In 2016-17, I lived in Turkey, working as a volunteer with Syrian refugees. I was part of a network of official and unofficial organizations that were doing their best to help the influx of refugee families stay above water during their unplanned stay in Turkey – sometimes literally.
I have a lot of memories from that time, one of them being the piles and piles of clothes that had been donated to the refugees. We had rooms full of donated clothes. Ironically, a majority of the refugees in the area were tailors, so it would’ve been difficult for them to start a business because of the infinite supply of free clothes.
This doesn’t mean that the refugees had everything they needed. They were lacking in every other area. They were often sick because they couldn’t afford medical care and medicine. They suffered cold winters because they had no fuel for their heat. Many families didn’t have basic things like refrigerators or mattresses. But they certainly had clothes.
As volunteers, we couldn’t do much with the clothes, books, or odd appliances that someone would donate, but when someone gave money, we could do everything. Any money we got could go to the person most in need, and alleviate their dire situation directly.
I’ve personally seen people or their children get their lives saved because they got the medical care they needed thanks to someone’s monetary donation. If that person was a provider for a family, then by saving them, a whole family would be saved. As far as I know, these donors never realized the huge impact of their often small donations to our unofficial volunteer organization.
As time passed in the organization, we spent less effort deciding where the monetary donations would best be spent and more effort giving donations directly to the people. I don’t recall any decision being made about going this way. Being unofficial, we didn’t have to deal with outside governance or follow counterproductive policies. We simply strived for whatever had the best effect. Giving more money directly to the refugees was a natural process because it most easily led to the best outcome for the people we were trying to help.
This outcome is consistent with numerous studies that conclude that monetary donations are more effective than material donations, and is also supported by findings from Charity Navigator and the CIDI, which is the U.S. Agency for the Center for International Disaster Information. The CIDI even made a simple one-minute video about it which you can view below.
After my time in Turkey, I never stopped volunteering, but it was always as a teacher, and never again as someone who worked on giving physical aid. I’m not a money guy. I’m not a businessman. When it comes to volunteering, my strength is in teaching, not asking people for money or doling it out.
That is, until the recent earthquake in Syria/Turkey. After seeing the destruction of my wife’s village in Syria, and its villagers spending the below-freezing nights huddled in a tent around a single stove for warmth, I knew I had to do something more than teach them English to improve their situation.
But as I said, I’m not a money guy. I don’t know how to ask for donations, and I didn’t know how to get them to the people they were intended for. Also, my wife’s village is in Afrin, Syria which is one of the most politically unstable regions in the world. Immediately after the earthquake, Turkey wasn’t letting aid into Afrin, and any material aid that did come through was stolen by the warlords that controlled the area. Photos of militia members selling stolen earthquake aid like tents and food at marked-up prices deterred anyone, including me, from donating.
For example:
Fortunately there was another way. Remembering my volunteering experience in Turkey, I knew that while it may feel intuitive to send material donations to those in need, direct monetary support was always a better use of donations. Why guess what a family needs and spend the time finding and giving it to them, when they already know what they need and they can get it or do it themselves with the money you give them?
My next task was to find the right channels to send the monetary donations through. While it wasn’t very easy to do that, it also wasn’t impossible. The first ways we found were through local political organizations. I wasn’t happy with that route.
In the end, I decided on a system where we would have a list of names to exactly who we would give donations to, send the donations, and either have the recipients show the money they got, or talk with them on the phone to insure that they got the exact amount that was donated to them.
The next step was to test the system by sending a donation of $100 through it. It worked! After the test donation, I could in good conscience, begin asking for donations with the promise that all of the money donated will go directly to the people in need.
So far, this system has worked perfectly. I’m proud to say that not a single cent has been siphoned out of the donations. Out of the 12 families we donated to, all 12 families have received the exact amount we’ve given. I’ve even paid the transfer fees so nothing is wasted from the actual donations.
Here’s a sample of our initial test donation and the first 10 videos we’ve received from the recipients of our campaign. If you want to be a donator and continue these donations, you can simply Paypal zacahopkins@gmail.com
Baghdad to Mars 