Declined Charities

Years ago, a Cambined Charities Drive was supposed to be a panacca for all the ills of student philanthropy. No longer would charity after charity pester students with its own door-to-door drive; instead, students could "give once and give generously" and then forget about charities for the rest of the year. The reasoning behind this week's Combined Charities Drive remains basically the same, but most people today realize that a single solicitation for a number of charities creates an ailment almost as bad as the former rash of individual drives. Simply stated, student donations have fallen off so far in recent years that many philanthropies do not receive enough money from the annual College drive.

Phillips Brooks House is a prime example of an organization that has received too little from the drive. Paradoxically, while the scope and membership of Brooks House have expanded, its share of Combined Charities has sharply declined. The social service house began a new program with virtually no members in 1945, built to 400 in 1950, and rose to an all-time high last year of 825 from the College and another 125 from Radcliffe. Although Brooks House has extended its programs into prisons, mental hospitals, tutoring, and boys' clubs, its income has fallen from a high of $5,000 in 1947 to last year's nadir of $1,548.

World University Service is another student-oriented group that made a record haul immediately after the war, and then began to disappear from student checkbooks. Devoted to improving educational standards throughout the world, WUS by special arrangement conducted its own drives in 1947 and 1948, when students had great interest in raising money for demolished universities in Europe. Personal solicitations netted WUS $23,000 in one year. By contrast, last year's Combined Charities Drive gave the group only $428.

Other groups at other universities have faced problems similar to those of Brooks House and World University Service. In three years of chest drives at the University of Southern California, donations fell off from $10,000 to $4,500. The University of Washington, too, had trouble and almost criminated its single charity drive. Instead, however, it decided to try the drive again, this time employing strong social pressure to ensure campus-wide donations. Everyone who contributed proved his good standing by wearing a yellow and purple pin: pity the student who tried to buck that drive.

Few people would consider forcing this type of drive on Harvard, but no one denies that there is much room for changes in Cambridge. Some people have urged that students should either give to the six recommended charities--or not at all. Yale follows this pattern, and collected $20,000 last year. In last spring's drive at Harvard, less than half of the total amount collected went to the six charities picked by the Student Council. The majority of funds went to well-known national charities, but there were a number of small donations which are difficult to explain. Both the Harvard Athletic Association and the Harvard Band Drum Fund, for example, received small checks from Combined Charities. Legally they may qualify as "charities," but they are scarcely appropriate as true philanthropies.

Besides favoring a strictly limited list of charities, many people feel that more publicity should surround the annual campaign. Undoubtedly, few students know very much about the six charities listed, and rarely do the solicitors have a personal identification with any of the charities. One suggestion is to encourage the six organizations to mail out their own publicity blurbs. Another, perhaps just as effective, is to inform the solicitors more adequately about each charity's aims.

Many other ideas undoubtedly will come forth before next year's drive, if one takes place. In the meantime, the current drive seems to be falling behind last year's meagre totals. Unless more than 61 percent of the College donates this year, Combined Charities will, once again, have very little to combine.