Occasionally I like to write things on
this blog but not half as often as I should. Even more occasionally
what I write is somewhat thought provoking, again not as half as
often as I want it to be. Today I'm writing to have a little bit of a
moan about charity, naturally. More specifically the ALS Ice Bucket
Challenge.
It's the viral phenomenon of the
summer, well other than Ebola, and seeing as my mum and her husband
have now been 'challenged' I can only assume it wont be long before
somebody I know 'challenges' me. When that happens I will gladly
donate £10 to an ALS charity, but I won't be spending any time
making a video to help raise awareness (self-congratulating vanity
project to show the world how funny, creative and charitable I am)
and I won't be giving it to the ALS Association.
It would be easy to spend time
criticising the way that people are using this charity as a way to
draw attention to themselves online but to be honest as annoying as
those self-serving videos are I can look past them if it helps people
with ALS. Much like Mo-Vember, Pink-Tober and those annoying wrist
bands, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge annoys the shit out of me, but I
would happily look past my irritation if they were doing a great deal
of good. The problem is that they aren't, they just allow knob heads
to feel better about themselves without doing any where near as much
as good as people think.
“But Glenn!” I hear you scream,
“We're raising awareness for ALS.” Well yes, these charity trends
do help to raise awareness which is all well and good but then again
53% of people in Britain have no idea what the Ice Bucket Challenge
is in support. These are people that are watching and making the
videos but still manage to have no idea what the ALS Association is.
A good portion of these people still don't know what ALS is either.
Lou who?
“But Glenn!” I hear you say, “We're
raising money for ALS!” Well yeah, some people are but one fact
that says pretty much everything about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
is this - over half of the people in Britain that made a video didn't
donate a penny to the charity. At least if people are buying a
fashionable charitable wrist band they actual contribute something to
the charity. I sadly know people that have jumped on the Ice Bucket
bandwagon, done a 'funny' video, felt better about helping spread
awareness and then not given a penny. This is charity in the 21st
century.
“But Glenn!” I hear you cry, “We've
raised nearly a hundred million dollars for ALS!” Well yeah, that's
fantastic, that's an immense amount of money to go towards helping
people with ALS, but how much of that money is actually going towards
that? Obviously lots of figures are thrown about, I've seen as low as
5%, but until the ALS Association's accounts are released nobody can
know for sure. The figure being touted by the ALS Association is only
27%, and that's from the company that you're giving your money too,
if they're happily admitting that they only spend a quarter of your
donation on helping end ALS I can guarantee it's actually a lot lower
than that.
So what does the rest get spent on? The
majority of it gets spent on 'public and professional education'
which can be roughly translated as advertising and marketing. So a
big portion of the money that people are donating goes into trying to
get people to donate more. That's a bigger portion of the donations
going towards encouraging more donations than helping people with
ALS. The rest of it goes towards helping pay the wages of the ALSA
and for those that don't already know this – working in charity is
a very lucrative career. It would be rather impartial of me if I
didn't point out that this figure was given before the summer Ice
Bucket Challenge craze kicked off, maybe all of the extra money
they've made this year will go towards helping people and not towards
marketing, solicitors and big bonuses for the board members. I won't
be holding my breath though.
“But Glenn!” I hear you roar,
“We've still raised like a quarter of million dollars for ALS!”
Well yeah that's great but do you have any idea what that money is
being spent on either? Nope, didn't think so. Well obviously the
majority of that money goes into researching the disease, finding out
ways to help ease people's suffering and find an effective cure.
Which is great, it really is, but most of this research is done by
massive pharmaceutical companies and this is where this charity model
really goes to fucking shit. I can look past the self-serving pricks
making the videos, I can look past the lack of awareness from people
taking part and I can look past the small portion of donations that
goes towards actual charity work. It's harder to look past the fact
that all the Ice Bucket Challenge is really doing is lining the
pockets of already extremely wealthy pharmaceutical companies.
The research that these charitable
donations are supporting is already being done by these companies and
they are doing them for one reason only – money. If a company finds
a more effective treatment to help lessen the symptoms of ALS or
discover a form of chemotherapy with less severe side-effects then
they can patent this drug and sell it for even more money than they
are already charging. Effectively the donations that people are
making just enable companies to more cost-effectively make a product
that they can charge extortionate money for. And if that isn't the
definition of charity I don't know what is.
So there you have it, the full effect
of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – helping to swell the coffers of
companies that already make a fortune from helping to treat diseases.
At least the middle classes can feel good about themselves though,
and they get to look cool on the internet as well. Everybody wins!
Apart from people suffering from ALS, or whatever the fashionable
charity of the month is.
I'm sure that half the people that read
this will just think I'm being a cock for the sake of it but that's never stopped me from speaking my mind before. I'm also aware that there
are a lot of lovely people out there who do have the best intentions
when they take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge. Unfortunately this country is
dangerously unaware of what they can do to help actually help charities and are
taking the most visible options, so the wrong people are profiting
from it. If people really do want to donate money to help people with
ALS I urge them to put down their camera phones and instead do some
research into where their money is going. This goes for anybody who
wants to donate money to any charity.
Here's a link
to follow if you like animals and want to find some charities that
help animals.
Here's a link
to some information on charities doing great work in Africa.
Here's a link
to check out some great charities that are trying to ease the damage
that we're doing to the planet.
Oh and here is a link
to a list of the 50 worst charities in America, so avoid giving to
any of these companies or their subsidiaries.
