§   With the best will in the world, I could never fill this aching, endless void of charitable appeals.  §

As I mentioned in an earlier blog (Charity Begins, 06/05/19), I do not tithe to any specific or single organization; I provide funds to various charities as I feel led.  Environmental, animal and children’s charities top that list. But I am growing ever more dismayed by the constant appeals that arrive, both by snail mail, and by e-mail, for yet more funds.

In just one week—one!–I counted appeals from the following agencies:

Wheeler Mission
Arbor Day Foundation
Environmental Defense Fund
Doctors Without Borders
Audubon Society
Smile Train
Hiefer International
Southern Poverty Law Center
ACLU
Planned Parenthood
World Wildlife Fund
Cats Haven
Humane Society

Not even an all-inclusive list, this, of the causes or organizations in which I wholeheartedly believe and to which I have contributed in the past, and it certainly doesn’t include the appeals to which I am subjected through TV commercials and email. But, even with the best will in the world, I could not, cannot, answer all these funding requests. If I had just won the lottery, it’s still unlikely that I could fill this aching, endless void of charitable appeals.

Even more upsetting, years after my initial contribution, I continue to receive funding requests from charities that are not my choice; charities to which I sent a donation only one time. Usually these contributions were made as a memorial for the loved ones of friends; sometimes, the only reason I sent money to a particular organization was that I was once the responsible individual at the office, passing the hat to collect funds and writing the check after a coworker had experienced a loss.

As I open these mailings, so many of which include enclosures–maps and notepads and pens and address labels and little blankets and dream-catchers and greeting cards and tote bags—I’m forced to wonder, how much does all this cost them? All these mailings, all these little bits of bric-a-brac? Can the contributions they acquire from such mailings actually supersede the cost of sending all this stuff out?

And despite all these enclosures, nowhere in those collections of stuff is a simple postcard with an option to check and return, requesting, “Please remove me from your mailing list”. The onus for figuring out whom to contact and then deliberately making that request is put upon the individual being dunned. I cannot help but believe that omission is purposeful. The lack of an uncomplicated “please remove” option is intended keep me on the mailing list ad infinitum, so that I may be guilted into making further contributions. I resent that so much that, even were I inclined to provide more money, I refuse to do so.

The guilt factor is strong in another way, too: only once did I intentionally request to be removed from a mailing list, that of a well-known cancer charity. Fed up after being bombarded with multiple requests in a single week, I finally sought out an e-mail for the right department and sent them a demand that my name be removed from their contact list.  In return, I received the obligatory “It may take us several weeks to process your request” reply—a totally ridiculous statement, and blatantly untrue in an era in which one need only punch a single Delete key on a database to remove contact information. It took almost two months before I was finally free of their incessant mailings, but I still encounter their soul-wrenching commercials on TV every week. I hit “mute” on the remote or walk out of the room each time.

But now, having published this blog, I think I have hit upon the method that I will use in the future to handle requests from repeat offenders in the contribution-by-guilt charity lottery. I will simply print out a copy of this essay and, using their very own return-addressed envelope, mail it, highlighting this note:

“It isn’t that I don’t care. In the past, I may even have supported your endeavors. But I give when I both have the funds and the spirit moves me…and today is not that day. In the meantime, kindly remove me from your contact list.  Please, please, stop asking me for money!”

It may work. Or it may not. But at least I will have stated my feelings and my preference.