I have terrible guilt trips when I pass a beggar as I feel I ought to be giving them money, but it's combined with the knowledge they might smoke it, shoot it or drink it. I know someone who gave sandwiches to a beggar and they had them thrown back at them. Big Issue sellers often congregate round supermarkets too.
What can you do? Giving to homeless charities I think is the best way to deal with it.
I work for a charity whose sole use of collected money is to make sure the hospital's patients have state of the art scanners. The cash the hospital gives us for each scan pays only for the running and staff costs, not the capital replacements. This means we can subsidise scans to save lives, the hospital can scan more patients with a given budget and we have one of the shortest waiting lists for MRI scans in the country.
But the Appeal folk (mostly volunteers) give up weekends, sometimes just to bring in a couple of hundred pounds. A box wave (yes, no shaking allowed any more) will bring perhaps only £120 in a day.
Ironically, before the National Lottery, we used to get a lot more...
moonbells
