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Uses
for Material Donations
If you have already
collected material to donate to victims of a disaster in another country,
but can’t find an agency that needs these items, there are a few
potential uses for them. (Remember, if you haven’t already begun
collections, contact a relief organization first – see Appropriate
Ways to Make Material Donations.)
- You can register your material
in the Center for International Disaster Information’s (CIDI) database
of available material, which attempts to match offers of material donations
with professional relief organizations. A cautionary note, however:
for all the reasons discussed in previous pages, items with the best
chance of being matched with a responsible relief agency are those which
have been requested by the disaster-stricken country, are of high-quality
and appropriate quantity, and pose no potential health risk to disaster
victims. For additional information, please visit: CIDI's
Disaster Assistance Information Collection.
- You can donate the material
to local charitable organizations operating in non-crisis areas. There
is plenty of need across the United States and in your local area. And
material donations made in the US (in non-crisis situations) do not
face most of the problems described previously: transportation cost,
urgency, cultural appropriateness, etc. Examples of such organizations
include the Salvation Army, Goodwill, homeless shelters, your local
chapter of the American Red Cross, and others. Check your local phone
book for more information.
- You can have a yard sale
with the collected material, and then donate the proceeds to the disaster
relief organization of your choice. You could hold the sale via a church
or community group. Advertising it as a yard sale to support the victims
of a disaster might increase patronage.
Individual
donations of goods and collections of items are put to their best possible
use, and have the greatest impact economically, when they are donated
to local charitable organizations within your own community. (“Disaster
Response: Gifts of Goods & Services for Disaster Relief”, American
Red Cross)
It is not unusual for community
and civic groups to have collected several thousand pounds of relief supplies
only to find that they do not know to whom to send the supplies and that
they do not have viable transportation options for shipping the goods.
At this juncture, it is often advisable for those collecting the goods
to auction them off locally, converting commodities into cash to be applied
to the relief effort. (Center for International
Disaster Information Web Site)
Return
to Guide to Appropriate Giving
Appropriate
Ways to Make Material Donations
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