My son's school sent around a fundraiser today: they want parents to buy bags of rice to help raise funds for the school at $5/kg. So it's rice, right? That's gotta be better for you than chocolate!
Now I can understand how fundraising used to work, once upon a time, where someone would buy something in bulk getting a reduced price for it then the resulting savings would be shared between the buyer and the charity. "Win-win", as the phrase goes. Or really "win-win-win" because the original supplier just sold a whole chunk of stuff they otherwise would not have, and they will have made money too.
That doesn't seem to be the modern way fundraising happens. On this occasion I am being offered a price around 80% above retail, and the school refuses to tell me what portion of that will actually go to help them. Even this seems on the surface to be a slightly better offer than the typical "buy this chocolate bar or my kids won't get to go on their $SPORT trip" that generally ends up on the reception desk at the office. A deal which was surely cooked up in the marketing department of a chocolate manufacturer, negotiated with the school or sports club, to be inflicted on me. That's not win-win - not if I'm one of the parties - at best it's win-win-lose, and I feel ganged up on.
When my son was at pre-school ten years ago they had an option where I could contribute a pre-calculated amount in lieu of participating in fundraising activities. Simple and painless, and if people preferred an outlet for their baking they could make that choice too, while I was free to attend kindergarten social activities without feeling remorse for not buying their product.
I loved that approach. I loved it most of all, I think, because I remember still with a clarity that comes of real visceral anguish, how bad I felt as a child when I was forced to go door to door to beg for sponsorship, or to sell plastic bags. To raise funds for who knows what meaningless school alteration. My rationality-fuelled imagination as a fourteen year old led me to believe that I was being forced to sell worthless goods by abusing someone's guilt, simply in order to skim a few pennies for a school whose only connection to me was a mandatory daily attendance. Forty years on I am that someone, and I'm just as angry about that abuse of guilt from the other side. Is that the sort of sleazy sales trick we should be teaching our children to do?
I'm angry that fundraising has turned into an industry. Why do corporate interests need to be involved to the extent that it becomes a line item on their profit statement?
How can we get back to the win-win-win of my parent's childhood?