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Loaves & Fishes' One-Forty-Two Con Job

A frame from L&F's video. You can see the whole of the thirty-three-seconds-long video at the bottom of this post.
Loaves & Fishes is sending out a donations plea, by email, that reads as follows: “For less than the cost of a Starbucks*, $1.42, you can provide a hot home cooked Thanksgiving meal to a homeless man, women, or child.”

This is, of course, a baldfaced lie, an act of treatchery, to deceive potential donors  -- subliminally if not openly -- that any wee bit of money YOU give to Loaves & Fishes will somehow result in a spectacular amount of great good getting done.

$1.42 donation plea at L&F's
homepage as of 11/24/12.
Of course, it's a lie.  Your money, given to Loaves & Fishes, will not move the moon and the stars. It will not buy a turkey dinner for anyone anywhere. Your money, in the amount of one dollar and forty two cents -- or in any high multiple of that amount, which is what L&F hopes to receive from YOU -- will do no more good than what you might suppose.  Here is the truth, folks -- sorry it is so NOT uplifting -- but your $1.42 will do no more than $1.42-worth of good.  That's all. Tops.

One-dollar and forty-two cents won't even rent a lane for a game of bowling at Country Club Lanes.  It is just not much.  But you should hold onto it -- don't send it anywhere -- and find good you can make of it, at home.  With a bunch of piles of "one-dollar and forty-two cent" amounts you can buy yourself or your whole family some Swanson turkey TV dinners.

Loaves & Fishes isn't really having a sale, you see.  This is not "10 acts of glorious good for the price of one act of glorious good" week.  God isn't really multiplying the bread and fish in Sacramento during Sale Week such that "Only YOUR faith that $1.42 is really $142.00 will make miracles happen."  It just ain't so.

What Loaves & Fishes is doing is solely one dastardly thing: To mendaciously, perfidiously get into your wallet or purse and extract as much therein as possible.

What?  You think I'm carrying on about all this a bit much?  You say you know Loaves & Fishes wildly exaggerates things, but you just take it as their mostly-benign way of making their need for donations known?

Sigh. Please, please don't support this crass fall from authenticity. We don't have to become a nation where lying is OK when you get away with it, such that it becomes believed and then a truthy truth. We don't all have to succumb to Romnesia. Romney lost the election, y'all! C'mon!! Support the True, the Good and the Beautiful by telling Loaves & Fishes to go jump in a lake. OR, tell them that you want only truthful, authentic, understandable donation-seeking correspondence sent to you, henceforward. That it is what you are told and shown that is REAL that you might respond to with a donation of your hard-earned money.

You, the donors past, who are seen as donors future, have a lot of leverage to make things better for the homeless. Be courageous for us. Don't be easy, giving your money away, blindly.

Below, Loaves' viddie that came with their texted plea for that one-forty-two:



-----
* I think by "Starbucks," a cup of coffee is what's meant and not a franchise.

Note: It is never explained why $1.42 was chosen as the mystery amount. Nor is it explained why, in the video, a menorah is the important symbol of this plea for Thanksgiving-turkey meal money. Am I ignorant? Was it Moses who introduced the Thanksgiving tradition in America??

Comments

Sir, as a senior standing student at the University of California, Davis, son of two unhoused , mentally ill parents, and major of both sociology and psychology I feel you are wrong in your place of contempt. First, indeed, 1.42 alone can afford you less than a dollar menu item, but, in bulk, this will cover much. Today in fact, my fiance and I distributed 20 turkey dinners will all the trimmings at a reasonable portion. At 1.42 for each serving we would maybe break even. Our total batch is forty and we spent around 70. We did this for no publication, no cause but our own humanity. 40 times 1.42 is 57 rounded up.
I only state this so you can see the limit of the resources Loaves and Fishes has. To say one thing and act another is a given in a political system that we have. Without LandF there would be few bureaucratic manifestations of unhoused alleviation.
You missed the price in bulk- you could buy nearly twice as many things for 200-300 in bulk than one at a time.
I'm new to your blog, but my life is closely entwined with the unhoused and I will follow closely.
Unknown said…
James, I appreciate your comment. But I assure you that those eating at Loaves & Fishes ate momentous Thanksgiving meals (on the Tuesday before the holiday) with the meals coming from citizens' donations of food, paying Safeway prices.

I do understand that you, and ten-thousand others come to the very mistaken belief that Loaves & Fishes is wonderful -- based solely on the line of business they are in, not on the reality of the incompetency and waste at the rotted heart of the organization.

Loaves & Fishes receives between $4.5 and $5 million dollars every year in donations. [See their annual Form 990 federal filings.] Where it disappears to, I cannot say. They did spend nearly $2 million for a new Admin office/Warehouse which seems fully unnecessary since there was nothing much wrong with what they had.

You are flatly wrong, Mr. Sunderland. Sacramento is unfortunate that the Delanys and their soup kitchen ever came to town. Suffering is multiplied because Loaves & Fishes exists since it pre-empted a charity that would certainly have been far, far better from setting up operations, here.

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