Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
As reported in yesterday’s posting, tsunami relief donations are pouring in. Personally, I can’t seem to stop quoting the figures from Catholic Relief Services: $700,000 collected annually and now $9.1 million collected in two weeks.
How can any organization process and distribute ten or twenty times the money it usually handles in a year? Could you eat 10 times as much this year as you did last year? Could your organization do ten times as much work? I think not.
Questions will of course be raised about how this money is spent. Let that be as it will, but I’d like to suggest an alternative to pumping tons of money into these huge organizations. Give small. Give to little people. Ask around. Who do you know? I have a friend whose son worked in Sri Lanka. Who does he know there. I have a friend in Thailand. Do they know groups that can use resources… and what kind of resources?
Could small be more powerful now? Maybe. Think about it. And what about bloggers? Are there tsunami relief projects that are being reported in weblogs? Post the addresses in the comments. Can we make connections here between the little people? Start conversations? The money might take longer to get there, but the conversations about what’s happening can provide much longer term support. Please post project blogs in the comments here.
I haven’t had time, but I want to look up what Sri Lanka and Thailand and Indonesia already sell to us. I’ll try to buy more of that stuff, as I need it. The news and the flurry of checks writing will be over long before the rebuilding. Can we open conversations and buying patterns that can support rebuilding long into the future?
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