Reply to Feds - do you find the Feds Feed Families and CFC annoying when you are not getting a raise?

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[quote=Anonymous]I think the concept of CFC (i.e. providing a way for employees to do charitable giving through their paychecks) is terrific.

I think the way the CFC is run in practice is horrible.  I have been pressured by a co-worker to give, and then when I didn't (I was clueless at 23 yrs old), he came back and tried to get me to sign the form and he would put $2 in for me.  I later found out that he and the other CFC rep from another division had a bet (or maybe the bosses had a bet) to see which division could get more participation (perhaps they were trying to get 100% participation).  I guess my non-interest was holding my group back!   I didn't know that at the time.  I just thought the guy was being persistent.  What he didn't know was that I was planning to leave my job in the next year to work full time for a non-profit doing direct services to poor people in DC -- in a full time volunteer corps program.  But, actual charity gets lost in the CFC competitions.

I felt that it was nobody's business what I did with my GS-7 salary and I didn't need to be pressured to participate or pressured to sign a form while someone else gave a donation in my name.

Some years later, I was back in the gov. as a lawyer and as the new person in the office, I was tagged to be the CFC rep (they didn't know my history with it or my feeling about it!!).  So, I did a low-key job of promoting CFC to my co-workers.  I had to attend some kind of CFC gov-wide event at a Marriott (the big one up by the zoo).  The CFC people had these barometers of what our fund raising goals should be and all I could think was "who the heck are YOU to just decide how much OTHER PEOPLE should be giving out of their paychecks?"   They just take whatever they got last year and add 10% or something on it and decide that THAT'S what other people need to be contributing to CFC... and they were all rah-rah-rah and patting themselves on the back.

I just don't get how anyone thinks they (1) should decide what other people should be giving, and (2) should take credit for other people's generosity.  It just doesn't make sense to me.... but it showed me how much of an industry this CFC thing is.  It's not just a nice little process for people to make giving to charities easier.  It's an industry.  I disagree with that concept of "charity."

While I worked in an office that had some oversight over the CFC program, I experienced a situation where I received some life insurance money.  My spouse and I wanted to use that $ to contribute to a charity that was related to the person's cause of death.   Since we were going to make a decent sized donation anyway, we thought maybe we could boost the CFC totals too.  Came to find out that the  "overhead" is for CFC before a single dollar goes to the charity was like 14%.  I thought, why would I send this money through CFC to get to X charity?   My charity (and the cause) get less.  We sent the money directly to the charity and skipped CFC.

To the extent that CFC makes it easy for people to give to charities and be helpful in the world, I like CFC.  To the extent that CFC is about competition and pressure and people just making up "goals" so that they can then pat themselves on the back for other people giving money, I think CFC is a crock.[/quote]

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