Exercise critical thinking while giving #GivingTuesday

When you do a social intervention, you sort of have a responsibility on what happens next, whether it is good or bad. For the most part, donations and volunteers will yield positive results for you, however, for the beneficiary, the impact is often not sustainable.

In Puerto Rico, people are still donating canned food and bottled water. All of which I've talked to various groups to discourage people from donation after a disaster.

When a hurricane takes out >70% of the powergrid, floods and destroys infrastructure, recycling is probably one of the lower priorities of the city, however, when a lot of food and water come in containers, there will be a point where there is no place to store the empty containers but, outside in the open. As trash piles up, these containers collect rain water and breed mosquitoes, bringing about a second disaster of diseases.

Donating bottled water cost easily 100 times more than just donating water filters. Every disaster area has water. they just need to filter out bacteria and impurities.

It is also possible to ship fresh vegetable and fruits, and with water filters, people can have clean water to drink and wash the vegetables. This will create much less waste and avoid unnecessary wastage and disease.

Please exercise thought when you donate. Your action does have an impact, and not caring what your donations do, or what happens after you donate is sometimes as bad as not donating.

If you want to pick up a Charity to support, perhaps you can support Relief 2.0.

We are working on a new ways to support Refugees (in Europe) and hope to spread our knowledge once we have more success.

http://www.relief20.com/give

-- Robin Low

You don't need to be rich to give.

A story of a woman living in a rental flat with public assistance allowing a homeless man to sleep in her house is very heart warming.

There is always a misconception of selfish people to believe that you need to be rich in order to give, but how does one consider themselves rich?

This lady in a wheelchair living with public assistance gave a safe space for a homeless man to sleep. Her action speaks a lot and puts a lot of us to shame as we just think of the negative things.

The reply from the government is also very disturbing.

HDB says...

"HDB rental flats are heavily subsidised and meant for needy families without other housing options and family support.

"Therefore, only tenants and authorised occupiers are allowed to occupy the rental flats.

"Subletting of rental flats is not allowed, and will be investigated.

"Some of these needy cases (of individuals living in an interim place) may have deeper underlying personal and social issues, which extend beyond housing.

"If HDB is alerted to such cases, we will work with the relevant social and government agencies to see how we can extend more holistic assistance to them."

So are they going to take action on people allowing homeless people to live in their homes?

-- Iron Bowl