My friend was telling me that his wife wanted to take an early retirement so that she could spend her energy volunteering at a nearby nursing home for the elderly. She wanted to do charity work. She also wanted to be around elderly people, because she had lost her own mother some years ago after a long struggle with illness. Her desires are noble, but difficult to achieve thanks to the lack of coordination between social service groups and individuals seeking to do good deeds.
All too often, social service groups view volunteers as intrusive annoyances. It seems some employees of non-governmental organizations are as interested in pay scale, benefits and job descriptions as any employee of the private sector. They don’t view their work in terms of personal passions for humanitarian deeds.
A common recruitment tactic of charity groups is simply to set up a bank account and ask everyone to make deposits. They’re recruiting riyals, not people. I often feel that when I donate to these faceless bank accounts I’m not actually feeding people in need but rather feeding a bureaucracy. Unlike in places like Europe and the United States, there’s no fiscal transparency and accounting methods that are compulsory for non-profit groups.
(In the US, a person who wants to give to charity can often look up the actual percentage of the money that’s used to administer the charity — staff salaries, cost of marketing, etc. — compared to the money that’s used to actually help people. The US Internal Revenue Service has the compulsory 990 Form that all non-profits must fill out each year and that provides valuable information about the organization’s fiscal situation. Many noble non-profits advertise their fiscal health by posting these forms on their websites; those that choose not to advertise their fiscal responsibility probably have reasons not to.)
A lack of any established system for accountability is not just reserved to the organization’s own fiscal well being, it’s also a problem with simply giving money.
An example: I know a businessman who wanted to give his zakah money to a local women’s college. It turned out that the college had no way of accepting or handling such a donation, which amounted to millions of riyals.
I know of another man who wanted to build a public hospital 10 years ago. When he attempted to take the necessary steps from the Ministry of Health, all he got was grief and delays. After a long time, he was able to get a green light, but no papers were signed, no documents were brought out. So he built the hospital. Upon completion it sat for years empty and unused. Nobody from the ministry even bothered to pay a visit to the new facility.
I believe this emphasis on frisking people’s pockets with no system of accountability, or no way to handle donors, is killing the will for people to do charity work.
