charity vs charity

(disclaimer: i apologise in advance for the amount of times the c word appears in this blog entry!)

something that has cropped up within my time at barnardos a lot is the notion of charity (ohhh, that word), and what it means to be a charitable person. something i have noticed a lot about charity shops is that i am more indebted to those that walk into the shop to give their time away, rather than their money - i.e volunteers express a charitable heart more than most of the consumers in a charity shop do. after all, there are plenty of people looking to give their money to us with the proviso that they consider themselves to have found a real good bargain. i question whether that really is charity at all, as they are more interested in making themselves feel good in a superficial way, but nevertheless we need those kind of customers amongst all the other customers we get in the shop to make all the services in a charity run. with volunteers however, there are no provisos. sure, they can get a discount on the things that they find in the shop if they volunteer, but what they give to the shop is a much bigger investment.

"it's just like a magic penny

hold it tight and you won't have any

lend it, spend it and you will have so many

they'll roll all over the floor"

another thing that i have noticed within my work is the struggle in maintaining the right charitable identity. it seems there are two options - either Who you work for is your charity, regardless of who your customer is, or, the customer Is your charity, at the expense of flagging profit. err on one side and it is easy to forget that some people have no choice but to get their clothes from our shops because they would never have the money to go elsewhere. sometimes our clientele is the exactly the kind of people that the charity would need to champion and defend, and to insist on prices that aren't high, but just on the side of unaffordable to them, can be heartbreaking. on the other hand, allowing things to be priced as near to pocket money as possible to be in the customers good books puts the charity into trouble and it means that the services they seek to provide cannot be properly funded, and with the consequence of having to downsize the vision of the charity. you also have to factor that a charity, under the benefit of experience and gathered information, possibly has a better notion of how to use what they receive to help the poor, than, say, a poor customer would.

here's where these thoughts leap into the age old question of whether or not to give money to the homeless or to give it to a charity. in my work, the two ways of expressing being charitable meet and do not quite see eye to eye because it affects business practice, yet somewhere along the line they should meet nonetheless.