Why donating money is a lazy option? | Artemis

3 min readJul 29, 2019

You must be thinking, have they lost their mind? How can someone undermine an action as noble as donating? We are not saying donating is bad. But do you think that only donating money online or giving away your old clothes enough?

Donation helps assuage our guilt, but is a temporary solution

How many times have we all felt bad at seeing a homeless person on the street, felt a tinge of sadness in our heart for being better off than them, given them some money, and felt better about ourselves and found that guilt disappear? After all, that person won’t sleep hungry tonight, thanks to us!

It was a good deed to help someone and we deserve to feel good about ourselves. But maybe we got assuaged of that guilt too soon. Is one meal enough or shouldn’t dignity be a basic human right as well? Maybe if that guilt would have remained in our heart and nagged us, we might have taken an action, like trying to create job opportunities for homeless people or teaching in a free community school. That might have helped alleviate that person from his homeless state and be a more long-term solution. Like the saying goes,

“ Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

World’s problems can’t be solved without getting our hands dirty

Sure, giving money to a charity to protect turtles is good. But it also makes sure we stay distant from the problems at hand. To properly tackle the world issues at hand, we need more people who understand the gravity of the problems affecting the world and we need more people who feel connected to them. And we won’t feel that connection till we actually go to down to a beach in Bali, see the amount of plastic that washes ashore everyday and understand the magnitude of the problem.

Donation is more helpful for the state than the causes?

People have often argued that donating money to charities also allows the government to escape their responsibility towards issues at hand. So instead of working towards building a sustainable environment that will help solve issues like gender equality or poverty or health issues, government agencies start relying on charities working in these sectors and shake off their responsibility towards it.

Limiting doing good to donating can be limiting

A vast amount of population has limited resources or don’t trust charities and fear that the money they give won’t be used properly. That often discourages people from taking any action. People either keep on delaying doing good till they become Bill Gates or get caught up in the bureaucracy. The intent never converts into action.

“There are two ways of spreading light — to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” — Edith Warton

What’s the solution?

We are not saying donation is bad or has no benefits. Almost all NGOs/NPOs run on money they receive from donors. And that is NEEDED and it makes a lot of difference. We certainly appreciate donating and think the world needs more people to donate. But, we don’t want to limit donation to just donating money or material things, we believe world needs more people donating their TIME as well. It needs to be accompanied with people getting out of the comfort of their homes and volunteering with other people to solve the larger issues at hand. Actively getting involved in volunteering efforts has proven to

Increasing people’s awareness about issues
Making them more mindful of their actions and the role they play in the society
Increasing their feeling of accountability
Increasing empathy and altruistic behavior
Increasing their connection with people from different backgrounds
Increasing acceptance of others
Helping to solve the fundamental problem and not just the symptoms

We need to get to the root of the problem. After all, no amount of money spent to clean the ocean can be effective if we continue to use plastic indiscriminately.

Originally published at https://www.artemis.im on July 29, 2019.