Donating To An Organization or Straight to One in Need?

i donate to a local charity that runs a shelter for homeless people. the stuff that i give them all goes to needy people, nothing gets sold. i used to give to goodwill but decided i would rather support a local charity.

There are many ways of donating as you said and probably I use them all at one time or another. I recycle many things among my family and friends. The baby things are passed from one baby to another until they dissolve in shreads. Same with cribs, car seats for children, etc. After they have fulfilled their duty inside the inner circle, we see if there´s something worth giving away. I give some clothes to institutions that take care of needy people. As for money, the little I can spare I give to my special charity: I donate for children with cancer as une of my grandsons died of cancer.

A lot of places used to allow you to donate used toys for Christmas too. And now most places require new toys.

I can see why they do that though really. I'm sure a bunch of people ruined it for the rest of us. They probably donated stuff that was in horrible condition, rather than being smart about what to give away.

So I still give away my used stuff, but I give it directly to people on FreeCycle. I've had people take toys that I had, which are mostly practically brand new, and tell me that they gave them to their child for a birthday or other occasion because they simply couldn't afford a present. And they were so happy because their child didn't know the difference on used and new. And that is how I grew up too, to me, if it was new to me then it was new.

But I can definitely understand that an organization can't trust people to give them good used stuff. Maybe that car seat had been in an accident, how do they know? Their reputation is at stake if they give it away. But if you give it away personally, they aren't the ones at fault if anything goes wrong.

On the plus side though, once I saw a group asking for money to give food to homeless people. And then right across the street was a homeless man. I asked them what was up with that, because it seemed a bit odd. They said he didn't want to go to their shelter, but they did give him a packet of food. So I was glad to see that at least. But generally, I will give food to the homeless on my own as well. Especially if I am leaving a restaurant with leftovers or something, if I have food the homeless are always welcome to it. If they ask me for food and I have nothing on me though usually I won't give them money, just in case I was enabling a drug addiction.