As the age-old adage goes, one should not look a gift horse in the mouth but, of course, to every rule there are the exceptions. And when it comes to charitable events organised by the private sector or people campaigning for one cause or another, a healthy dose of scepticism is never unwarranted.
Four prime examples from this last week spring immediately to mind.
Firstly, yesterday four leading organisations marked the 14th annual Corporate Social Responsibility Day with employees volunteering a day’s work at homes which help various vulnerable people facing different social problems. The initiative saw hundreds of employees from Farsons Group, Forestals Group, HSBC Bank Malta, and Tumas Group lending a helping hand at a number of homes and charitable institutions.
The second was the Arduous DLH plane pull, where funds were raised for l-Istrina, as featured on our front page.
These two initiatives are the very essence of the CSR concept. While there is no doubt that the corporations and organisations involved will get their pound of public relations flesh out of those activities, the hundreds of employees taking part all have their hearts in the right places. Each year they raise the bar further and provide a shining example of giving something back to the community in which they work.
On Wednesday Henley & Partners, the purveyors of Malta Individual Investment Programme, announced it has teamed up with UNHCR and that it will donate more than USD1 million to help the global refugee cause.
Through a multi-year partnership Henley & Partners will support UNHCR's global refugee registration activities and further advocate and assist UNHCR's resource mobilisation efforts in the interests of its people of concern. And in line with the passports it plies the world over, Henley & Partners' support will be primarily focused on funding refugee registration and identification documents.
Here a little scepticism is in order when one considers that USD1 million is a mere drop in the bucket in comparison to what the company will be accruing from the sale of Maltese passports alone, and considering past criticism to the effect that while Malta cries for burden sharing in terms of impoverished irregular African migrants intending to seek asylum, it welcomes other migrants who can pay for Maltese passports.
But then again, every euro counts when it comes to helping out the world’s most vulnerable.
Now for the real scepticism. While we wholly commend any charitable work carried out in any disadvantaged community in any part of the world and while this newspaper has time and time again stressed the need to donate blood, we entirely disagree with the notion of leveraging such important efforts for pure publicity.
This is exactly what the Yes to spring hunting camp has done when it made a meal out of the fact that seven hunters, very generously, donated their time and skills to build a school in Ethiopia, and when they very generously donated blood to the blood bank yesterday.
We are, however, certain that these instances were not the first in which hunters have lent a helping hand in Africa by way of missionary or NGO work. We are even more certain that yesterday was not the first time that a hunter has donated blood. The difference is that when they have partaken in such initiatives in the past they were not publicised as part of a referendum or any other campaign.
The way they were publicised was, simply put, tasteless. While we can certainly understand that hunters are aiming to minimise on some of the negative publicity they have earned over the years on account of a handful of bad apples, we do not believe that boasting about charity work in such a blatant manner is the way of going about it.
There is something that is just a little too disingenuous about those two publicity stunts that simply begs one to look that particular gift horse in the mouth very closely indeed.