Controversially, a petition signed by 100,000 people has called for a reallocation of the UK’s foreign aid budget to help compensate British flood victims and improve flood defences. The £11 billion annual budget aims to alleviate poverty and help crisis-affected areas around the world. Similarly, complaining voices in the right-wing media have criticized aid agencies like Oxfam for being too concerned about international poverty and ignoring the poor in the UK.
This attitude seems to run counter to a more common sentiment that relief charities associated with humanitarian disasters in the developing world have no real business operating in the UK, where, it is sometimes suggested, the “real” poverty does not. exist. In Venezuela in 1999, 30,000 were assassinated. The devastation in Bangladesh in 2004 was indescribable, with waters covering 60 percent of the country and leaving an estimated 30 million people homeless or stranded. The 2011 Southeast Asian floods killed an additional 3,000 people and wiped out the livelihoods of millions.
So should charity start at home? Should we first help our own people before worrying about the rest of the world?
Help needed close to home
someone said: “If you really want to make the world a better place, start by giving help to those in need right here in our city.”
In other words, there’s no use sending money to a foreign relief fund if you ignore the needs of people sleeping rough on your own streets who need food banks.
A number of international charities provide aid in Britain.
The international charity Oxfam has had aid programs in the UK for the last 20 years.
UNICEF focuses on the most disadvantaged children wherever they are so that they grow up safe, happy and healthy. It works in 190 countries, including with UK public services to protect, promote and support breastfeeding and strengthen mother-baby and family relationships.
Save the Children works in more than 120 countries. He has worked in the UK since the 1930s when he set up crèches in deprived areas of the country. Support children living in the most severe poverty by providing their families with household essentials, such as a children’s bed, family kitchen, or educational books and toys.
“If you don’t have any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart problem.” (Bob Hope)
Aid for social exclusion
The need for food and shelter is an obvious need that tugs at our heartstrings and is found in many war torn regions and third world countries. Aid charities will not distribute emergency shipments of grain to people in the UK because that is generally not how poverty is found here.
However, there are other forms of deprivation that are less easy to discern. Poverty looks different around the world, but all disadvantaged communities have a sense of social exclusion, lack of voice and lack of opportunity to shape their own lives. In Britain there are many families who are not starving, but suffer from food and housing insecurity caused by low wages, unemployment: they are slipping out of the net of what some commentators have described as a social security system every increasingly threadbare, where complications with benefits mean there are long delays.
Help that does not create dependency
A big concern that many of us have about giving to the poor is creating a culture of dependency. Where is the incentive to try to work your way out of poverty when one risks losing the benefit of regular handouts? That’s why genuine charity involves acting sensibly as well as loving.
“It is thought that charity towards one’s neighbor consists of giving to the poor, helping the needy and doing good to everyone. But true charity implies acting with circumspection and so that good results.” (Emanuel Swedenborg)
Oxfam uses the principle of ‘give away’, rather than ‘give away all the time’. On a practical level, it funds social workers to guide often desperate food bank customers through the maze of social security and offer advice on managing debt and getting back to work.
Another sensible way forward could be to donate money for low-cost loans that can create an ‘can do’ mentality on the part of beneficiaries.
Help as daily charitable behavior
Giving to a relief charity is all very well, but isn’t it meaningless unless we’re also doing good in the normal exercise of our everyday roles? That would mean acting sincerely and honestly with concern for others rather than self-interest. Giving our time and efforts not for the sake of reputation, honor, and gain, but for the sake of meeting the needs of those around us.
“Neighborhood charity is much broader in scope than helping the poor and needy. Neighborhood charity involves doing the right thing in every task and doing what is required in any official position.” (Swedenborg)
Central to this view is the notion that charity is about giving of ourselves without seeking reward out of self-interest.
Unless charity starts at home, in this sense of an attitude of goodwill and integrity in our relationships, I would say that any donation of money for international aid is like giving a guilty gift to a child to make up for the absence of a father. or fulfilling an occasional social obligation without bothering to provide any regular helpful contact or input.
Help as a means of spiritual enlightenment
It is important to help those we know whose lives interact with ours in our daily lives. But that should perhaps just be the beginning.
“Charity begins at home, but it must not end there.” (Thomas Fuller)
Giving regularly to help others in need has been a common spiritual discipline and is found in various religious traditions. The Christian tradition of tithing, optionally pledging a portion of personal income to donate to charity, has analogies with the mandatory charitable traditions of Sunni Islam (Zakat), Judaism (Tzedakah), and Hinduism (Dana).
Copyright 2014 Stephen Russell-Lacy