Ryan ChartrandWhy is it that our senior citizen community is so rampantly hounded for monetary donations? Whether through telephone or mail, this barrage of contribution requests victimizes, in particular, the elderly demographic, whose perceived expendable income makes them a target for a variety of groups looking to fill their coffers. It is a practice that seems particularly despicable when it hits close to home.
My grandma is a 92-year-old widow named Martha who lives by herself in a small, cozy apartment in my hometown. Her exercise consists of a walk to the apartment complex mailboxes each afternoon, a quarter-mile trip she does dutifully although it gets more difficult for her with every passing year.
Each step she takes is filled with the cautious anticipation that she may receive some correspondence that day; perhaps a letter from a relative in the Czech Republic, or a card from my cousin, the first of only three grandchildren, who lives 500 miles away.
Personal notes and parcels don’t come every day, but solicitations do. And on this November afternoon, the box held one envelope. It was yellow, and said in bold type across the front, “Attention: Our information on your account may not be complete.” The warning startled my grandma. The letter was from a breast cancer charity she had supported not long ago, and she was concerned.
It was in the memory of her oldest daughter, who died of breast cancer in 2004, that my grandma made that donation. It was the second of her three children that she has buried in her lifetime. As my grandma opened the envelope, she wondered with trepidation what piece of information she must have left out to result in the charity’s records being incomplete.
She was surprised to find, instead, a request for another donation. The incomplete record, it seemed, was that she had not given the organization more money, even though she had given only months earlier.
The enclosed letter was filled with guilt-inducing, heart-wrenching phrases that hit every emotional nerve, and concluded with two boxes the recipient was to use to indicate whether or not a donation would be made. The second of the two was surprisingly callous: “No, I will not donate even five dollars to fight breast cancer.” It was a painful choice of words, designed to make the reader feel selfish for not yielding to the blame-assigning device.
It is an unfortunate fact that solicitation letters like these are not an anomaly. By Feb. 12, my grandma had received 14 similar notices. However, the larger issue at stake is the moral implications involved in this organization’s work. Using the worthy cause of cancer research as its front, the fine print of the letters reveals that over 90 percent of the money raised goes back into fundraising, and that the services of a paid professional fundraiser are used.
It is painful to realize that my grandma, a woman who lost her daughter to breast cancer, has now lost money to an organization that clearly did not deserve her trust.
Mari Feazel
Journalism junior