honolulu habitat for humanity

habitat for humanity is one of those top of mind organizations. and even though i've yet to work with them, the degrees of separation between myself and habitat are very few.  nicola, my good friend from college went to zambia and costa rica with habitat and one of my best friends, chandra, has worked with them through her church. 

my birthday is fast approaching and i thought i'd organize an adopt-a-day with honolulu's habitat chapter.  volunteering nirvana would be something like having a date in mind, committing to being there, intrinsic value in exchange for your help. win-win in my book. this was not my experience today.  on their website, honoluluhabitat.org gives the break out of the "cost" to volunteer.  $25 per person, $500-1K per team (with varying perks) or build-a-thon for $5K.  when i started working on dates with them, i was sent forms that were not the same listed on the website. the updated forms require $75 per person or $1K-2K per team.  the 300% increase raised my eyebrows.  there is apparently a monetary threshold at which my brain/instincts say, "that's reasonable" or "really?!" and when i did ask why there was such a dramatic increase, the answer was "since inception no one ever thought to increase the cost. and since this is a huge source of revenue for us, it makes sense." 

i fully appreciate the fact that while organizations like habitat are for not-for-profit, they still need to generate funds somehow to function (and thrive).  i'm not bucking at the idea of making donations. what disheartened me was that by upping the ante to $75, its not very feasible for the average person.  15 of my friends were willing to donate $25, give up a saturday from 8am - 4pm, and were excited to hammer/saw/spackle a house in waimanalo. forking over another $50 on top of that would be me asking them to sacrifice something else out of their recession-thrashed budgets. 

habitat is working incredibly hard to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world. that is not up for debate here. what i do want to challenge is the knee-jerk tendency to default to larger organizations.  in this instance, $75 would likely go toward supplies and overhead costs. OR i could volunteer somewhere for (gasp) free and give my $75 directly towards a propane stove for AIDS orphans in India.

either choice moves me toward my goal of making positive change in the world. another win-win. gotta love that. i plan to work with habitat in the future, but for now, for this birthday anyway, there are many other cause-worthy fish in the proverbial sea.