OCCOM BILL wrote:Thanks Thomas. I see that friendly old man from the Christian Children's Fund got to you too.
Almost. In the case of
CARE, it was basically nostalgia. My mother, born during World War II, always spoke fondly of the
CARE packages Americans sent to Germany after World War II to ameliorate the hunger there. She was especially fond of the chocolate bars that came with those packages. Chocolate was a decadent luxury in Germany back in those years. But thanks to
CARE, my mother and her brothers could binge on it -- one piece of chocolate a day! So, when I left the Lutheran Church and had spare money as a result, I donated it to
CARE international. It just seemed like the obvious, non-sectarian way of giving back.
In the case of
Save the Children it wasn't a friendly old man from the Christian Children's fund. It was a nice senior-highschool girl. She walked up to me in Chicago last year with a well-rehearsed, but warm and idealistic sales pitch. She steamrolled me. On my next internet session, anxious that I've fallen for a scam, I checked
www.charitynavigator.com to check out what kind of organization
Save the Children was. It turned out that not only are they not a scam, they are in fact fairly efficient at converting donations into benefits for the poorest people in the world. So I kept my membership alive.