miss_yt | (no subject)

Some of you may remember my summertime LJ rant about charity muggers. This is in the same vein.

Lately I've seen two kinds of clipboard-carrying people around the U of M campus: the ones who ask you if you're registered to vote in Michigan (I did register with one of them, since I moved apartments) and the ones who ask if you have a minute for the environment.

The voter registration people are a little annoying because there are so many of them,¹ but they're okay.

They are real volunteers. They range in age from college kids to parents and grandparents, which indicates that they are working for a real grassroots initiative.²

While most of not all of them probably skew Democratic, they are only doing what they say they're doing. They are registering people to vote and not asking for money or for you to sign up with one party or another.

If they ask you whether you're registered and you say yes, they leave you alone. They don't want or need anything else from you.
- There's a bonus to this: if you have actually registered, there is no reason for you to feel guilty for saying "Yes, I've done what you asked."

The "do you have a minute for the environment" people are really, really getting on my nerves.

I don't think they're actual volunteers. I've seen all the "Jobs to Save the Environment" flyers around campus, and I know that most people who stand on the sidewalk and hold clipboards are being paid to do it.³ They don't do it full-time, of course, and the salary is low, which is why they're all college-age kids. It's also easy to convince a naive college kid that they're being paid to do good work, instead of being paid very little money to make someone else a lot of money.

They aren't doing what they say they're doing. They are not asking you for a "minute" of your time. They are asking you for your money or perhaps for your personal information so they can sign you up for a mailing list and - here's the part they don't tell you - sell your information to "affiliates."
1. I know it sounds horrible, but I know that even the best-intentioned nonprofits tend to swap member names and e-mails amongst themselves. It's not too much of a stretch to suppose that at least some of them turn a buck by selling people's information to corporate sponsors or to merchants who have their "seal of approval."

I hardly need to point this out, but they're going straight for the cheap guilt trip. This is particularly annoying for me because I come from a culture in which both God and my mother guilt-trip me as a matter of course. These clipboard people are amateurs.

Even if you have already signed on with/given money to this organization, and you say so, these people will push you for more instead of thanking you and leaving you alone.

Most of the time I encounter these people when I'm on the way to a class, so I can honestly tell them so. If I'm not pressed for time I usually give them an inarticulate brush-off. But I'm increasingly tempted to answer these people with a list of the ways in which I already give time, effort and money to the environment.

I recycle. Admittedly this is fairly easy in Ann Arbor, where there is recycling pick-up, but I make sure to do it. If I have trash paper or an empty can or bottle with me and there is no recycling bin nearby, I will carry the trash with me until I find one.

I almost always carry a refillable, reusable water bottle with me instead of buying and drinking bottled water.

I use compact florescent light bulbs, and I habitually turn off the lights, TV, etc. when I leave the room.

I walk or use public transportation whenever I can, instead of driving. My car gets decent gas mileage and I am going to drive it until it dies, getting the best possible use out of the resources and energy that went into producing it.

I don't use chemical cleaners on surfaces in my apartment: I wipe and mop with a mix of water and vinegar.

As much as possible, I use organic, cruelty-free soap and makeup products.

I don't eat conventionally farmed meat (factory farms are big polluters).

I try to only buy/eat seafood that is sustainably farmed and/or fished.

I use rechargeable batteries. If I use a non-rechargeable battery, I recycle it when it's depleted (places like Staples will take in your used batteries to recycle).

If something I own breaks, gets torn or is otherwise damaged, I get it repaired and keep using it instead of throwing it out.

Basically, I spend a lot of minutes doing things for the environment. I bet the people with the clipboards don't do all those things. Guilt-trip that, bitches.

¹ Although because of Michigan's voter registration deadline, there are going to be none of them soon.

² I say this based on my experience with advocacy groups in Philadelphia. The one I worked for, which was involved in getting people to vote in Pennsylvania's 2006 senatorial election, involved many local people of widely varying ages. We did some clipboard-holding ourselves. I've noticed that clipboard-holders for the Fund for Public Interest or Greenpeace or organizations like that are pretty much exclusively college kids. There's a reason for that, which I explain below. Well, above. Um, above this footnote but below the sentence to which it refers.

³ They may not even work directly for the organization they're ostensibly charity mugging for. There are companies that do charity mugging for hire, and some nonprofits hire those companies to collect their donations. As you may already suspect, a large fraction of the donations that are collected by these contractors go to paying the contractors themselves. I think contract charity muggers are mostly a U.K. and European phenomenon, however: American organizations tend to have their own standing army of clipboard holders and cold-callers.