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Thank you for advocating that people send money. I love the idea of a bake sale!

But please, don't send clothes and/or expired medication. Expired medication has to be disposed of properly, and clothes are often inappropriate and clog up the system (volunteers have to sort through the clothes, which takes them away from doing more valuable work). Donating items can in fact do more harm than good. Donating money, on the other hand, allows the people on the ground purchase what the population actually needs.

Your best bet to ensure that your money is having the best impact is to donate to organisations that are already on the ground. They understand the local context.

Also, please don't forget that although Haïti desperately needs our help now, they will also need our help to rebuild over the next few years. If you feel touched by what happened in Haïti, consider making regular contributions to a non-profit in international development. These organisations help to make countries like Haïti less vulnerable to unpredictable events.

As an addendum to the above, donating money (in some situations) also allows aid organizations to buy supplies locally. Of course, that's not always feasible, but when it is, it means that your money goes even further by supporting a local business or farmer that might have been struggling.

Sorry, but I think you're better off just writing a check to Oxfam or the Red Cross or whatever charity you support. The bake sale idea is nice, and doesn't hurt anything, but it's more about keeping yourself busy and telling yourself that you're participating in the relief effort.
And while good intentions and motivations and industriousness are fine, they don't really have any impact on the situation--not like direct action does. A dollar given grudgingly is the same as a dollar given with a song in your heart, despite all happy talk to the contrary.

Bake sales and other similar efforts multiply dollars, build community, and, yes, help us deal with the helplessness of observing a lot of misery and not being able to do much about it. There's nothing wrong with a little song in your heart.

As one of your very regular Haitian-in-America readers, I want to express my gratitude that anyone does whatever they can, and in the best way they know how. I know many have strong opinions, but any help at all... is still help. Thanks again to everyone.

My concern is that I hope the busyness of bake sales does not redirect people from looking into the roots of this tragedy, and does not lead people to think that is all they can do, or that it is sufficient.

Haïti has a long an troubled history -- it is a country that was never given a break by the world. Becoming educated about Haïti, keeping abreast of developments, particularly redevelopment plans, is very important.

Start with reading this article:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/isabel-hilton-dont-blame-the-haitians-for-doubting-us-promises-1870940.html

Read the writings of Paul Farmer, who is a great authority on Haïti, having written several books (go to the library to try to find a copy of The Uses of Haïti, which is unfortunately out of print at the moment, but is a must-read), and who has worked there over the past 20 years.

The NGO he co-founded,

http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

is one of the best organizations to support in the Haïti effort.

Try to protect Haïti from the predatory redevelopment efforts that are surely on their way, as well as supporting immediate disaster relief efforts.

While I appreciate the intention of a bake sale, I'm with mschatelaine.

I forever associate them with student council fundraisers, and it seems to trivialize things a bit.

"...it seems to trivialize things a bit"

Literally sugar-coating the situation...

You *do* understand the concept that the sale price of the finished bake goods generally exceeds the cost of the ingredients, right... or am I missing the point of what a bake sale does?

Assuming that's correct, then the person who wants to do the bake sale is actually contributing more than he or she might have been able to on their own...

Plus, it also highlights the cause to a broader community, AND gives the baker a sense of purpose in a situation that seems otherwise futile.

Check your assumptions and bake sale biases at the door. ANY help is better than no help.

This reminds me of a piece in The Onion after 9/11:

Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake

You could see the cake-baking as a ridiculous and impotent reaction, but I think the piece accurately reflected how helpless people feel in the face of such overwhelming destruction and tragedy.

The bake sales might not be the most direct way to help, but I think they give people a sense of purpose and a sense of control over chaos. I don't think they trivialize the tragedy.

Here's a link to the article: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28148

My personal belief is that we should be donating directly to organizations who are already in Haiti and are intimately aware of the political climate and other various challenges. Personally, I find businesses who offer portions of their sales to any relief effort to be incredibly distatseful and exploitive.

And thank you for the links, mschatelaine. i will read them on my break at work today.

So, PrettyKitty, you'd rather those businesses contribute absolutely nothing?

patrick (the other one) Bravo! You're right. Most people, when confronted with a bake sale for something will at least think about it whereas reading about something horrible in the news will trigger "god, that's awful" and then putting it out of their minds. Asking, then and there, for money and making it easy (and tastey!) to give will make it much more likely that someone who might not have otherwise will give.

And what if I can't afford more than the ten bucks it costs to get flour and sugar (or less, if I have it already)? A bake sale means more money than I could have sent and it highlights the issue to others. It isn't trivial. Showing that you care is never trivial.

I guess my thought is this.. if it is sugar coating it or whatever.. So what?

We need more folks thinking of others in the world, not just ourselves, so whatever brings that forth, in whatever amount it changes the world.

When I was a kid I went trick or treating for MS or something.. The amount I collected was pretty trivial, but when combined with everyone's efforts I felt so proud. I made a difference. I remember that I did something special and different.

I applaud all efforts to bring kindness and compassion to the world. I applaud anything that stops anyone from the isolation of their own story for however long. Each time someone takes 5 secs to think of someone or something besides themselves.. that's a good thing.

I have NO money to donate, but I can bake. You can think a bakesale trivializes the tragedy, but what money is raised by my selling cookies is more than the NOTHING I could donate and I'd rather do a little something than nothing.

I don't have much money to donate either, but I can definitely bake! I'm doing my own one-person bake sale this week at my company. I'm hoping to raise $1000, with each pastry at $5 (but people are putting in $10 and $15). I'm baking something new everyday...I have the menu posted up and I'll be writing down how much is made each day to encourage people to keep donating.

I haven't done a bake sale in years, but getting back into it and coming into work on a rainy MLK holiday brings that little bit of needed sunshine into that office.

For those of you who think bake sales are silly, I leave you this quote:

"It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving." --Mother Teresa

Anything counts, and a bake sale is a sure way to put love into giving.

I'll be posting results of my bake sale soon on my blog www.quitecurious.com.

Happy baking,
Paula, San Francisco, CA

Patrick, I'd like businesses to donate as much as they can. But I'd rather they did so without piggy-backing off the tragedy. Donate, sure. But don't use it as an opportunity to get great publicity or boost sales. I work in Public Relations, so I know of what I speak.

The naysayers are completely ignoring the community spirit that these bake sales inspire. They reach parts of the community that might not otherwise donate - children empty their piggy banks and retirees who cannot otherwise afford to donate will pay $1 for a cookie. From what I have read, a couple hundred dollars will buy a significant amount of water and/or food for the victims.

PrettyKitty, I own a small business and we announced that we'd be donating all of our profits from Sunday's sales to AmeriCares.

Yes, our sales were boosted relative to a typical Sunday, and AmeriCares was the sole beneficiary of that boost. If people were considering patronizing my business, they had the option to do so on Sunday, knowing that any profit we made was going to be donated to AmeriCares, and far more people visited on Sunday than usual. So now I can make a sizable donation to AmeriCares that I would have been able to make otherwise. I'm not seeing what's disgusting about that.

"would *not* have been able to make otherwise" I meant. :)

Maybe I'm alone on a limb on this issue, but that's how I feel. I also am not a fan of celebrity telethons, such as the one George Clooney is planning on Friday. Again, I think people are generally smart enough to understand how to donate even 50 cents on their own to an organization that is already on the ground in Haiti.

Let me try another take at this:

Any help is obviously welcome, bake sales included. It is just that some kinds of help are better than others.

If an NGO asks for your money and tells you that 50 cents of every dollar you give them goes to a project overseas and that the remaining 50 cents goes to administration, you would probably not think this is a very good organization in which to put your money.

If you buy a pastry for 5 dollars and 2.50 goes into the ingredients and the rest goes to the project overseas, well it is not any better.

If I have a dollar to spend for a cause, I want as much of it to end in the project.

Any organization doing work overseas needs to take some of their donations to fund their operations. Usually 10-15%, or so, is acceptable, not much more. And do not forget that after you deduct the cost of your bake sale, you will still have to deduct whatever administration cost required by the organization to which you are giving the profit.

At the end of the day, the 40 cents you will have gotten out of every one dollar of sale will be appreciated, but the whole dollar would have been even better.

Mscheatelaine, in most circumstances, (I can't speak for everyone), the bakers donate the ingredients and work for the bake sale, so they aren't deducted from the money raised. All of the money goes straight to the charity. And for the bake sale I'm working on, our charity criteria include already being established in Haiti and having minimal administrative costs, information that's pretty easy to find online.

I really dislike pink cans of soup and livestrong bracelets, but I think the majority of these bake sales are in a different category.

Wow! Who knew that a little pastry charity would spark such controversy? I was inspired to participate in my city's vegan bake sale thanks to this post. As a person of modest means, donating a tray of vegan brownies that cost me $3 to make and having them go for $30 seems like a much bigger help then my cash would get. Plus, people get to eat delicious food. It's win-win, as I see it.

From Samin Nosrat, who is organizing the large, three location bake sale this Saturday:
I held bakesales for both the tsunami and hurricane katrina that raised over $2k with minimal effort on my part. That's way more than I could have ever done on my own. So many of the people who donated didn't even take a baked good! So many thanked me for giving them the opportunity to donate, because they'd been meaning to, but hadn't gotten around to doing so via the internet. People gave me $20, $50, even $100 for a single cookie. it was about so much more than the baked good--it was about giving people an opportunity to give. And that's what I'm hoping will happen on Saturday, in a much bigger way."

I am shocked that people are so negative towards fund raising. 40 cents on the dollar? Are you suggesting it costs 60 cents to bake a single cupcake or cookie? I assure you that is not the case. How is it better to contribute my 5 dollars than to turn it into 50 dollars by selling cookies?

I am the first to tell people "send money, not stuff," but I can't imagine saying "don't try to raise money, your method may sugar-coat the tragedy." Of course we're all entitled to our opinions, I'm just surprised that earning extra money to donate is being looked down on. What then is an acceptable way to raise money?

I honestly think that if your heart is in the right place, that is all that should matter. Sometimes when things seem far away it is hard to come to terms with the tragedy. Anything that gets people talking about it and contributing seems like it definitely is not hurting.

Just my two cents' worth - I'm a student. I don't have a lot of spare money, and most of my classmates are in the same boat. I think that for those of us without much money, it often feels awkward to donate the $5 or $10 or $15 that we feel we can easily spare, because it's so little.

So, over to the bake sale idea - I'm part of an informal campus group that advocates for healthier food options at school. We run a weekly potluck and ask people to pay what they can to cover some of the costs of the food we bring in. We usually make about $5. Last week, we decided to donate all of the proceeds to the relief effort (no money went to cover our costs). We put up some posters two days before. We made $350 in a couple of hours that way, and got a significant number of donations from people who likely would otherwise not have given anything because the amount they could afford was so small.

Another thing the naysayers are missing is that a bake sale is a great way to introduce your child to philanthropy.

I think some of the naysayers here are just not understanding how the bake sales work. Bakers (professional or non) donate bake goods. Those baked goods are then sold to the community, usually for a suggested donation. Generally what happens is that people who stop buy will give $5, $10, $20 or more for a cookie or a brownie, sometimes not even taking anything. So the bakers are able to turn some time and a little money into even more money, which is then sent to relief organizations.

Reports are that this weekend almost $22,000 was raised from Bay Area bake sales for Haiti. I really doubt that the people who end up getting food, water, or medicine because of that money will care that it came from a bake sale.

Criticisms focusing on "this" kind of help versus "that" kind of help smack of counterproductiveness, self-satisfaction, superiority and are offensive. Criticising someone's charitable efforts because they don't align with one's personal choices for what charitable efforts should look like reveals only the critic's hang-ups, for lack of more precise or elegant phrasing.

Some criticise aid for Haiti, for instance, on the basis that the U.S. has problems itself, and we should "take care of home" first. These criticisms of bake sales are cousins of that argument and result in inertia. If we wait to lend a hand until that hand is perfect, no aid will ever be given. Dwelling in a mindset that denigrates charitable work for failing to achieve an indivual's conception of the ideal helps no one. Bake sales don't exist in a vacuum. They are part of the broader universe of people doing their best to pitch in and help. Say thank you and add whatever good efforts you choose to the whole.

Thank you to all who have contributed in whatever form those contributions have taken. Your grace is profoundly appreciated.

Well said VerryKerry!