is an indicator, I think, of how far from the Gospel our churches have strayed. Truly, Oxfam rings bells rung by Luther’s visit to Rome. That there is corruption in church and state by Godless men is no surprise, it is always so. What is surprising and disheartening, is the extent.
But C.S. Lewis did tell us (actually he didn’t, apparently it was the movie star Irene Dunn, in May 1945)
“If we don’t stand for something, we’ll fall for anything.”
Hedonism appears to be the order of the day in the charity field.
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Increasingly I have become very sceptical of institutional attempts to deal with social and other problems. Once something turns into a “system”, too much energy and resources is spent on feeding the system rather than dealing with the needs it was founded to address.
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Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies, actually in spades because there is no measurable work output.
“…in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.”
Indeed the only organizations that seem to avoid this (at least to some extent) use full-on military organization, and that includes the Sally Army.
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Alas, too few people have respect for the military organisation model. I am getting so sick of SJWs’ contempt for concepts like self-discipline, authority-from-above, etc. The Salvation Army are great and the vision of General Booth says something important about how evangelism should be central to the Church’s mission.
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One of the keys is that particular use of mission. Of course the military is the original author of organizing large groups of people, and many lessons have been learned. It’s one reason why successful organizations pay attention to why, and how, the military does things.
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Its even worse when an organization like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is like them in this respect as well. They take money from every diocese in the US and then involve themselves in a host of political endeavors. They give money to political pressure groups from LGBT rights to Open Borders and a host of other unsavory enterprises while getting huge grants from the US government to help the poor or other such things. Their largest provider of income at this time is the ordinary citizen’s tax money that is redistributed to them (and not at our behest).
It has become so political that I have come to the decision to quit giving money to my own diocese if any of that money is earmarked for the USCCB.
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I understand, it was over 30 tears ago, when I was in the United Church of Christ, that I determined that there was nothing that that church did in the mission field that I wished to be associated with. It wasn’t long after that that it was no longer my church. Your case is different, your church still does good work, but less than it used to. Good luck.
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I prefer, like you, to give my money to causes I approve of.
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Indeed. This seems to be a problem that rather recent in terms of our history . . . going back to mid-20th century shenanigans . . . but it is rife today.
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Indeed, and the comments from Oxfam’s Director, openly stating that he defends their lack of public action because it protected the organisation, shows it has gone too far.
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In aligning themselves increasingly with the secular world, charities have become too much like other businesses, but without the checks that the need to make money imposes on such businesses.
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I completely agree. The profit motive isn’t as good a reason as salvation, but in many case it will serve.
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It is very sad.. Many elderly give more than they can honestly afford to charity’s that are dishonest.. 1 Peter 5:2
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