US charity workers to march against ‘deadly mythology’
Howard Lake | 19 August 2014 | News
American charity workers are being urged to join a 60-mile ‘march’ to raise US$1m to fund an organisation that aims to make a “strategic, surgical strike” on the public’s “deadly mythological” view of charities.
The Charity Defense Council says the march is for “the people who get labeled an ‘overhead’ and the people who rely on them”.
The organisation – founded by Dan Pallotta in 2012 – says charities regularly organise sponsored events in support of their causes, but there has “never a demonstration by the sector to raise money and raise consciousness in order to change the way people think about changing the world”.
It adds:
“This is your tribe. This is your root cause. Because these are the issues that stand in the way of our potential to impact the causes we work on everyday. If we don’t take a stand for ourselves, a stand will never be taken.”
The money raised will be used to recruit staff for the CDC’s major programme areas in its first year and begin advertising campaigns aimed at the general public.
The march will take place from 26-28 June next year and run from Kittery on the Maine-New Hampshire border, to Salem in Massachusetts, a route chose because it is where the Puritans first landed in America.
The CDC says: “The Puritans’ gift to us was a strong ethic of charity. Our task is to reconcile their ideas with a new age facing social problems more complex than they could have ever imagined. We re-visit this historic ground where our ideas about charity began in order to re-write them for a new age.”
Marchers will be expected to raise a minimum of US$2,995.
Watch a video about the March.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.