Charity initiatives

I came across a reference to this on another board: I hadn't heard of it before and I thought it was worth sharing.

Suspended coffee is something which started in Naples, apparently, and has since spread to other countries. What happens is the people who buy a coffee in a coffee shop buy a second (or even more than one extra) and ask for it to be "suspended. That coffee is then available for a poor person, who is given it for the asking.

For homeless people getting a hot drink is not always easy and so this is a form of charity which is easy and which is obviously beneficial in some ways. It is not custom here, though apparently people are asking major chains to introduce it, and they are considering it.

It is heartwarming, despite my reservations about it: and we must not make the best the enemy of the good. So I think we should introduce this, on balance. On the face of it it is win-win. The coffee shop sells more coffee, which is what they are there for. They get some good PR out of it, presumably, and that is not a bad thing from their point of view. It costs little in time and effort so their costs are low. Tying charity to existing systems should mean that there is no leakage of donations to admin etc: so it ought to be a very cost effective way of giving.

From the point of view of the donor there are a number of benefits: For those who are concerned about giving directly because they fear that the money will not be spent on things they approve of, it meets that perceived problem; it is easy for them, since it takes neither time nor effort; some of the money donated goes to profit, which might be a concern equal to the worry about how much goes to admin etc in other forms of giving: but no worse.

As with selling "the Big Issue" this is a way of integrating charitable concern with a market society, arguably. It does not necessarily suffer from the selectivity that conventional charities sometimes have - the "rice christian" effect. It does not support the narrative about the poor in the same way as the Big Issue because it does not pander to the prejudices of the privileged in quite the same way (though the arrogance of deciding how a gift should be used is there, it does not demand "work" as the quid pro quo for assistance). One can imagine it could be extended to other kinds of shops and supersede the shame of "food banks" (shame for the donors and for our society, I mean) though that would start to impose admin costs probably. It would be far easier to put the wider implications of what kind of society we are becoming out of mind, and we like that:). It even promotes "social inclusion" because all those poor people would be nearer to being proper consumers, and that is the badge of membership

But there is the rub: it would mean that homeless people would come into the same space as you and me. Perhaps that is why the coffee chains in this country are not leaping to implement this scheme?