Charity

Thursday

Teresa Mull

In praise of American charity

Here’s a bittersweet headline to warm your heart this holiday season: “Woman set up GoFundMe that raised over $1 million for her children before she died.” And another: “GoFundMe benefiting pregnant wife of Matthew Gaudreau has raised over $500K.” And one more for good measure: “GoFundMe raises over $26K for Massachusetts State Police trooper’s family.” I see stories like these weekly — and what’s remarkable about them is not so much that people are willing to help neighbors enduring tragedy, but how so many people are willing to go above and beyond what is being asked. The first fundraiser, for instance, was set up by a single mother from Utah dying of cancer to raise $5,000 for her own funeral expenses and a little money for the kids she left behind.

charity

Monday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meet the telemarketer-turned-filmmaker behind HBO’s Telemarketers

In 2001, at the age of fourteen, Sam Lipman-Stern dropped out of high school in New Jersey and started working at the now defunct Civic Development Group (CDG) as a telemarketer. He stayed for seven years, calling up citizens to ask for money on behalf of police charities. It turned out to be a massive scam.  More than two decades later, Lipman-Stern, now thirty-six and a seasoned filmmaker, has exposed not only CDG — which underhandedly kept 90 percent of the proceeds it raised — but the entire industry in his frenetic, rip-roaring investigative HBO documentary Telemarketers.  Co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough and produced by the Safdie brothers, the three-part docuseries is a wild ride, largely due to Lipman-Stern’s archival footage.

Sunday

Amber Duke

The Satanic Temple’s legal campaign against criticism

What happens when you create a de jure religious organization for the purposes of opposing organized religion? In the case of the Satanic Temple, you seemingly become the thing that you hate. After I wrote about the Satanic Temple's attempt to start an After School Satan Club at an elementary school in Chesapeake, Virginia, I was made aware of an ongoing legal battle between TST and some of its former members. TST accused four former members of hacking a Facebook group for a Washington State chapter, as well as a related meme page, and using it to post defamatory claims about the organization and its leadership. The Satanic Temple's latest lawsuit against these former members was dismissed in January by a district court.

Thursday

They/Them

Shelter and the world of white homeless privilege

The biggest homeless charity in the UK appears to be teaching its staff that white people who live on the street need to check their privilege because they benefit from white supremacy. This is the latest Wokeyleak from a source inside Shelter, which manages some £70 million ($96.3 million) in donations a year. The charity subjected employees to over 12 hours of excruciatingly woke Zoom tutorials on such edifying topics as ‘Mitigating Whiteness at Work’. Extracurricular reading included courses on ‘Learning How To Apologise’. Some of Shelter’s diverse staff objected to this controversial critical race theory training but were told that participation was ‘not optional’. Every single one of Shelter’s executive team, incidentally, is white.

shelter

Friday

Charles Lipson

Those emails seeking donations aren’t junk mail

It’s a small miracle, really, and it only happens in America. Every December, the mailboxes fill with requests for donations. They come from St Jude’s Hospital, the Salvation Army, the World Jewish Congress, Nature Conservancy, Feed America, the American Cancer Society and thousands more. They trickle in all year, but the deluge comes after the clock strikes 12 on December 1. And not just emails. Every day the postman brings more, most describing the charities’ good works, offering heart-warming (or heart-wrenching) stories of the people they help, and perhaps including a calendar for the coming year. Another request appears on Wikipedia pages, reminding us this invaluable service is funded solely by donations.

emails

Saturday

Charlie Nash and Paul Rowan Brian

Coming clean: can porn be virtuous?

This week, Pornhub launched a campaign to raise awareness about plastic pollution: a porn video set on a dirty, plastic bottle-littered beach. Titled 'The Dirtiest Porn Ever,' the porn giant has promised to donate a portion of the money from views to an ocean cleanup charity ⁠— incentivizing people into watching porn. As if people don’t watch enough already. It’s not the first time that a pornography company has attempted to brand itself as virtuous. Pornhub even has an entire charity page on its website called Pornhub Cares. Saving the bees, conserving endangered pandas, helping women pursue an education, and planting trees are just a handful of campaigns that Pornhub has run over the past few years.

pornhub porn

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

It’s high time to butcher PETA

Animal liberation charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has gone and done it again. Notorious for using cheap shock tactics to make a noise and pull in more donations, the organization sent a press release and posted a tweet within an hour of the announcement that fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld (for whom I personally felt no love) had died: ‘Karl Lagerfeld has gone, and his passing marks the end of an era when fur and exotic skins were seen as covetable. PETA sends condolences to our old nemesis’s loved ones.’ Last year, Lagerfeld, who had long defended his use of fur, conceded to demands that that he stop using fur and crocodile, lizard, snake and stingray skins in his designs.

peta