Monday, February 02, 2009

Pagan charities?

We don't need specifically Pagan charities for general causes that are already being addressed by other charities, because:
  • we're not trying to attract converts by saying "Look how compassionate we are; we're the best religion"
  • why replicate the work of large secular charities? It would only increase administration costs and decrease the amount that actually reaches the people who need help
  • we're not big enough to organise our own charities
Perhaps we do need self-administered charity audits to demonstrate that we are "doing our bit". We often get flak in interfaith contexts because there aren't any specifically Pagan charities.

We may need Pagan charities for causes that we care about that no-one else cares about; and these are the charities that Pagans have started.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with all of your points.

I do like the idea of trying to make donations in the name of the local Pagan community, though. I think Pax brought up that suggestion over at The Wild Hunt. Again, it's a way of demonstrating that we are there doing our bit, though I do have mixed feelings about that.

Anonymous said...

There are a number of pagan charities in existence:

http://www.circlesanctuary.org/liberty/pagancharitywork.html

Some of those are probably duplicated here:
http://www.witchvox.com/lx/lx_charity.html

More here: http://pagantheologies.pbwiki.com/Pagan-friendly+charities

Pagan Scholarships:
http://www.angelfire.com/ia/Geoff/pagan.html (about 1/3 of the page down, some may have been discontinued)

http://www.flybynightbookstore.com/scholarships.html

http://www.witchvox.com/vn/vn_detail/dt_gno.html?id=13434

http://nyc-ppp.org/html/mjms.html

My personal favorite pagan charity: Act of Kindness

There are others, but it seems that a lot of folk do not know about them.