What motivates you to give to a charity?

Xanga, the other site where I maintain a blog, has this new featured question and it got me thinking. You see, just the other day, I was on the phone with my sister and somehow, we got to talking about our parishes.

I'm usually pretty easy to convince when it comes to giving donations & contributing to charity. All it takes is a woeful face or maybe just a mention of all the blessings that we enjoy in life and I'm a goner. Being thankful for what I have is a big motivator, it always makes me want to give back and help someone else out. However, I do need some sort of affirmation that whoever's asking for my help really needs it.

For example, a few years back, my church started this debt elimination campaign because it owed so much that all the money it got was just going towards the interest and was barely making a dent in the $300k principal that it owed. So they parish started this campaign. We were asked for pledges and extra envelopes were distributed so that we can give our contributions every week.

I didn't really get in the spirit of the campaign until a year later, when the new resident priest started implementing cost cutting measures. I didn't really see any need to donate my hard earned cash to the church when our airconditioning units were turned on full blast during the summer and the heater cranked so high during the winter. I also didn't see the need for all those halogen bulbs in the chandeliers. Where I came from, if it was hot ? We fanned ourselves in church. So anyway, the priest started replacing all the high energy bulbs with energy efficient ones. Then the heaters & air conditioning units were turned down to more reasonable levels. These actions showed me that they (the church staff) were committed to the campaign, so I started making an extra effort to contribute.

Last Sunday, a nun also came to speak to our church to collect gifts for the poor students in their school. They had these trees set up in the lobby and hung tags with kid's names, ages and preferences (clothing or toy). Some tags have the kid's preferences too. So we started looking around and some of them stood out, one asked for an xBox 360 game, one asked for a Wii controller, another asked for a PSP game, and yet another was asking for an iPOD case.

What ? These kids were supposed to be poor ? Come on, if they could afford to buy (or has access to these gadgets) then maybe they can afford to buy (get access to) their own accessories. We looked around and found a more reasonable request for an MP3 player, we took that tag and have gotten the item for the child already.