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I believe that the most valuable thing you can donate to charity is time.
Take for example the sum of £50. To most people, it is a fairly substantive sum of money. Regardless of whether you earn £5 an hour or £100k a year, it is likely that you'll think twice before you spend £50.
Think about how long you (yes, you!) have to work to earn £50. If you donated £50 to a charity of your choice the chances are that the charity in question will be fairly chuffed. But consider this, what if you donated the same amount... in time?
Last time I checked, minimum wage was £6.08 per hour. This means that someone on minimum wage will take a little over 8 hours to earn £50. That's a lot of time. A long day's work.
Last year, there were 4 of us from Round Table collecting for Children in Need at Edinburgh Waverley station. Over the course of a 12 hour day, we were probably collecting for about 8 hours. We raised £1,720 in that day alone, and with manpower from Round Tables across the nation the combined total was tens of thousands of pounds. Our figure is a helluva lot more than £50 each, and we're hoping to raise even more this year with Pudsey in attendance.
And that's just fundraising; imagine what you could get done with a whole day of 'doing' things for charity! It might be on the phone at the other end of the samaritans, helping people through a low in their life. It might be a local charity who do fantastic work in your community (one thing which round table has opened my eyes to is that there are many local charities). Your time would make a difference to any number of wonderful organisations.
The next time you think about donating to a charity, stop and think for a second. Think about what else you could do instead of just paying over a bit of cash. Because even if you could give up a teeny tiny bit of your time, it would make a difference. THEN make your donation.
