“Air Ambulance” collection sacks…
I arrived home today to find a collection envelope containing a plastic sack, for me to fill with “Good quality clean clothing, linen curtains, as new underwear, socks and tights, shoes, belts, bags, teddy bears, toiletries, cosmetics, cd’s (sic), dvd’s (sic), unwanted mobile phones. No electrical items, books or bric-a-brac”
The envelope gives a lot of information about the “Warwickshire and Northamptonshire Air Ambulance” and quite rightly praises it highly - and proclaims that the Air Ambulance needs an enormous amount of funds to continue its good work - which it undoubtedly does.
The information printed on the envelope is all designed to lead one to believe that when you fill the sack, the funds raised from the sale of “your” goods will go to the Air Ambulance. If one looks at the detail, then it states that for every tonne of items received by the collectors, £40 will be donated to the Air Ambulance…
If we spend a moment considering that statement, we can work on the following to be close to fact: each item collected on average weighs approximately 0.5kg, so there are 2000 items to the tonne. For those 2000 items, £40 is donated to the Air Ambulance, which equates to 2 pence per item…
TWO PENCE PER ITEM!
I suspect that most of these “Good Quality Clean” items end up on the markets - unlikely though to be priced anywhere near 2 pence per item…
I would be the last person to advise against donations to charity in general, and the Air Ambulance in particular - I believe it offers a tremendously good and crucial service - but unfortunately in this case the collection company is taking nearly all of the proceeds. There can be little doubt that both the Air Ambulance and other charities would be much better off if we all donated a couple of pounds to the Air Ambulance and sent our clothes to the local charity shops.
I am sure that we all support the efforts by some of the locals to hold events to raise funds for the Air Ambulance - more strength to them - and that makes it all the more galling for people to profit extortionately, whilst pretending to do good deeds - I’m sure we can all imagine how much collecting they would do if they asked for your items for free, in order to sell them for personal profit!
Will Doherty.