You Just Don’t Know
So your in the the grocery store and your picking out your dinner for the night…. You’re walking up to check out and you stop and stare at a poster. This poster is a woman from Guatemala who has her own business. So you are asked if you would like to add $1 or $5 to your purchase to donate to help her continue her business. Because you just spent money you feel that you should donate. But this is not how you help someone in need in a third world. This situation is discussed further in the “Poverty Capital” by Ananya Roy. The main point she addresses in this is how poverty capital is done.
She describes poverty capital as the way companies capitalize on the poverty of people in low income areas. Another point she mentions is how people can easily be persuaded by companies to give their donations.In my opinion companies also profit off of your consciousness. Companies want us to feel guilty and to ease this guilt we feel we buy something that we want and donate money to a cause.
I’ll admit I have given into this idea of donating money to a great cause. Me being a person who loves converse, I ended up buying converse(red) and at the time I felt I was helping the people in Africa who were in need. I thought it was a doing a great service to them. But I was really easing my guilt. I felt that I wanted to help my people. But I wasn’t. I was made to think my money was going to straight to them as well as the full amount that I was donating.
This is not only done with (red) charity but with an even more well know charity. You know the commercial that makes everyone tear up. Yup SPCA, in the CNN news article “Little Of Charity’s Money Goes to Helping Animals”.This is the same situation we have seen previously. When people donate to a charity believing all of the money goes to the cause but instead little of it does. According to the article “In 2010, SPCA International owed $8.4 million to Quadriga Art LLC and its affiliated company, Brickmill Marketing Services, according to publicly available Internal Revenue Service 990 tax records.” That shows why we should put little faith these charities. If we don’t know and do our research we can become easily tricked into these strategies.
Another article that supports this theory that companies use charity cause for the wrong reason is the article “Selling Products for a Cause Might Hurt Corporations Bottom Line”. In this article we are provided with a solution. In the article it states “Or maybe as for-profits run more of these feel-good campaigns, buyers are becoming more suspicious about how much of their money is actually going to charity”.
The overall point of this article is to open people’s idea of they are donating to charities. People need to do more research before we donate to a cause thinking we are doing the right thing. What have you donated to lately? Do you really know where you money went?
Works Cited
Fitzpatrick, David. and Griffin, Drew. “Little Of Charity’s Money Goes to Helping Animals”. CNN, 15 June 2012. https://www-m.cnn.com/2012/06/14/us/animal-charity-investigation/index.html
Fitzgerald, Michael. “Selling Products for a Cause Might Hurt Corporations Bottom Line”. Pacific Standard, 27 August 2013. https://www.google.com/amp/s/psmag.com/.amp/economics/selling-products-cause-might-hurt-corporations-bottom-line-65150
Roy Ananya. “Poverty Capital”. Routledge, 5 March 2010. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MA59bux878p0j24JmIKg10NRLrhjqatV/view?usp=sharing
