Tag: charity

Collecting

My experience is that most people are generous. Not showily so, not ostentatiously generous – but quietly, reflexively open. Present them with a collecting bucket and a good cause and something in them responds before the rational mind has finished its cost-benefit analysis.

A Saturday afternoon earlier this month bore this out yet again. I was one of about thirty volunteers collecting for The Exeter Chiefs Foundation at the Chiefs’ match against Gloucester. The Foundation supports several charities across Exeter, including Citizens Advice, who organised our team. So it was buckets, card readers, and enough layers of clothing to survive a February afternoon outdoors.

The response was overwhelmingly warm. People gave. People smiled. People paused to ask which charities the Foundation supports. Taps of cards, clinks of coins, words of encouragement. The generosity of strangers.

At half-time, we took our buckets into the hospitality boxes.

In one, we were immediately welcomed. Wallets appeared, phones came out, a young boy dropped his change into the bucket with quiet concentration. Generosity as reflex.

In the next, we managed perhaps half a sentence before one of the party waved us away. No words, no explanation. Just a hand raised and lowered, and the very expectation that we would leave.

As I said to my collecting companion: clearly hadn’t read the manners manual.

To be fair, people decline for all sorts of reasons; and that’s entirely OK. A polite “not today” is a perfectly good sentence; nobody minds hearing it. What stays with you is not the refusal but its texture. The wordlessness, the brevity, the assumption that a gesture would do where even a few syllables were called for.

But proportion matters. One silent wave against an afternoon of open wallets and kind words. The Foundation and its volunteers had a good day. The generous far outnumbered the curt, as they usually do. Most people are decent. I keep finding this out, and it keeps being reassuring.

Invisibility

9.30 in Okehampton Town Centre, and it is not busy. I am standing opposite the pedestrian crossing, just up (or is it down) from the entrance to Red Lion Yard, between it and the flower stall. There’s a yellow plastic bag at my feet, and I am wishing that I was wearing something a little warmer than a T-shirt, fleece and scarf. I can see the church clock. It is not moving very quickly.

I am holding a collection tin, although these days they are yellow plastic. I emailed one of the girls earlier in the week, and told her that Caroline and I were going to sell flags in Okehampton on Saturday morning. Yesterday evening she told me that she had had a vision of the two of us wrestling with flags and wondering how we would sell them, and, rather more, why anyone would want to buy one. Only when I told her that for my generation, today’s stickers were, when we were children, paper flags, attached with a pin – ‘flags’ – did she understand.

As I told her, I recalled, aged 12, standing in the Square in Wallingford, selling flags for the Lifeboats, a tray of flags round my neck, and the lifeboat shaped collecting tin on a red string. My mother organised two collections, a house to house collection for Imperial Cancer Campaign – I used to go with her up Wilding Road (one of the longest in Wallingford, or at least to a small boy it seemed that) – and the other for the Lifeboats, which despite being some 100 miles from the nearest sea was always well supported. You don’t need to live next to the sea to feel the call of a seafaring heritage!

But back to Okehampton on a cold, grey Saturday morning. What struck me most was my invisibility to at least half of the passers by. Rattling the tin is not allowed, and so the next best thing is a sturdy good morning, then catch the eye, and smile. But for many, hurrying by, I simply didn’t exist – they looked right through me. It was disconcerting and, in a very small way, I felt what I am sure many Big Issue sellers feel – a nuisance, someone who if you ignore you can pretend isn’t there.

And yet for every two or three persons who scurried by, head down or consciously avoiding me, there was one who replied to the good morning, fumbling for change, apologising that it wasn’t very much, engaging in small talk – or like the couple in their late 60s who told me that the CAB had been their lifeline. That’s why it is worth doing it.

The CAB has done a brilliant job in Okehampton this year, and they do it every year. I may be a little partisan – Caroline works for them – but an hour on the street on a Saturday morning is all you need to know this.