The thing that annoys me most about Oxford Street is this: not the tourists, who wander at snails pace along London’s busiest shopping stretch and then stop, abruptly, in great swarming packs to take a picture of each and every tube station sign from the middle of the pavement. Its not the ‘model scouts’ who offer me, at too regular an interval for me to even have the time to be naively flattered, the chance to be pampered, preened and photographed for “just £49.99, when as a regular package these components would cost you over £500!!” Its not the mothers, with their pushchairs, trying – and failing – to negotiate their way around the tightly packed rails in Topshop, inevitably running over my already weary feet at least twice in each manoeuvre. What annoys me most are the cheerful chaps in their brightly coloured tshirts and high vis satchels asking me to donate to charity.
Its not that I’m against charity, or that I don’t have enough spare change in the bottom of my (not so charitably priced) Longchamp bag to donate, I just object to the way in which their volunteers approach and accost people on a daily basis, hoping to force them into setting up a direct debit payment plan for a child in Africa. And when did good deeds become so costly? A few quid at a event used to be greeted with a smile and a gracious thank you, whereas now anything under £20 a month is scoffed at with disdain.
In my opinion, charitable giving should occur in one of only two plausible arenas. Very privately, from the comfort of your own home, through calling a Children in Need phone line, or in a confidential envelope and sent through the post. Nobody needs to see or judge what you give. And if they do, it should occur at option two: the highly publicised, double-spread-in-the-back-pages-of-Tatler High Society charity ball, where the sole purpose of attending is to make sure you donate the most money, and the most people see you doing it. Very public, or very private, and not in the middle of Oxford Street, where you can’t see straight, let alone think about saving a child’s life. As a society, we are forced into the two most private aspects of our existence: religion and charitable giving. Being stopped by organisations in the street is not only rude, humiliating and – don’t gasp, you were thinking it too – inconvenient, in the long term its also counterproductive to the cause.
Consider it; you’re walking to a meeting, or you’re late for a lecture or even a tube, and you’re approached by a volunteer. You’ve explained that you’re late, but they don’t listen; they’re already on paragraph three of the speech they learned on their training day. You really have to go, but its just not happening. People around you are watching you, thanking their lucky stars that they were reading the Standard or pretending to be on the phone as the blue tshirt and toothy grin homed in on the area. You feel the pressure and bolt. You’re late, and now you’re embarrassed you got caught and didn’t donate, and pissed off that it happened to you this time. So the next person who approaches you asking for your bank details and your favourite impoverished region of Africa gets an earful. You’re annoyed, and now so are they. The next person they ask only gets a half-arsed pitch because they’re wounded and upset, and thus that guy won’t donate. The volunteer is deflated, and no longer wants to approach people which their sunny attitude and fake grin. In the end, noone donates. All because we are forced to.
If someone came up to you in the street wearing reeboks and a hoody and asked for your bank details and home phone number you’d run a mile and call the police. But just because these charity volunteers claim that the money will go to a starving child you’ll never meet, in a region you’ll never visit, we’re more than happy to part with our private information because we feel like karma will repay us. Maybe. Eventually. These kids don’t have bank accounts, so why should I give you access to mine? If I want to donate, I’ll offer my clothes. I’ll give a sandwich to the man who sleeps in the doorway at the end of my street. I’ll find a charity box and slip in some change. But please, please, let me do it in my own time, and with my own rules.
Agree wholeheartedly!
Especially as a lot of these be-bibbed pavement-lurkers aren’t actually charitable volunteers themselves. For some causes (Poppy Appeal, Lifeboats, Salvation Army…), the people who stand outside shops rattling their tins for loose change are, but the ones armed with clipboards asking for your bank details, and then scoff and/judge as you refuse their assult, are actually being paid around £7/hour from some agency. They’re not doing it, first and foremost, out of the kidness of their heart or because the cause is personally resonant…yet they feel it to be perfectly ok for them to judge/question/guilt random people into making donations of their own.
While I’m all for spreading the word and opening people’s eyes to the bad things that do go on and do need support, I find it hard to believe that hijacking a shopping trip is the best way to do it.
Besides, I want to take the time to look into loads of different charities, decide which ones I agreed with and which ones genuinely seemed to actually give the money on to their causes instead of boosting their Directors’ salaries, and THEN donate!
I avoid them like the plague, and the charities that use this method of fund raising. It does make me feel very misanthropic, seeing these people bothering passers by. I saw one outside Waitrose in Crouch End the other day (upmarket supermarket, wealthy suburb, I guess the demographics are fitting) and I was SO glad that he already had someone in his thrall!
As sad as it is, a few of my not-so-close acquaintances are these self-same people you decry (with good reason) in your article. Were you to meet them in a normal environment, you’d find them to be the same as any other teenager – interested in smoking, drinking and partying like their lives depend on it; and this is the exact reason that I don’t let blanking charity collectors get me down. As the previous poster stated, they are normally paid a full-time wage to either stand in prime publicity areas or they go door to door, pestering people in their homes. A great deal of them have no principles associated with the cause they support aside from a vague conviction that ‘something needs to be done about [insert charitable stereotype here]’.
Charity, as you said, should be conducted discreetly – it should not be subject to intimidation or fear of public shaming.