Thursday 23 January 2020

Is the bushfire relief money being spent?

My nephew has just sent me something which is apparently doing the rounds in social media.
He has apparently copied this one from Twitter - or had it sent to him.  A cautious man he wanted to know if it was likely to be true.
I told him the answer was both "yes" and "no".
The answer is  "yes" because the money will not yet have been spent. The answer is "no" because charities get audited and they will have to account for where the money goes. If money is given to them for a particular purpose then it must be spent on that purpose and not on some other purpose.
Yes, money will be wasted. It will be wasted for all sorts of reasons, some of it outside a charity's control. There are federal and state government entities at work here as well as charities. Sometimes things will get duplicated while other things get overlooked altogether. 
And there will always be the "squeaky wheels" - the people who shout the loudest and demand the most. They may not be the most deserving but their demands will be met in order to keep them quiet. 
There will be other people who won't ask, don't ask and even can't ask. They may be in even greater need of help. They may simply be too traumatised to even think about asking. Right now they are not functioning. They are reacting. They are surviving.  It is impossible for them to make decisions, let alone big decisions. 
It is all too easy for people not affected to simply make a donation to Red Cross or the Salvation Army or something else and think, "I've done my bit." The reality is that it is much more complex than that. None of  us have ever "done our bit".
It's called "love one another". 

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