Why I Won't Sponsor You

Just recently, everyone seems to be taking up long distance running. Nothing against this, obviously, it's a good way to keep fit. The London Marathon has been running (pardon the pun) for years, and people generally do it once and get sponsored to do it. But I agree entirely with David Mitchell's views on running marathons for charity. Why should I as a sponsor pay you to do something that you probably enjoy doing anyway? Hundreds of people go running weekly, even daily, and don't expect to be sponsored. I'm happy to give money to charity, and I do. I just don't see why just because you've decided to run a race, I should give my money to a charity of your choice rather than mine.

As an aside, people generally have a kind of pro-charity bias. A while back I started suggesting the Mafia do a naked calendar. I've got lots of people interested already (OK, Kath is interested already, but I'm working on others). Thing is, every time I suggest it, people say "that's a great idea, you should do it for charity!". No! I should do it because I think it'd be funny! And if there is going to be any financial benefit in doing so, why should I give it all away?!

But I digress. The point of this rant: the Race for Life. If you're running the Race for Life, I have no problem with you. In fact I support you 100%, by all means do it. You'll get fit, you'll feel good, there are no reasons not to do it. But don't expect me to sponsor you. Why? Well, firstly everyone seems to be doing the race for life. If I sponsor you, I've got to sponsor everyone else I know too. Suddenly I'm giving away a month's disposable income in one whack, assuming I don't want to default on my mortgage. Secondly, I don't support cancer research, it gets more than enough money. The reason we don't have a cure for cancer is that the research is still ongoing, not because it's underfunded. There are plenty of companies investing in cancer research because they stand to make millions once a cure is found. Throwing more money isn't going to speed anything up, and that money would be much better spent on other things which kill people or make lives miserable, such as Alzheimers, or AIDS, or human rights abuses. If you want me to sponsor you and you're giving the money to Alzheimers Research UK or Amnesty for example, I'm much more likely to sponsor you because they're causes I support, but by its very definition the Race for Life is run by Cancer Research UK, and therefore you kinda have to give your money to them. Third, see David Mitchell's video, linked above. As he rightly says, long distance running is an incredibly inefficient way of raising money. If you were to put aside all that training time and get a second job, you'd make far more money than you could do in sponsorship. I've done only one mad charity thing in my life - shaving my head. It took five minutes, no effort, and I made over £1,000 in sponsorship which I gave to a local charity that provides support for terminal cancer victims. Training for a race takes months, if you made £1,000 every five minutes you could buy most medical research centres. And one final, albeit petty reason for not supporting the Race for Life - I don't like the word 'race', it implies competition. Surely lots of people supporting a common cause doing something special together is a co-operative event, not a competitive one.

So please, if you ask me to sponsor you to do the Race for Life and I decline, don't be offended. I'm not heartless, I'd simply rather give money to charities that will benefit more from my donation. And, noble and selfless though your actions are, I'd rather give to charity for my own reasons.