Posts Tagged ‘charity’

|

Did The Red Cross Employ Slave Labour?

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

CBC Radio - The Current

Just passing on an interesting story I picked up on while driving from Saskatoon to Qu’Appelle the other day.  The above link will play the radio episode that I heard, while the link below will take you to a written article.  Both sourced by the CBC and, as I understand, originating from an investigation done by the French Radio-Canada.

My opinion of all this is not great for the Canadian Red Cross.  As a past, and potentially future, donator to the Red Cross I’m a little upset at they way the Red Cross seems to be treating these allegations.  Their initial approach to the whole thing seems okay to me.  After hearing a report from one of their field agents, they began with a high level internal investigation to determine if there was any truth to these allegations.  They decided there was, then hired an external third party investigator to bring in the details.  Seems reasonable so far.

The part that I’m upset with is what they did after that.  I’m just going to sum it up with what they seem to be doing, vs what I want to be hearing from them.

This is an isolated case, of 40 or so workers and it has been fully dealt with

vs

Thank you for bringing to our attention this potentially wide spread problem.  We will be sending our own field agents to Java to conduct a full review, and will compensate workers that were under compensated for their efforts in rebuilding after the Tsunami.  Expect a report on our findings in the next 6 months.

We have a code of ethics that we make all contractors sign to prevent anything like this from happening.

vs

We realize that without proper inspection and follow up, we can not be certain that contractors are following our code of ethics.  In the future we will be performing regular inspections at job sites using a rotation of our own field staff.  We will take the lead from other NGOs and cancel contracts with employers who are found to be non-compliant.

We are not directly responsible for any abuse given to workers as this is the responsibility of our contractors

vs

As owner’s of the project, we take full responsibility for any worker abuse.

You get the idea.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/03/17/mtl-red-cross-tsunami-enquete.html

http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=34473&tid=001

Tags: ,
Posted in charity | 3 Comments »

Kiva Challenge

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Back on December 17th, 2009 I sent the following message to 17 friends and family.

Hello!

In the spirit of Christmas, I’ve decided to help people in third world countries by inviting my friends to become lenders through kiva.org.  As a special Christmas incentive, I will make an additional $25 in loans for each of my friends that becomes a lender in December or January.  The site should let me know who accepts, but you may want to send me an email just in case.

Oh, and please join team H.O.O.K.A.H. (not a requirement, but appreciated)

Here are the results.  Of the 17 friends emailed, 2 contacted me.  One joined Kiva for the first time because of my challenge.  The other was already a member of Kiva but stepped up with an additional $25 loan.

As promised, today I loaned an additional $50 through Kiva.   $25 went to each of  Ayten Qarayeva and Siham.  You can check out my loan history by following this link to my profile Mike Lenzen on Kiva.org.

For those that don’t know, Kiva is an Internet based micro loan company.  They allow lenders to come together to loan money to some of the world’s poorest people so they can invest in businesses and become self sufficient entrepreneurs.  In these poor countries many people are in need of small sums of money to make a huge difference in their lives.  Unfortunately, without organizations such as Kiva there would be no way for these people to raise the required funds to start or expand their businesses.  In my opinion, Kiva does make a difference and I encourage everyone to become a lender today http://www.kiva.org.

Tags: ,
Posted in charity | No Comments »

Canada will give 80 million to Haiti. How?

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Canada has just announced that it will send $80 million to Haiti to help with humanitarian relief.  I think that’s great, but isn’t Canada’s parliament prorogued?  Oh yes, it is.  I’m hoping that the government had previously allocated this money towards international disaster relief in it’s 2009 budget, otherwise the implications are that Canada has a new dictatorship government.  A government that no longer consults the elected house of commons, but simply suspends government and makes decisions unilaterally.  No wonder people are getting fed up with our parliamentary system.

Anyways, we still have to ask, was this an already budgeted item or not?  I spent a few minutes searching the website for the latest budget, and could not find anything that would suggest it was.  But, I could have missed it, so I sent an email to the finance department asking if it had been budgeted or not.  I’ll report back with any response I receive.

I did not receive any response from the finance department…

so I wrote the opposition MP in responsible for critiquing the budget, Mr. Ralph Goodale.  Here was his response:

Dear Mr. Lenzen:

Thank you for your email regarding aid to Haiti.

With respect to your questions, it all depends on how much the Government spends.

CIDA would already have some money approved by parliament (through the budget) which can be allocated, and/or reallocated to provide aid to Haiti relief efforts.  Re-allocating money and spending within the existing budget would not require parliamentary approval, only Treasury board (a cabinet committee) approval.

That said,  the government has promised matching funds to the donations made in Canada, so if that exceeds the amount they can find through re-allocated CIDA funds, then the government can still commit these funds, but Parliament will have to approve this money before it can actually be spent.  Parliament would approve them through a vote on the Estimates (which Parliament votes on 3 times a year – the next vote (on Supplementary Estimates) will be sometime before March 26.

Sincerely,

Robyn Sullivan

Special Assistant

Office of the Hon. Ralph Goodale, P.C., M.P.

Wascana

So, I guess it is possible that the Conservative government can allocate some funds to Haiti, however once their budget is reached, it will be up to parliament to approve any further spending which is done on a scheduled basis and was not interrupted by prorogation.  So, to sum it up, this is not proof of a dictatorship.

Haiti relief article.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/01/19/haiti-canada.html

Prorogation of Parliament article.

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2009/12/30/parliament-prorogation-harper.html

2009 Budget Website

http://www.budget.gc.ca/2009/

Tags: , ,
Posted in charity | No Comments »

Canada Red Cross On-line Donation Overwhelmed

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

If you are like me, the recent news coming from Haiti about the devastation caused by the January 12th, 2010 earthquake prompted you make a donation to the aid agency you thought would be most effective.  I’m not going to tell you which aid agency that should have been, but I am going to share my experience with my online donation to the Canadian Red Cross.

January 13th, 2010

I logged on to the Canadian Red Cross website.  I went to the “Donate On-line” section of the website.  There I filled out my donation amount, name, address, and credit card details and finally pressed Submit at the bottom of the website.  The Submit button turns gray.  I wait.  I wait some more, nothing.

Personally I’m a big fan of running Firefox from my Linux distribution of choice (currently Arch Linux).  Could this be the problem?  Some incompatibility?  Maybe, so I load up Virtual Box drop into Windows XP and Internet Explorer.  A few moments later, I’m staring at the same grayed out Submit button.  Oh well, their server’s must be overloaded.  I’ll try again latter.

January 14th, 2010

Wait patently for any emails which would indicate that my previous day’s attempts to make a donation were successful.  None arrive.

January 15th, 2010

I try again.  Good old firefox and linux come through this time.  Everything processes quickly, I sleep soundly knowing I’ve done my good deed for the day.

January 18th, 2010

Checked the Visa statement.  Oh oh, two charges from January 13th.  Guess they went through.  Realizing that I can’t afford to make a donation triple in size to what I intended I quickly email the Red Cross.  Good news for me, and anyone else who made the same mistake, I received this reply by email.

Hello,

Due to an outpouring of generosity, our online donation system is running slower than normal, but we wish to assure you that your donations are being securely received.

Canadians who did not receive a confirmation of their donation can rest assured that their donations have been received. Donor tax receipts should be ready by January 29.  Donors who made multiple donations due to the white screen will be contacted by the Red Cross. We are working on refunding multiple donations.

Moral of the story, if your wanting to make a donation to the Canadian Red Cross, try once, and wait a few days to check your visa statement before trying again.  You won’t be receiving an email confirmation for a while, so your VISA statement will be the quickest indicator of the transaction’s success if like me, you are left with an unresponsive gray Submit box.

I’ll post an update latter on to let everyone know how I made out, but right now I’m feeling optimistic.

Update January 30th, 2010

I’m glad to report the Red Cross was true to their word.  They phoned me back this afternoon and asked if the triple donation was in error.  I said that it was, and they kindly refunded the difference and issued a tax receipt to my email address.  No problems.

Tags:
Posted in charity | No Comments »

|