8 January

This one is a real test case for what I’ve posted before, that if you want to live by the actual realities of life, you’re going to piss off just about everybody. Is this annual fundraiser a good idea? Like most modern fundraising, it targets sentimentalism, the Culture of the Feels. The genuine tragedy and motivations of the McGraths - who could question it? We *feel* so good chipping in. Some facts about the McGrath Foundation. It employs no nurses. It provides money to local area health services to employ them. That’s fine, but the majority of funding the foundation gets comes from government grants. So you have government grants going to government services, through the completely unnecessary (and expensive) intermediary of the Foundation. The Foundation spends more each year on its own administration and marketing than it does funding nurses. It has over 60 staff, professional fundraisers and marketers and administrators. Again, fine, somebody has to run an organisation. But this is a government service, why not bypass all of that and just give money directly to the local area health services? To quantify it, government spends almost twice what the Foundation does for each ‘McGrath’ nurse. Of the money raised through the Pink Test initiative, as little as 25% actually ends up funding any nurses. Nobody is dodgy here, it’s just an unthinking sentimentalist approach to a public health need. Governments go along with it because they don’t want to be on the receiving end of outraged pearl-clutching by kidults in social media society. The same thing applies to things like Jeans for Genes Day, or Red Nose Day, or Bandaged Bears. Ask people what they’re donating for and 9 out of 10 of them won’t have a clue. It makes us FEEL good. That’s all that matters, apparently.