Generally, some people in the non-profits are "multipliers", while others are merely "additive". If you are a smart and educated person, you probably don't want the "additive" role, e.g. one of dozen people who pour the soup at the soup kitchen. Just send some money instead and let someone else do the job; they will do it almost equally well.
But you might be very useful in the "multiplier" role: someone who solves the logistic of soup cooking and distribution, or who speaks with the media, etc. You would be a great multiplier if that role happens to be your profession, but even generally smart people (e.g. someone smart enough to recognize problems and ask online for solutions) could be a big improvement over someone stupid in an important role.
If you want anything done, in any branch of relief work, you will forget the word 'stupid' and be offended on others' behalf if it is used in your presence. It doesn't even take altruism.
As to multiplier/additive equilibrium, yes, causes need multipliers. What I disagree with is that causes will always benefit, linearly or otherwise, from hiring additives.
You start donating money. There appear hired people. The 'free' people gradually leave. You hire more to replace them. Other kitchens, which might not have lawyers in their staff, decide your kitchen can't play nice. You lose their cooperation.
Result: your own utility goes up, the kitchen's goes down.
If a soup kitchen lacks the funds required to pay a minimum wage worker to pour the soup, it would benefit more from donations than from volunteers. If it doesn't have enough people to perform low-skill tasks and has the money but doesn't hire workers, then what it needs is competent leadership. In either case, a skilled worker can help a lot more by providing something other than unskilled labor.
But most people are skilled workers outside free kitchens. Should they all donate?
When I read about the lawyer working at the soup kitchen instead of spending another hour at his paying job, I keep thinking, 'how cute these choices are. There are so many lawyers already, and so many kitchens, the guy can hardly say he's on the front-line... he found a way to occupy an evening, less depressing than watching the news.'
Be careful of using revealed preference as a fully general counter-argument. It's possible, and probably common, for someone to really alieve that they are working towards and want to be working towards that goal but they just haven't thought through whether there is a better way to do it.
It is not the lawyer's responsibility to think of the better way, but the kitchen's. Unless the purpose of the kitchen is community-building and fuzzies-production, in which case it works exactly right.
I don't follow. Do you argue that in some cases volunteering in the kitchen is better than donating? Why? What's wrong with the model where the kitchen uses your money to hire workers?
Nothing wrong - if you prove the business scalable. (Which might not be true for many charities out there, but that would not make them inefficient; only the donating as contributing.) I admit I have no experience with free kitchens, though.
Scalable in what sense? Do you foresee some problem with one kitchen using the hiring model and other kitchens using the volunteer model?
Yes, I think it might lead to discord, at least. 'Oh, it's just a job for them - a cost, not an opportunity - certainly they will try to do as little as possible, and this will reflect poorly on us, and we don't have rich lawyers!' 'Oh, how come they don't switch to hiring? We used to do so much less, but they don't even try!' or something like that.
Now, the problem with people buying endangered plants can be attacked from different angles.
The first question I have is: If there a market for an endangered plant, why doesn't it get grown in a greenhouse or on farmland? Is the plant is really endangered and there are few of them gathering them up shouldn't be cheap. Why can't a farmer who focuses on growing them compete?
Explaining that this wasn't what we had planned, or that the flowers were already cut and dead, or that this was one party out of likely ten from that train alone fell on deaf ears
The thing that matters isn't what you planned but what the law of the land happens to be.
Now imagine that the lawyer's interested in wild nature protection. What would he rationally do?
Lawyers are experts in suing people. Here people seem to violate laws. A lawyer might go and file a lawsuit or if that isn't possible report specific incidents to the police.
(I will add info about the law later - don't have it on hand right now.)
The early spring plants, such as snowdrops, are not very rare in the regions where they grow, it's just that 1) they begin to bloom earlier in Southern regions (the Crimea, Caucasus) and there is an established line of distribution to many towns by railway and buses. It is, in essence, organized crime. Snowdrops aren't the only such product coming from the Crimea (Ruscus and Juniperus are, too, and probably other things we didn't work with), so I imagine the people who do thiscan obtain profit without farming. Another evidence of this is the occasional plant with bulb present - were they farmed, the bulb would have been left in soil. (Cyclamens are used in folk medicine, so they are often taken with bulbs; but the bulbs, unlike the flowers, are mostly sold locally, and we would not be aware of it if we didn't come there during the season. This is, however, unlikely for snowdrops, which are poisonous.) 2) when other populations (in 'continental' Ukraine) begin to bloom, there are several other species - Scilla sibirica and bifolia, tulips, narcisses, later lily-of-the-valley, irises etc., and so the gatherers can pick a lot without farming.
Also, apparently flowers 'from the wild' have additional charm.
Also, farming Red Data species is illegal (but bulk sellers still provide 'licenses' from their village councils now and again.)
Also, there are places in the Carpathians where if you fence off a part of the meadow it's considered yours, so you can gather what you want there.
Also, by the law we cannot do much beyond spread bad publicity without police. The police are in on it, since most of the trade goes on in public places like markets and near underground stations (in Kyiv and other larger cities), so they are lukewarm in general and tend to find excuses not to get involved. When we do file a lawsuit, the seller is still unlikely to be fined. The whole businesd is rather amusing cat-and-mouth if you don't get involved, with many mice and few cats, and the occasional wiping of face against the wall.
The early spring plants, such as snowdrops, are not very rare in the regions where they grow,
Then why are they an endangered plant?
Very uneven distribution, and/or gradual decline in population, and/or destruction of habitats, and/or (for things like clubmosses, which go to funereal wreaths, secondary stuffing in bouquets and Easter decorations) largely unknown distribution and very slow recruitment of new plants.
In general your presentation doesn't give me the impression that this is a very important issue, especially given what currently happens in the Ukraine.
I don't know to what extent that's due to your presentation of the issue or inherent to the issue. If you want to achieve something on the issue it might be necessary to spent energy on developing talking points that illustrate that it's an important issue.
Notice I never said it is. (And please stop adding 'the', it is seen by Ukrainians as 'they are still referring to us as 'the Edge' after all these years'.) My goal was not to present the issue competitively, but to show a situation where donating money leads to, say, climate change activism (which I think is less efficient) and donating manpower - to a regular, structured, and much more integrated into existing legal infrastructure campaign.
Given the current situation, donating money [to war-related issues] is very efficient iff you know it is not a scam. But there is a vast need for specialized volunteering, too (housing people, rehabilitating invalids, journalism, etc.)
It is worth noting that in the case of the Snowdrop, the classification of species and subspecies is messy. A lot of the preservation is trying to preserve natural variations in their natural habitat. If all we cared about was Galanthus nivalis paralectotype we could ignore localized subspecies -- in fact, if all we cared about was Galanthus nivalis the pretty white flower, we would just be happy to let it go extinct in the wild -- we have plenty in gardens across Europe.
The reason why people take them from the fields when it is so easy to grow them in your back garden is simply that if you take flowers from a mountain field they are free. If you live near a field, don't expect to get caught, and have not particular feelings on the tragedy of the commons, why wouldn't you pick them and sell them?
Were I a part of the system, yes, I would. But I am not, and there were cases (I remember two) when the protected species was declared extinct from a reserve, and the habitat irreversibly changed (into a wood logging site and into a building site, respectively). Without the species (Galanthus sp. in the one case, 3 orchids + 2 willows in the other) the ecosystem is still valuable, but much harder to defend.
So... A species becomes popular - is recognized as becoming rarer - is protected by law (since the Red Data Book has more to do wth law than with science) - is gradually exterminated or left only in unconnected populations - is proclaimed a conservation target - and then winks out, one population at a time, and the places where they used to be are seen as 'lost' and so much less valuable, conservation-wise.
1. The ordinary hour.
When I read about the lawyer working at the soup kitchen instead of spending another hour at his paying job, I keep thinking, 'how cute these choices are. There are so many lawyers already, and so many kitchens, the guy can hardly say he's on the front-line... he found a way to occupy an evening, less depressing than watching the news.' (If anybody can just pay others to fill in, why doesn't the kitchen already hire help? If it did, surely the lawyer would one day donate money. Charities don't work like clocks, the need for extra funds would arise eventually.)
If the lawyer doesn't come at all, and other people don't come, the kitchen won't work. Even if a handful keeps coming, they won't hold out for long. I have seen it happen. High turnover rates are ok if new volunteers keep stumbling in, but when you come out in full force of five or three, you get this feeling. Like you're the Last Fools on Mars.
And then you all quit.
And then you don't start again. And then you never learn the effect of not contributing anything, and will be discouraged from donating to any cause, because this will be your new default setting. So even if the lawyer allocates one evening for manual labour, he already benefits the cause by being there, which is more than just his personal warm fuzzies.
2. That one hour which you really shouldn't have missed.
Sometimes, asking people to donate money is difficult because you would lose too much by being seen as for-profit, and asking people to donate time is difficult because you have to be absolutely sure they will follow orders. And then the lawyer who comes out of his own volition is worth very much.
Our NGO's hazy mission was protection of wild nature. One of traditional ways to do it is by focussing on specific species, or groups of species. Operation 'Snowdrop' is an umbrella covering prohibition of trade in endangered plants; it starts around late January and closes around late June, but it peaks around February 14 and March 8, the black days of mass destruction.
Now, the problem with people buying endangered plants can be attacked from different angles.
One is educating them. Writing to militsia (police) was the most targeted correspondence, but the most it did was make them wary and derisive (unless they suddenly needed to show activity to their superiors.) We contacted schools, but children usually don't buy flowers; and it always took so much time. Mass-media occasionally took up interest, but for real coverage they wanted Action. Since this provided us with the largest audience, we tried our best to provide it.
We invited them to the train station, where the plants arrived in bulk (mostly snowdrops and cyclamens from the Crimea and crocuses from the Carpathians). There we enlisted police's help and confiscated the flowers, counted them, wrote protocols which would hopefully end up in court and directed the flowers to hospitals. A reporter and a law-enforcer would typically go there with one of us, to witness the distribution. Once, a man demanded before the cameras than we destroy them, so that he would know we didn't cheat him out of profit. The police supported him. That was a devastating hit. We would be reminded of that event for years to come. Explaining that this wasn't what we had planned, or that the flowers were already cut and dead, or that this was one party out of likely ten from that train alone fell on deaf ears - people saw us trampling 10 thousand snowdrops into pulp; we were guilty.
...maybe it is possible to raise funds for this kind of work, but we never figured out how. Office supplies we already had, through association with another NGO. 'For insurance'? (There was that time when it was the cops who trespassed upon a population of Pulsatilla nigricans we monitored.) But men and women, thinking on their feet, not quitting after the first large loss, we never had enough. Now imagine that the lawyer's interested in wild nature protection. What would he rationally do?
(What tags should I use?)