Where Have All the Good Fundraising Campaigns Gone?

Surely they still exist somewhere–but I haven’t seen a good youth-based fund-raising scheme for a good while.

Back in the day, when my youth group needed money, we did stuff to earn it even if we did market our “wares” to our parents and home church. My sister headed up–once–a day-long hard-tack candy-making operation in our church basement to raise money to go to a winter retreat. And every year we cooked a “souper bowl” meal of spaghetti and soup for Super Bowl Sunday and asked for donations for the eats.

Thankfully we never had a “slave auction,” a horrible flashback to our country’s slavery days, in which members of a youth group are “auctioned” to church members to do work for them for a day or several hours. But a “slave auction” would have at least had a leg up over today’s fund-raising trends, the leg being that the money-hungry, auctioned youth actually would have had to work for their funds.

Today’s trends? How about many sports teams’ “buy this card for $10 and these businesses will give you 10% off” deals? How about Girl Scouts’ cookie sales? (They don’t even make the cookies, dammit). How about my school’s band’s fund-raising auction? Any band members working that magic show where the auctioneer turns your donated junk into I’m not sure what–Epcot Center tickets?

For school and youth-group fund raising that supports peripheral, luxurious, or inflated lifestyles (Do they really need to go to that theme park…again? Or to fly to Africa for a missions week? Do football teams really need to….uh, to exist?), I don’t see these “just give them a reason to give” campaigns as respectable, appealing, or worthy of my hard-earned coinage.

After all, there are plenty of wholly legitimate causes to donate to, if people are in the market for giving money to people who haven’t really done anything–not even schemed–for it but really need it anyway.