I wanted to start a discussion about Crowd funding

I'm really taken with a recent campaign by the husband of Blessie Gotingco, who is trying to raise money to fight the Dept of Corrections for being negligent over their care and release of the man who murdered his wife

Justic for Blessie

It raised $128,000 in only a few days - so clearly that shows the New Zealand public want action.

Do you support any Give a little causes?

Hi Ingrid, I was just talking about the same thing yesterday with a friend.
When Givealittle was new and the stories were just starting to appear on our news pages such as Stuff, I would often go and donate $20 here and there.
Now I rarely read the stories.
Every day there is a new sad story that makes you feel awful, parent dying of cancer and leaving young children, child needing treatment offshore, possessions being lost in house fires etc...
I still feel compassion to these people it is just that I don't want to read miserable stories on a daily basis.
I wonder if they would have more impact if the news sites decided to pick a story of the week to profile rather than filling the gaps in our news stories with misery.
I also think that in some situations there is an onus on the family to protect themselves with insurance etc... to cover for these types of emergencies. I say this carefully knowing that some families have barely enough to live on let alone buy life/health/home insurance.
Also there are some stories that annoy me. One most recently I noticed was a little boy born with one malformed ear with associated hearing loss. The parents were appealling for $100k+ to get this fixed overseas as they are worried about him being teased for having one ear.
Our friends' daughter has lived with the same and is a lovely 16 year old who lives a perfectly happy life.
Horses for courses I guess.

Re Blessie Gotingco, from what I have read I do feel that our system has let the Gottingco family down.
That person, who doesn't deserve his name to be remembered, should never have been in a position that enabled him to offend again but our system doesn't cater for this. He had served his sentence and they just couldn't keep him locked up indefinitely. I hope that they key has now been thrown away and that he is never ever released. I don't know how her family will ever be able to find peace in knowing what she went through.
I would have thought that Sensible Sentencing would have picked this story up rather than the family personally fighting Dept of Corrections.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2016 12:30AM by helen.

Agree with Helen, there are some causes for which Give a Little is perhaps not the appropriate forum and for that reason it may be getting away from its intended purpose which is diluting its effectiveness. There are only so many discretionary dollars and more causes mean fewer dollars for each. I personally do not donate to any Give a Little cause, preferring to help in other ways and probably at a more personal and local level, rather than people I have never met and never likely to meet.

Re the Gotingco family suing Corrections - while the recent report, despite 27 recommendations, concluded that Corrections could not have prevented this terrible tragedy, and while it is possible to sue the Government in NZ (not in some jurisdictions eg the US), I believe that their chances of success are negligible to the point of being non-existent, and the only winners will be the lawyers who represent them. The Government has bottomless resources when it comes to defending itself, including dollars and legal expertise and anything else it needs to get itself off the hook, so I think this venture is doomed before it even begins.

That said, I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Regards,

Barbara Anne



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2016 01:15AM by Barbara Anne.

Good point Barbara Anne and while my heart goes out to the Gotingco family I do see their fight as futile and one that I will refrain from donating to.

I don't donate to crowdfunding or any other fund raising sites. We have our own charity that uses up all of our disposable income (and more) and also I do not have the time to check out the various causes, many of which seem quite questionable.

It may sound callous, but I do not have unlimited resources and am not willing to donate on a knee-jerk basis with no chance to weigh up the worthiness of each issue.

I have also stopped signing on-line petitions as they invariably result in spam, and lately I have even been subjected to telephone cold calling as a result of signing a petition about animal abuse.

I agree with all of your posts above; it is saddening to read some of the Give A Little pages that sound very desperate for funding, but agree that my/our disposable dollars cannot stretch to all of these & we have our selected charities too.
But I have donated in the past, to a personal friend for funding to travel overseas for advanced cancer treatment, so can understand that for some they will do all they can to help & think that this is their only option.
Other pleas though such as a lady this week who is living in her car with her kiddies I think is also really sad, & think this is probably the tip on an iceberg (housing issues) but like Helen think that her predicament could maybe have been prevented by some earlier choices & not refusing the accommodation offered.