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FAQs
Why does American Care Foundation
discourage donations of collected goods and individual items for disaster
relief?
- Collections of items require valuable
and scarce resources such as time, money, and personnel to sort, clean,
and distribute them, which come at the expense of the emergency
activities relief workers are attempting to perform. American Care
Foundation has neither the resources, nor the logistical set-up, to
properly handle these types of donations, and therefore cannot accept
them.
- In addition, because we have no way of
knowing what spontaneous individual donations or unsolicited collections
of items will consist of, we cannot ensure there will be enough of a
particular item to distribute it equitably, or if the donated products
will even be appropriate for the relief effort.
- Shipping donated goods is also costly
and particularly difficult in the aftermath of a disaster, as inroads
into disaster sites are often damaged or impassable, and easily clogged
with shipments of non-priority items. American Care Foundation makes
every attempt to procure items locally to save money by minimizing
transportation and storage costs. Local procurement also ensures that
the items distributed to disaster victims are appropriate for their
culture and diet.
Where can donations of collected goods
and individual items be most effective?
Individual donations of goods and collections of items are put to their best
possible use, and have the greatest impact economically, when they are
donated to local charitable organizations within your own community.
Donating locally eliminates transportation costs and ensures disaster
workers are not overwhelmed with sorting unsolicited donations and are free
to perform priority relief activities. Because these local agencies are not
operating in the crisis environment that characterizes disaster relief, the
charity will have the time sort, clean, and repair goods and identify how
and where they can be most beneficial.
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