Charitable or not?
Recently, I have been trying to raise some money for a relatively new charity with branches in the UK and France. The charity is taking a group of young Armenians from the UK to Armenia in the summer holidays to help out with renovating schools and looking after the students. Medical and care staff are also in the group. Each person has paid their own air fare and living costs, so the charity is looking for donations to pay for the cost of buying materials to renovate the buildings.
One of my friends is going on this trip, and he asked me if I would like to help him fundraise. The fundraising involves a sponsored competition in which small groups of people have to go around London for a day finding the answers to a number of questions. The first group to return will win a prize. I accepted to help out and printed out a copy of the sponsorship sheet the very same day in order to get a head start. However, I did not know how difficult it would be to ask people for such small sums of money…
I decided that the best place to start would be the weekly Armenian Saturday School. All the parents and teachers there are Armenian, so it seemed plausible that they would recognise the current situation of village schools in Armenia better than others and be willing to sponsor me and donate to the charity. How wrong I was!
I spoke to the headteacher and she advertised the cause before the start of school. However, only one parent ever came up on the day to make a donation. Note that I wasn’t asking for any set amount, and I was expecting donations of £1 or £2, which is normal for sponsorships. It seems like these people are either extremely tight-fisted, or alternatively, according to my parents, they don’t completely understand the principles of sponsorship since that kind of thing does not exist in Armenia or even outside Europe and the USA. They are too embarassed to donate small amounts and too poor to donate large amounts, so they do the only other thing possible and completely avoid the issue.
It really is a sad story when I am more successful in raising money for an Armenian charity from non-Armenians than the nationals themselves.
Have you had a similar experience with fundraising for charity? If so, I would like to hear from you.