a challenge

so i had an idea a couple of weeks ago, and it goes like this:

what if i ask everyone that i know who has seen hotel rwanda to donate an amount equivalent to the cost of their ticket to humanitarian relief agencies working in darfur?

it’s kind of like those empty plate dinners that raise money for hunger… have you ever seen one of those? you pay for a dinner, but then you don’t actually go, so all the money goes to the cause without anyone having to spend anything on your spaghetti.

this is like buying a seat for a movie and then not going, so all the money goes to whatever the movie would have been about, and you don’t even have to turn off your cell phone!

:)

we could squabble about whether such small amounts will really make a difference, who we should donate to in order to maximize our impact, whether green is really the new black…

but in the time it takes to have such squabbles, we could each earn the amount in question by flipping burgers at mcdonalds, so i’m going with… not worth it.

at worst, we send $9 in movie money to unicef, and they scratch their heads and go on with their day.

and at best?

let’s just say the potential is hard to ignore.

so let’s try it, shall we?

consider this an official request, from me to you, for you to spend the next 5 minutes of your life clicking on one of the links below and then donating the price of a movie ticket in your hometown.

i’ll do it myself right after i hit “Publish”, and i’ll write another post soon about where the idea came from, for those of you with interest in such things.

give a shout out in the comments if you play along, eh? (but if you’re considering making comparisons to any haley joel osment movies, comment that one forward instead, will ya? ;)

i do appreciate it.

challenge on.

7 Responses to “a challenge”

  1. mom Says:

    I’ll play. Oxfam is one of my favorite charities anyway.

    I love this idea. I’m thinking how it might work when we show Iraq for Sale at church.

  2. Guest Says:

    I have zero faith in… organizations, unless it’s something like send Chinese food to an IDF soldier, but since I check this blog daily I’d feel guilty not joining in. Isn’t there a Darfur specific thingy? I’d rather buy a Kalashnikov for a refugee, but Doctors Without Borders is great, too. Tzedakah means justice!

    I’m not watching the movie, though. I’m depressed enough. I still have the images of rivers in Rwanda running red with blood and the US not even agreeing to send rafts and body bags to help fish out the corpses. We gave them a plaque though, so…

  3. Erik Says:

    I haven’t seen Hotel Rwanda. But I also don’t really understand how donating money is helping anything. Should I donate just on the off chance it randomly does something good? I don’t know what any of these organizations do.

  4. Kevin Makice Says:

    If I could find the $5 (well $20, once you include my date and the staple of Rollos bites, Coke and popcorn), I’d send to Doctors Without Borders. It will be on my to-do list for you once the student loans come in.

    Setting aside the debate above about whether donation of money does any good — and I don’t trust, for example, any organization claiming to help New Orleans; I sent our support directly to families we knew or WWOZ — my concern is the target: a movie. Part of the power of a movie is experiencing the story in a simulated first-hand perspective. I wouldn’t want anyone to NOT see the movie and instead substitute a few bucks. Maybe there is a way to reconstitute this idea so the storytelling isn’t lost. Otherwise, this gets reduced to the passive activism MoveOn (and others) do these days with their click-to-fax campaigns.

  5. kynthia Says:

    guest – http://www.genocideintervention.net is a nonprofit that specifically deals with, well, genocide, and they pledge that at least half of the money will go directly to people on the ground in darfur, with the other half covering operational costs and educational outreach.

    you could poke around for chinese delivery services in the area, though, if you like, and let us know what you find. :)

    erik – i can definitely relate to the feeling that the money might not do any good, and i can’t promise you that it will. the idea, though, is that lots of people don’t send money because they feel that same way, and so there’s no assurance that private donations will ever amount to much, and the burden remains on the public sector, which we both know is less than a paragon of efficiency when it comes to spending aid money.

    i’m saying that we need a sense of being a part of a larger, more powerful whole, and the question is whether people who have seen hotel rwanda could provide a flashpoint for that, since we know that enough people were already willing to “donate” $5 or $10 to hotel rwanda to total over $30 million.

    i’m just intrigued by the idea of small amounts, contextualized in terms of money that has already been spent on something like a movie ticket, adding up to something large enough to have an impact. i’m not saying it’s the perfect solution, but i do think it’s a start, and i’m more than willing to talk about other options for next time, because i think this model could be extended to other causes.

    for now though, yes, you could say that i am asking you to just donate money “randomly.” really, though, i’m arguing that, if enough people join in, the amount could become large enough that it would be impossible for it not to have a positive impact of some sort. a pattern could emerge from the randomness, you might say. :)

    and even if the odds of that are rather slim, i think it’s worth wagering the value of a movie ticket, since we have all most likely spent at least that much this week on other less potentially compelling things.

    if you’d rather spend a half-hour of your time signing petitions or sending postcards to congress, however, i could be persuaded to take that as a donation in kind. check out what they’re doing at http://www.savedarfur.org, or sign the amnesty international petition to send UN peacekeepers to the area.

    kevin – i need to write the fuller background story of how the idea came about, because you remind me of why i don’t really like the empty plate analogy. i’m not saying that people should buy the movie ticket inStead of seeing the movie. i’m asking whether they are willing to pay for the movie aGain. i’m saying: was the emotional power of the movie enough that you think it’s worth twice the cost of the ticket to actually try and do something?

    so it’s not about providing a substance-free substitute for the movie; it’s about providing a simple yet substantive outlet for the energy that the movie inspires. a better analogy than the empty plate dinners is the campaign to buy a ticket for someone else to see an inconvenient truth. but i think it could be better than that, because it transfers the activism outside the theater.

    but i’m not going to get started on participant productions (the folks behind the an inconvenient truth campaign) here, because my reaction to their strategies is part of what got this idea started, and it deserves another post.

    for now, though, does all that make sense, yinz?

  6. dad Says:

    This post reminds me why, whenever I talk with people about you (which dads do now and then), the brag starts like this: “My daughter, Kynthia — and there’s no bias here, but she’s the most awesome human being on the planet — . . (insert whatever I’m boasting about) . . .”.

    Substantively, I have a friend who is a doctor with doctors without borders, so the next time I see him I’ll ask him how to make a donation, or maybe I’ll do it on the web, and tell him it’s from you (after the appropriate aforesaid introduction). I’ll also buy him a beer, and tell him its from you. Then he’ll probably agree that you’re the MAHBOP. Hard to say when I’ll see him again, he’s in town when he’s between assignments — most recently somewhere in China.

    Love you.

  7. Tim Says:

    Maybe you could take the challenge a bit further. I’ve been thinking about starting back up with something that I’ve done in the past when I’ve found myself spending too much on entertainment — for every dollar spent on entertainment, give an equivalent amount to charity.

    On the one hand, it helps to curtail spending too much, since you think before every purchase “yes this is a great deal, but is it really worth it if it’s going to cost me 2x this much?”. On the other hand, it also means a lot more money is going to good causes.

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