Jami Donates Some Advice

I won't try to take credit for being the world's most generous person. I give when I can, and to things that I care about or believe in. I donate when there are various drives, like when the mail carriers are collecting canned goods or whatever. I give clothes and various household things to the VVA and I freecycle, which is sort of like donating, but not tax deductible. Anyway, I make this point because one thing that really shreds my cheese is what I call Fake Donating. Fake Donating is giving something that is unusable. I don't know if people do it to look good or convince themselves that they've done good but it's just wrong. Every year my MOPS group has a giant flea market. People donate stuff and we sell it. We usually get tons of donations, for which we are immensely grateful. But the Fake Donations make me crazy. Last year during sorting, I saw a toy truck with no wheels. Look, that's garbage. Even people on a limited income aren't going to buy their kid a plastic truck with no wheels. Stuff that's missing parts, clothes that are seriously stained or torn, broken items - that's really and truly junk, not junk sale junque. So, instead of being a useful donation, it's one more thing that we had to sort and then throw away for you. It's anti-helpful. The Husband's business had a food drive for Thanksgiving. They asked customers to donate Thanksgiving type non-perishables, that would be given to a local ministry where people know they can come and get complete fixings for their holiday meal. Now, I know that we all give the food we don't like to food banks, and honestly, I don't have a problem with that. I hate green beans and I'll gladly donate a few cans. Other people like green beans. They enjoy eating them. Green beans are food. But, for this particular drive people donated several bags of expired foods. That's wrong. They might still be okay to eat, and yes, beggars can't be choosers, but that means they don't get to choose the brands or whatever, not that they get to choose whether or not to try something that might give them severe abdominal pain, okay? I won't even mention that some of the things donated were not really Thanksgiving-y, because hey - if you need food, you need food and just because peanut butter isn't a traditional Thanksgiving treat, it's probably more useful to the family than a box of stuffing mix, but jelly that expired 3 months ago - FAIL. You're not being generous - you're offloading stuff you should have used or thrown away. If you think it's probably still okay to eat, buy a new one for donating and eat the expired one yourself. When I taught Sunday School, my classroom was a constant receptacle for large unwanted crap. Broken TVs, odd lamps, clocks with no batteries - why do you think the church in general or youth groups in specific want these? Boxes of old magazines are great for crafts... if they are asked for. But piles of your subscriptions for the last 10 years are not helpful. So please, donate. Donate what you can to the causes you think deserve it. Give a can of green beans to someone other than me. But don't just rain your trash on charities; use a little discrimination. Fake Donating is really taking from those charities, because they waste time, energy and even money on getting rid of your "donations". Thank you.