Today, as I took my customary walk to the coffee shop, I passed by at least four teams of two green-shirted youths stopping people on the street to solicit funds. I think I like Greenpeace, I just hate how they generate cash. My problem with this approach is the amount of waste: hundreds of man-hours being spent to transfer cash from one pool (the general population’s pockets) to another (the Greenpeace bank account) without any accrued value for anyone.

We can assume these are all volunteers and will neglect the amount of time they take out of the lives of passers-by. My chief objection is that, once all the volunteer time and energy is spent, the organization does have more funds to do its thing with but the world is in essentially the same state as before save for the calories spent while doing the “work”.

What if, instead, those volunteer man-hours were spent actually producing value in a manner that enhances the world. Funds would still be generated but the world would already be a better place: we wouldn’t have to wait expectantly for our contributions to have some eventual impact–goodness would already have been spread.

For example, lets say Greenpeace organized (or, even better, trained) a team of landscapers. These would still be volunteers, at least for the most part. With such a resource in hand, Greenpeace could do things like bid on the construction of parks for the municipality. Their bid, thanks to the volunteers’ contributions of expertise and manpower, would undoubtedly be below that of other companies (seeing as it only includes the cost of material + whatever contribution is appropriate).

Actually winning the city contract would provide:
- funds for Greenpeace operations;
- experience doing actual work for young volunteers;
- added value and quality of life, through the creation of the park;
- lower cost for taxpayers, since the Greenpeace bid was lower than any commercial company could afford;
- the city with awesome spin, since they managed to build a new park for lower cost while simultaneously contributing to a worthy social cause.

After all these wondrous things have rained down on the world, Greenpeace now has the funds to do whatever goodness they’d first set out to do.

Isn’t that better? Such a means of fund-raising could sustain the organism while bringing immediate benefits before the group even began pursuing it’s primary mission.

For a large organization such as Greenpeace, it wouldn’t be such a big deal to manage numerous teams in various fields (landscaping, information technology, recycling, whatever) each of which could be carefully selected to be in sectors that enhance quality of life while providing volunteers with a means of contributing that’s both more interesting than standing on a street corner and much better on their resume.