We’ve built a culture where, when it comes to giving to charity, generosity waits for a spectacle, as if suffering must be performed before compassion can be released. Are you a sucker for the spectacle?
There’s a particular British ritual that plays out with the reliability of rain on a bank holiday weekend. Someone linked to your social structure, who inevitably engages with, although not exclusively, a consistently annoying member of the extended family or other acquaintance, announces they’re doing a charity challenge.
Charity: do we need stunts to donate?
A marathon. A Tough Mudder. A sponsored silence (which should frankly be compulsory for some). A head shave. A beard grow. A month without beer, chocolate, or swearing, always delivered with the solemnity of a peace envoy. Then comes the line: “I’m raising money for …”
Cue the link. Cue the social media posts. Cue the guilt. Because now you’re in the moral chokehold. Sponsor them and you’re a good person. Don’t sponsor them and you apparently hate children, hospitals, puppies, and the concept of hope.
But here’s the question that’s been gnawing at me for years: why do some of us wait for stunts to contribute anything at all?
Why does someone need to run 26 miles dressed as a giant banana before we’ll part with a tenner for a hospice? Why must a grown adult crawl through mud, cycle the length of Britain on a bike last serviced during the Blair era, or humiliate themselves in plain sight before we acknowledge a cause is worth supporting?
The performance of generosity
We’ve drifted into a strange cultural space where giving quietly is almost suspicious. Anonymous donation? What are you hiding? Why aren’t you posting a screenshot of your receipt with the caption “Do what you can”?
Meanwhile, the stunt economy thrives. The more extreme the challenge, the more applause the performer receives. Not the charity. Not the cause. The performer. The noble sufferer in Lycra. It’s philanthropy as performance art.
I’m not knocking the people who do these challenges. Most are genuinely trying to help. Some even enjoy the running, cycling, swimming, or self-inflicted misery. Fair play.
But for many of the rest of us? We’ve become conditioned to wait for the show before we open our wallets.
The quiet crisis of charity behind the performance
While some charities have also become chief cheerleaders of the stunt propaganda, they don’t actually run on stunts, they run on money. Boring, unglamorous, un-Instagrammable money. The kind that pays for staff, electricity, safeguarding, training, and the endless administration that keeps the wheels turning. Try telling the public that. “Would you like to donate £10 a month to help fund our operational costs?” Cue the tumbleweed.
We want our donations to feel heroic. We want to save a child, plant a tree, rescue a dog, or rebuild a school. We want the dopamine hit of impact. We want the story.
But the truth is that the most important donations are often the least sexy. They’re the ones that keep the lights on. The ones that pay the salaries of the people who actually do the work. The ones that don’t come with a medal or a sweaty selfie captioned “Never again (until next year)”.
The everyday alternative
We sponsor because we feel we should. Because we don’t want to be the one person in the office who didn’t chip in. Because we know the fundraiser will check the list and notice our absence. It’s charity by social pressure.
Supporting our mates is fine. But imagine if we gave because we believed in the cause, not because someone we vaguely know is cycling 100 miles in the rain. Imagine if we didn’t need the stunt at all.
Here’s a radical thought: what if we normalised giving without the theatrics? What if we treated charity like brushing our teeth – something we do regularly, quietly, without needing applause or a medal?
Pick a cause that matters to you – mental health, homelessness, children’s hospices, animal rescue – and set up a small monthly donation. Something sustainable. Something that doesn’t require a mate to run a marathon in a mankini. Give because it’s the right thing to do, not because someone is dangling from a zipline over the River Trent.
Charity stunts aren’t the problem – our timing is
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-stunt. If someone wants to run 50 miles dressed as a Victorian chimney sweep to raise money for Macmillan, crack on. If someone wants to swim the Channel covered in goose fat, I’ll sponsor them and send them a towel.
The problem isn’t the stunt, it’s the fact that we wait for the feat. We wait for the spectacle. We wait for the nudge. We wait for the guilt. We wait for the moment when giving becomes socially unavoidable.
But charity shouldn’t be reactive. It shouldn’t be triggered by someone else’s suffering, self-inflicted or otherwise. It should be proactive. Regular. Quiet. Consistent.
This is not to say that everyone is like this. We should acknowledge that there are regular, quiet givers: the ones who have direct debits, the top-ups at the supermarket tills, the money bequeathed in a will and the food bank donations.
The kindness we don’t post about
Maybe that’s the real heart of it. Not the stunt. Not the spectacle. Not the sweaty finish-line photo. But the quiet decision to care. The unremarkable, unpublicised, unselfish act of giving.
Because charity, at its core, isn’t about heroics. It’s about humanity. It’s about recognising that someone, somewhere, needs help, and deciding you’re going to be part of the solution, even if nobody ever knows.
Support your mate’s marathon, skydive, or 24-hour karaoke marathon by all means. But don’t wait for them. Give because you can. Give because it matters. Give because the world is slightly less bleak when we do.
And if enough of us start doing that, quietly, consistently, without fanfare, then maybe we’ll build a culture where charity isn’t a spectacle at all. It’s just who we are. Because if the only time we give is when someone’s dressed as an aubergine carrying a fridge on their back, the problem isn’t the costume – it’s us.
