The Efficiency of Charity

Have you ever noticed that people who spend money to travel somewhere to go help others can't shut up about it?
  Last week, I heard a d'var about how someone spent their winter break on a program that had them travel to Miami to build and plant a garden for some inner city schools there. This is a pretty common sort of service project these trips accomplish and are, I assume, based on the assumption that the charity college students are most qualified for is manual labor. Except for the obvious labor inefficiencies, it all sounds pretty good when you look at it on the surface.

   Upon just a little closer inspection, however, many problems come to light. Consider, for example, the idea of traveling 1000 some-odd miles from Texas to Florida. Where that might be justified if the location to which you are traveling has been devastated by a major disaster that is sufficiently devastating that the available volunteers in the area is insufficient. Otherwise, the travel is unnecessary and possibly harming. There are ample opportunities for helping people in the Austin community (A Google search for "Austin Volunteer Opportunities" found 395,000 results), many of which have equal to or greater than need to the gardening needs of inner city schools in Florida. But do the people who go on the trips regular volunteers in their community? More than not, they perform zero to little community service in their daily lives, except where they are required to.
  And yet the people who actually make a difference in society by spending their time and money directly in their communities are rarely recognized for their actions, much less given a public platform to talk about their work, but if someone paid to travel someplace to do something that could more easily and efficiently done by others.

  This is my message to you, people who travel across the country to help people so they can brag about it later— Take a regular vacation and, if you really want to help people, try to make a difference at home, using the skills you have. People won't be as impressed as if you told them you plowed a field for some underprivileged Florida schoolchildren, but it is the right thing to do.






Note: I am not decrying the work of such organizations as Doctors Without Borders, Engineers Without Borders, or other groups that use their expertise to help those who are far more in need than anyone in the volunteer's local community.