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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

This phenomenon also happens when people think that their physical goods donations (usually mailed/shipped) to distant places after natural disasters = helping.

Often in fact, it's called the 2nd disaster -- the flood of useless, disorganized junk that people send, thinking they're helping but actually adding work to the system. Dirty blankets, old shoes, random toys.

Charities/NGOs really don't want your disorganized stuff. They need $. Money. Funds that they can just spend on buying exactly what they need, in bulk, that can be distributed in an organized way.

Hard to get random people to understand that, or prefer to give money over sentimental junk.

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In general they also don't need your sporadic untrained volunteer time either. The volunteering events that HR departments love to organize where employees earning six figures spend hours on make work always strike me as an incredibly inefficient way to actually help people in need.

Feel good virtue signaling

I'm not the volunteering type, but I went to a work-arranged event where we tutored kids. I ended up feeling mostly guilty after doing it because it would be better for these kids to have ongoing mentoring by the same person than a revolving pool of tech randos.

Sometimes it is just that many randos care at all that matters, and that inspires a person to feel that they matter because you care.

So true. I helped out sorting produce at a food bank for a company organized event. Clearly we were an imposition on the workers there who were far more efficient and then pulled away to spend a half hour training us to do their job poorly for three hours.

Great for coverage in the company newsletter though.

I'd give a call-out to Habitat for Humanity in the US (providing lower-cost homes to qualifying families).

From the builds I've worked, they seem more than happy to exploit your muscle and tell you exactly what needs doing. It helps that home construction is mostly repetitive (nail this way, 100 times).

Also, surprise finding that about 1/4 of IT colleagues don't know how to drive a nail.

1/4 seems low

There's "I can make this nail go in if I work at it for a while" and "in straight with four hammer blows".

It was generally "I don't understand what 'smack it hard' means."

When you're driving 16d's, no sense beating around the bush.

I'm probably one of the people who thinks they know how to do it, but in reality don't.

Imho, it's mostly the right weight hammer + accuracy. Sadly, the latter of those lessons was personally learned only through the smashing of many a finger, to the tune of my grandfather's amused laughing.

That's where nailers come in handy. Using a hammer is kind of like coding on an Apple II.

Great organization there, and the people donating time do actually work enough hours to amortize the training time. It’s less useful from a corporate publicity standpoint though because of the time investment. Plus your employees are being trained into an opportunity for work that may be more satisfying and still decently paid, and then leave.

Sometimes you do just need bodies to move dirt or spread mulch or stuff envelopes or whatever. Obviously the phenomena you describe is real, but please don't write off volunteering as a whole.

Or you could do your normal work for 100$/hours, then donate that to pay two people at 50$/hours to do it. By spending the same amount of time, you helped twice as much.

Sometimes there's value in getting your hands dirty, in connecting with your local community, in having a sense of satisfaction from personally doing a good thing, in seeing how those less fortunate are struggling.

Not every problem is a pure efficiency maximization problem. There are intangibles to consider as well.

The question is then, why do organisations ask for volunteers? They could just appeal for money and pay for people to e.g. rattle tins. Maybe having volunteers signals something to the public, e.g. that the charity is doing good work.

Having been part of an org that asked for volunteers, we did it for two reasons:

First, to try to have a pool of repeat volunteers who we could rely on. In any other context, we would call these people "employees" but we ran on such a shoestring we couldn't pay everyone for all of their labor. Sucks, but such is the nature of the non-profit world outside of the glossy donor magazines. Most of these generous souls were recruited from friends and family or were people who'd received services from us in the past.

Second, is for advertising and to drum up support. People are far more likely to donate to a group they've volunteered with, even once, in the past as they feel a sense of ownership over the organization's outcome. Those "bring a bunch of six-figure salary folks to a group to pack boxes for a few hours?" They tended to result in some of the best donations we received for the whole year.

Free Staff? Is there another term for this that's proper and also doesn't imply compensation?

Is the word you're looking for "volunteer"?

"volunteer staff" is probably close.

"volunteer" by itself is not, because it implies nothing about it being long-term.

Neither one really gets the connotation right.

Repeat volunteer. Long term volunteer.

This is actually a double-edged sword, at least in the USA. You can’t have volunteers and employees do the same work, even at a charity. If you do, you fall afoul of federal wage laws. So you aren’t allowed, for example, to have a mixture of paid and volunteer workers acting as docents at a museum to help with staffing challenges, or have a mix of volunteer and paid workers work the register.

Sorry, I was unclear; I meant we would love to hire all of these amazing people who come back to volunteer week after week, but we can't afford it so we rely on donated labor.

The (very small number of) paid staff jobs and volunteer roles definitely don't overlap. First because our lawyer agrees with you, and second because we feel like that would be extremely rude to have one person be paid while another person is doing the labor for free. If one person is getting paid to do the role, everybody doing that role should be getting paid.

We try to do right by our volunteers. For example, when we have a new paid opening, we tell our volunteers about it first. And sometimes someone donates some money with a note of "do something nice for the volunteers, if you can," so we'll throw a party for our amazing volunteers or buy a nicer lunch (everybody gets fed but sometimes it's boxed sandwiches with chips and other days it's a full taco spread from a local restaurant)..

I'd ask in response if you've ever seen an organization asking for volunteers that isn't also asking for money.

If you can volunteer in addition to sending money, depending on the org they will have some shitwork to do that is unpleasant/monotonous (would cost money to get someone to do) and low-skilled (you probably won't screw it up, and they don't have to waste skilled staff on it - and the skilled staff hate doing it even more than you will.)

> Or you could do your normal work for 100$/hours, then donate that to pay two people at 50$/hours to do it. By spending the same amount of time, you helped twice as much.

This view doesn't take account of the massive range of skills required to deliver actual services (conservation, relief, etc), which would be cripplingly expensive to deliver through paid / contracted staff.

Concrete example: I've been volunteering at a raptor conservancy trust in the UK for two years. The advantages of volunteers is that the Trust gets a pool of enthusiastic people who can be tasked on a wide range of tasks on a very flexible basis. Actual volunteer tasks (I have done about half of these) include

* engagement with the public (crowd control, explaining what is going on, etc)

* animal husbandry (cleaning, water bowls, etc)

* construction (e.g. new aviary builds)

* infrastructure maintenance and repair (aviaries, fences, benches, signage, etc)

* equipment maintenance and repair (lawn mowers, power tools, etc)

* grounds work (gardening, weed control, etc)

* photo-library management / social media editing

* IT support

* conservation surveys (e.g. species surveys / transects)

* nest box deployment

And many more. The volunteers' free time allows the Trust's paid permanent staff to concentrate on their core competencies: looking after birds of prey and supporting global breeding projects and anti-poacher activities. The Trust is often able to match volunteer duties to the individual volunteers who enjoy them most / have a demonstrated aptitude - e.g. a retired guy who enjoys pottering with machines one day a week can maintain a small fleet of lawn mowers, strimmers, ATVs, pressure washers, etc, without the Trust incurring a regular maintenance contract. People with DIY carpentry skills can put up signs, make nest boxes, fix seats, etc.

Volunteer support has also been essential during the pandemic, when the Trust's revenue was slashed as a result of lockdowns.

Your consistent volunteering over multiple years is great and helpful. What doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact for the charity is a group of randos showing up for an afternoon in matching company shirts after a morning scavenger hunt, play-act volunteering for a few hours, then disappearing to the company-sponsored drinks and dinner event never to be heard from again.

Thank you!

> What doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact for the charity is a group of randos showing up for an afternoon

Yes, I totally agree. It's the long term commitment that makes volunteers useful. Rando newbies need monitoring and don't know how much they don't know about the real problems. So can only be given a narrow range of tasks. They can't be trusted with tools that are dangerous or tasks that have expensive failure modes.

But some percent stick around? I would go going back to habitat for humanity if not for the fact the work sites are all closed due to covid.

> But some percent stick around?

Yes, these are the ones that you start to invest time in.

Coming back to the organisation I volunteer for, the majority of the volunteers are already 'members' (e.g. they have purchased annual season tickets, etc). A few will drop out after a few weeks, typically when they realise that the work can be physically demanding and in all weathers. But once people demonstrate reliability and earn trust, then they usually get the chance to do more interesting things.

My hourly rate is over one thousand dollars an hour, and I still volunteer because it's fulfilling to get your hands dirty.

Sorry that I'm selfish.

If you regularly volunteer for the same task then you are helpful. A one day and never seen again probably wasn't helpful.

I've volunteered one offs before. A local urban farm needed to plant dozens of trees. They spent 15 minutes teaching them turned loose the group. We got them planted in like an hour. Then we moved onto weeding and litter cleanup.

Yes, I volunteer for something that requires a week of training. I volunteer a day every month or so.

Well, at least you recognise that you're doing it for yourself; self-awareness is the first step. Maybe you could donate money too, to make up for it.

I'd be willing to bet most people on this site are paid salary, not hourly.

You can still divide your salary by how many hours you work in an average year.

Sure. But I can't choose to work another hour instead of volunteering, make $60, and donate it. Salary doesn't work that way, and which is why these comparisons never make any sense to me.

In fact, if I decide to work another hour, I would be making less per hour.

most of America isn't making $100/hour. I don't make $100/hour. Heck, 2 years ago, I wasn't even making $50/hour.

I get your point, but for a good bulk of people, their time is in fact worth less than their total individual income for that day.

They do however love the opportunity to grow a sense of loyalty and investment in people earning six figures

I’d see those as one day internship to get to know an organization and what they do day to day.

The same way as companies allow kids to come to “do” their parent’s work for one day, it’s more of a PR move + keeping your org in touch with people from different culture/positions.

I think the volunteer time is not helping either, but there is more to it, through involvement that those people (we) have a understanding of the issues at hand that simply can't be replaced by promotional brochures and other forms of advertisement, which often just seems distant.

Charities run these sort of events primarily as fundraising. People who have spent some time volunteering are way more likely to donate and continue donating. It's common that it costs the charity more to supervise the untrained company people than it would to hire for the tasks, but it's still positive when you factor in future funding.

Our local minor league baseball team supports fund raisers by having the charity's volunteers work the concession stand for a night for a percentage.

That's how I spent 4 hours making roller dogs one Sat night.

The few regular crew does set up and tear down while the manager has a stressful evening herding cats. =)

I’ll add that food banks also prefer money over the can of beans that’s been sitting in your pantry for six months. They can buy in bulk at great rates and they know what the community needs.

100% correct. For example, the Chicago food depository is an amazing organization with a really well run warehouse. It’s best just to give them cash because they can buy in bulk and obviously it’s easier to manage large quantities of identical products than one-off donations.

Food banks also get a lot of bulk food donations from grocery stores and distributors. But they need cash to pay for trucks to pick up the donations, and to rent operating space.

This would be a great scene in a dystopian star warsesque universe.

Planet is bombed, human suffering, etc. Then, because of light speed travel, minutes later broken lamps and broken toasters fall from run down ’good will’ ships that finish off the planet.

See Autofac by PKD.

Short Story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac

TV Show: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

read the short story as a kid, always stuck w me. more relevant than ever with the continual drive towards efficiency and consumption fueled by amazon et al. the tv ep unfortunately changed the ending in a way that completely lost the character of the original (imo). still interesting but less dickian.

MCU beat them to it with the trash planet in Thor: Ragnarok.

Reminds me of this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719719.The_Garbage_Chron...

Where they dump Earth's garbage on another planet, that has life forms based on fruit people. Willy Watermelon Attorney at Law.

More Douglas Adams than Star Wars.

True! Reminds me of the fate of the Poghrils[1] and (to a lesser extent) the Shoe Event Horizon[2].

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/p/756092

[2] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon

See Charles Stross' Singularity Sky (aka Escaton Book #1).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81992.Singularity_Sky

https://textarchive.ru/c-2418451-pall.html

In which a materially-post-scarcity society called The Festival liters a world with telephones that all make the same offer.

“Entertain us and we will give you anything you want.”

Reminds me of the Billy the Galactic Hero. Where one solution for waste management was to ship it off-world. As post-packets...

Which is a strong indication that state or pan-nation but tax-funded aid and reconstruction programmes are better than charity. Yet, we insist in the feel good model of donations for reuse, or only for the tax write-off.

Not that it doesn't have or keep perpetuating problems of its own: obligatory labour laws, and forced market models are strings attached to world bank funding which can ruin an economy faster than you can say "chicago boys"

In theory the tax write-off makes sense: instead of the government serving as a middleman for charities and making political decisions on who-gets-what, it allows the citizens to more freely support the charities they like directly.

Sadly, in its present form, most people in the US seem to be too exhausted and cash-poor to donate larger amounts more frequently (even before COVID), slowly increasing the reliance on larger endowments based on the whims of fewer and fewer people/organizations. People with lower incomes also probably don’t pay enough in taxes to really reap the benefits of the write-off since it’s only a deduction.

My impression is that poor people donate a lot through their churches, which do tons of important social work, but we HN people have zero contact with those layers of society.

Charitable donations increased 5% from 2018 to 2019 (before COVID). We don't have the data on 2020 yet.

https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-g...

It's only a deduction you can take if you itemize your deductions. This rules out nearly all renters.

> instead of the government serving as a middleman for charities and making political decisions on who-gets-what, it allows the citizens to more freely support the charities they like directly.

In this case it would make sense to make the donations mandatory and income-dependent. Let people choose which cause to support but don't let them choose not to support anything. I happily pay income tax for the state to support those around me who need it, which ideally should cover the need for donations fully, but see your point.

Still, nobody should be dependent on only the good-will of other luckier people to this extent, when the system and people's background influence economical success this much.

>Yet, we insist in the feel good model of donations for reuse, or only for the tax write-off.

You do realize that even with the write-off, making a donation is still strictly net negative from a finance point of view[1]? If you donate $1000, your bank account contains $1000 fewer dollars, but you don't get back $1000 in tax credits. It reduces your income by $1000, which roughly translates to a benefit of $1000 * [your marginal tax rate].

[1] assuming you're not pulling any tax shenanigans

> If you donate $1000, your bank account contains $1000 fewer dollars, but you don't get back $1000 in tax credits

That's not how it works in France, you give 1000€ and you get an actual tax credit of 750€ (this is restricted to 20% of income tax).

So if you normally pay, say, 5000€ of tax, now in total you pay 4250€ of tax + 1000€ of donation ; but you can display on your website "donated 1000€ to foundation X !" (which has a value in itself as it improves opinion of your company, you can make a small press release, etc..) And that cost you only 250€ in practice.

Only if you ask for it though. You can always just give money and leave the taxes as they are.

You're both lucky.

It's stupid in Canada and seemingly nothing to do with giving or encouraging it. If you're in the highest tax brackets, that last $1000 you earn as income nets you ~$550. If you donate that $550 to a charity, you only get a credit that works out to half your tax rate on $550.

It's less credit for the first $200 in donations, and more credit for amounts above that for unknown reasons. Because 2 people donating $200 shouldn't count as much as 1 person donating $400? Or $200 every year gets you less credit than $400 every other year. Shouldn't we encourage regular giving in small amounts?

Meanwhile, if you have a stock that goes from $100 to $1000 and donate it, not only do you get totally exempt from capital gain tax, you get ~30% back on that full $1000.

If your income is low enough to not pay income tax, you get nothing back on your donations until you do.

Why aren't income-earning people allowed to get a full deduction on the tax paid on their donations?

I apply the same principle to wedding and graduation gifts. Here are people who probably don't even know where they're going to be living in six months. The last thing they need is more stuff.

Not just more stuff: more high-end stuff they'd never buy for themselves.

Indeed, especially because you're not supposed to get them stuff that's actually useful, like a decent oscilloscope or a proper set of cone wrenches.

We used a Google spreadsheet for our gift registry ten years ago. One of my friends, a sheet metal worker, gave us a really decent toolbox. Still using it.

If only people bought high-end stuff... often enough, they buy low-end stuff, blocking off a product category for a while - e.g., you're not going to buy a proper quality coffee maker for yourself if you just got a shitty one as a gift from a relative, because you'll worry about offending that relative.

Asian cultures just give money, well AFAIK.

In Poland money is 100% acceptable too. We had a wedding couple years ago, just said on the invitation that we're saving for the honeymoon, all guests just gave money, no other gifts.

I'm not the biggest fan of Amazon, but one thing they do well is gift receipts that let you return the gift for Amazon credit without letting the gift sender know you didn't like their gift.

Important to keep in mind that the random person in America has more miscellaneous junk than disposable income.

Here's a good old business idea. Create a gift registry where donors upload their donations to be validated / accepted by the charity org. The registry could be open source or for-profit.

Goodwill has a natural time delay that gives a chance for things to die off.

If someone can solve the huge drop in people who donate if they have to put in any effort it would be amazing.

Facebook has done it essentially already with their donations

This would only work for high value items, or 'semi-fungible' goods with an easy to determine resale value (e.g. books, media, smartphones). For the latter it probably wouldn't work either. You already have things like Eco-ATM and the BookScouter app that let you quickly and easily liquidate an old phone or a stack of books, etc. It's more work than donating (you have to sort through the books, generate an invoice, etc.) but you get some cash. If donating were the same process, many people would probably opt for the cash.

I've known people who made six figures driving around to thrift stores, buying up any books worth >$10 and shipping them straight to an Amazon warehouse. I do believe I've also heard of some Goodwills scanning book donations and sorting out the valuable ones themselves for resale elsewhere.

Someone mentioned "stuff arbitrage" below and I think this is really the value goodwill, et. al provides. Sorting and classifying donations provides a lot of overhead that doesn't scale well for things like clothing. In the past when I was broke and unemployed I used to go to Goodwill and buy a bunch of low-middle end designer clothes (Levis, Ralph Lauren, cashmere sweaters, etc.) for $3-5 a pop, and sell them on ebay for $20-50. The margins aren't bad, but it's a labor intensive endeavor. Between finding the right items, inspecting for defects, cleaning, measuring, photographing, creating an ebay listing, shipping and handling, etc. I made maybe minimum wage. Called it quits after ebay raised their fees for the umpteenth time.

If I'm understanding your idea correctly it would make donating more complicated, meaning less donations. Additionally, if you have things at a thrift store priced at "market value" you eliminate a.) the social benefit of making low cost used items available to the community (think a homeless guy buying a suit for a job interview for $5) b.) the fun of finding that hidden gem, which is the real reason most people shop there to begin with.

For things like art, high-end furniture, musical instruments, it might make sense though.

Tainted altruism is a good paper to read. Selfishness (in this case, the desire to get rid of junk) is slippery when it is in the name of altruism. When we have psychological cover, we are more willing to do the wrong thing. Many great papers on this. Look up "tainted altruism" and follow the rabbit hole of papers.

Even giving money to charities may not be a good idea. I think it is sound financial advice never to donate funds/anything to a charity. If you want to donate money, donate to somebody/something that provides a free service/product to you, or perhaps some political organisation whose ideas you espouse, or to a friend in need, but never to a charity.

What do you mean by “sound financial advice“? Of course you are not going to get richer by donating. In fact you are going to be poorer financially! But that is not the only aspect of life which matters.

> “If you want to donate money, donate to somebody/something that provides a free service/product to you”

That sounds very much like paying for the service or product in question. Can you elaborate on what you meant by this?

“... but never to a charity.”

Why? You spent a lot of characters and 3 ornately wrought sentences wich all just reitareted this “wisdom” as if it is a fact without explaining why you think so. Are you against altruism in all forms? Or perhaps you have this opinion from an effective altruism perspective?

I really don't get the appeal many Americans have for charity, and I think there are better ways of helping people than giving to these organizations whose only real effect is going to leave you poorer.

Charity is a non-solution for any of the worlds problems, and a distraction from finding real solutions.

Please elaborate. I’m having a hard time understanding your argument. Are you saying, for instance, that charities should not exist because they are a band-aid for missing government policies? I would submit that the dog rescue charities that I support are not going to be made redundant by a guaranteed minimum income plan for canines…

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