Nothing is sincere anymore. Everyone and everything has an ulterior motive. Even something that's meant to be sincere, selfless and giving is motivated by greed.
Fundraising is something that comes under this umbrella of goodness, selflessness and sincerity, but unfortunately this umbrella is permeated by droplets of human greed, saturating it's surface until something, even as good as charity, becomes a point of selfishness. Everything is subdued by want of profit or some other form of self attainment and I ask myself 'does selflessness even exist?' Is every action derived from human greed? Surely if we analyse every action or decision we have made every single one adheres to an aspect of greed and self attainment.
What becomes even more apparent is the correlation between concepts that are generally conceived as selfless and those that are acknowledged as selfish, for example; fundraising and banking. Through personal experience it is evident that paid fundraisers have just as many, if not more, pound signs in their eyes than bankers. To some extent the methods of paid fundraisers are incredibly more concerning than those of bankers. A whole business hiding behind the charade of being for charity: employees breaking laws to try and get more donations to aid their bonus, forcing elderly people to stand at their doorsteps when it is obvious that they are physically unable to, and exploiting the generosity of the vulnerable- it all seems pretty unethical to me.
Fundraising should be about encouraging people to give, not forcing them. It should not be about greed and trying to exceed your targets to procure YOUR bonus, it should be about that feeling you get when you realise how many people's lives you are aiding by procuring donations.
That feeling of overwhelming happiness that you get when you know you've done something 'right' should always be enough to do anything- but is even this just another form of self attainment?
And we come back to the same debate, is anything selfless? Can we ever escape the binding characteristics of our human nature and demonstrate true selflessness?
Fundraising is something that comes under this umbrella of goodness, selflessness and sincerity, but unfortunately this umbrella is permeated by droplets of human greed, saturating it's surface until something, even as good as charity, becomes a point of selfishness. Everything is subdued by want of profit or some other form of self attainment and I ask myself 'does selflessness even exist?' Is every action derived from human greed? Surely if we analyse every action or decision we have made every single one adheres to an aspect of greed and self attainment.
What becomes even more apparent is the correlation between concepts that are generally conceived as selfless and those that are acknowledged as selfish, for example; fundraising and banking. Through personal experience it is evident that paid fundraisers have just as many, if not more, pound signs in their eyes than bankers. To some extent the methods of paid fundraisers are incredibly more concerning than those of bankers. A whole business hiding behind the charade of being for charity: employees breaking laws to try and get more donations to aid their bonus, forcing elderly people to stand at their doorsteps when it is obvious that they are physically unable to, and exploiting the generosity of the vulnerable- it all seems pretty unethical to me.
Fundraising should be about encouraging people to give, not forcing them. It should not be about greed and trying to exceed your targets to procure YOUR bonus, it should be about that feeling you get when you realise how many people's lives you are aiding by procuring donations.
That feeling of overwhelming happiness that you get when you know you've done something 'right' should always be enough to do anything- but is even this just another form of self attainment?
And we come back to the same debate, is anything selfless? Can we ever escape the binding characteristics of our human nature and demonstrate true selflessness?
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