Comment by CodiePetersen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodiePetersen | Hacker News Reader

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Right and their program expense is "Distributing food". What do you think that vague description of a program encompasses. Paying drivers? Paying the manager of the drive by the hour? It tells you very little of what your money is actually going to.

Now I don't mean to knock the people of Brazos Valley Food Bank, they might all be volunteers and they might all work out of a volunteers garage, in which case you bet your ass if I knew for a fact I would be donating hard cash and probably even volunteer when and what I could if that was my neighborhood.

But I'm not going to donate to some giant entity that can "scale". My entire point of the comment was that the author paints a picture that your food donation hinders operations and youd be better off to donate just one dollar instead of one can. So I pointed out all of the local cases where your donation goes just the right amount and from volunteers and for people who aren't going to complain about what efforts you are going to put in.

I don't really want to knock anyone, either, and volunteering is great, but I find the implication that there's something skeevy about paying a fair wage to the people who supply a charity's backbone labor to be kind of bothersome.

Subtextually, there seems to be a peculiar double standard being presented: Paying retail prices for in-kind donations, which implicitly covers the wages of all sorts of retail and distribution workers associated with the grocery store, as well as lining the pockets of the grocer store's owners and, if it's a public company, shareholders, is just fine. But providing cash donations is bad, because then the charity might use some (presumably less) of that money to pay its own employees to do those jobs? And paying them money is bad, because they should be getting all that labor for free?

It's hard for me not to see that as a tacit allegation that one's time and labor are inherently less valuable when they're being given to an organization whose mission is to help others instead of one whose mission is to make its owners as rich as possible. Which, personally, I think that my opinion runs close to being the exact opposite of that.

If you want to spend your free time helping others, that's awesome. If you want to make a career of helping others so that you can spend even more time doing it, hey, that's awesome, too. And, the world's distributions of wealth, free time and skills being what they are, supplying the money that enables people to go that route can quite easily be the most effective option still other people have for giving back, so that's awesome, too.

I picked a food bank that I remember volunteering with when I was in high school: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

"Food distribution" here is everything that the food bank does to put food in front of people. Storage, logistics, networking. As an example, I worked in a warehouse alongside forklift operators, carrying boxes of food between refrigerators and packing distribution boxes destined for delivery. As another example, this food bank owns and operates community gardens. They also have a dedicated "Meals on Wheels" program for taking prepared meals out to senior citizens and the infirm.

The fantasy of working out of a garage is crushed by the basic nutrition needs of human beings. A single working garden is half a garage on its own, and a walk-in fridge is another half a garage. We generally want to imagine a food buffer of two weeks. A single block-sized warehouse can be far more practical for county-sized food banks than a network of restaurants, garages, church basements, or other small repositories.

Edit: While I might not have been compensated with cash, the forklift operators were employed. Many volunteers were, like me, in various programs that required that they volunteer with the community. Employment with the food bank generally meant additional responsibilities; they couldn't ask volunteers to do certain kinds of dangerous things.

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