Making cents of charity: Famine as fundraising
20 July 2026
I've contemplated writing a series about charities and common fundraising practices since Christmas, when retrospectives and takedowns of Band Aid's 1984 hit Do they know it's Christmas? made their annual rounds. To be up front, I worked as a door-to-door fundraiser in Canada for several months while I waited for my visa application to return to New Zealand to be approved. It was a great job, and allowed me to work on behalf of global charities like World Wildlife Fund and Doctors without Borders. It also gave me insight into the pitfalls and controversies that exist in this field, and how charities and their audiences mutually struggle to adapt to each other's evolving needs and interests. Practices for public engagement that seemed well-meaning in the 1970s continue, despite decades of criticism about child safety and questions about how much money actually reaches people and communities most in need.
