Giving to Family and Friends
Many people want and feel they have a need to give to others – particularly a community group or a great cause. That is fantastic, but should it be at the cost of spending time with your own family, children, elderly parents or your partner? On the other hand, community groups support families and provide a place for family members to let down their hair, relax, cool-off and go back to family and family issues refreshed and thus more able to be a constructive family member. The main thing is to keep things in balance and to make sure that family and friends are not sacrificed to community causes.
From a workplace giving point of view, the new trend for corporate giving is part of the push for triple bottom line accounting. It has also been more recently stimulated by the year 2001 as the International Year of Volunteering.
Corporate giving for some corporations means staff volunteering; for some corporations it means staff donations matched by the corporation; for others it is both.
The push for family work place balance has also had recent impetus with the strong demand for paid maternity leave. Less controversially it involves workplaces allowing job sharing, family leave – acknowledgement that workers are also family members.
It is vital that all of the efforts for workplace giving are integrated and do not work against each other. For example, there are some workplaces in Australia with staff volunteering programs where the volunteering effort is selected within a charitable rather than a community model. This means that staff are volunteering for a day or more each year, giving time to charities. At the same time they are unable to volunteer at the local school to hear their own and other local children read. The corporate giving program has in these cases been completely separated from family giving.
Formal charitable giving has been split off from giving to family and friends – and often it is also split from giving to local communities.
It is as though charity is valued more highly by these corporations than prevention which is ensuring that families and local communities are strengthened.
Strong families and communities means that disadvantage will decline and the need for charity will also decline.
Consider the following points:
Keep some sense of balance between time given to community interests and causes and time with family and friends. |
Try to find some community interests that allows your family to participate with you – this is especially good with children as it involves them from an early age in giving back to the community. |
In workplaces, try allowing staff to use staff volunteering time to volunteer to family or local issues, for example:
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Acknowledge staff contribution as volunteers on weekends and after work, for example:
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Ensure that programs encouraging staff donations enable staff to select local community groups that support their own family and friends for donations. For example staff should be able to select:
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Give to families and community by ensuring that family/community friendly policies are in place; for example:
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Further information
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Telephone 9205 5555
Email info@yarracity.vic.gov.au
Links
Within this site
Yarra City Council
External sites (Yarra City Council accepts no responsibility for the information or opinions contained within external sites)
Yarra City Council
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