DirectSponsor.org

This is the site of the Direct Charity Society and will also be where the Direct Sponsorship System info will live.

Introduction

Think back to a time when people used to help each other out directly. This was a natural part of our humanity, as crucial to our well-being as the ability to make tools. Our fundamental nature was formed over unimaginable time. Continually reaffirmed by reality, we were designed to be in communities who shared each others triumphs and problems. It’s as essential to our health as a hive to a bee, or a herd to a zebra.

Think back to before that part of our humanity was handed over to the external control of governments and corporations. Someone would typically help out a friend to pay the rent on a workshop to do his paintings so he could sell them at the market and in the town. If you did this, you’d know that the money really helped out your friend, and you’d be able to see for yourself exactly how it helped. Your friend (maybe together with you) figured out how to overcome a problem and identified an obstacle that was preventing that solution.

With the growth and spread of modern transport, along with financial and communications systems, we gradually moved farther away from personal, individual charity and into the realm of the impersonal. This corporate “charity” that replaced traditional human charity continues to grow. As it does, its “charity” becomes even less human-centred and even more collective-focused.

Virtue

There are three (for want of a better word) übervirtues, or primary virtues of which all others are a part. These are faith, hope and charity. Without charity a life can have no faith and there is no hope. The three are interdependent.

What’s needed is a radical re-assessment of how we do charity. Modern technology has doubtless brought about incredible benefits, but it’s clear we have not been fully in control of the direction in which it’s taken us. Before rebuilding, we need to throw out all the other aspects of modern charity until all that’s left is the human part. That’s a giver, a receiver, and a way for them to interact directly, like we used to do. That’s the mission of Directsponsor.org.

A great benefit of this approach is that it immediately becomes clear what amazing possibilities the new technologies have offered us. Even 50 years ago it would be ludicrous to suggest that we could get together and video chat with people from all over the world, read their own personal writings, watch their videos and even listen to their music, all instantly. It would be unimaginable that I could send them money instantly, securely and directly for less than a cent.

But this is what we have. Think about that and marvel at how our old system has failed dismally to move with the times, instead clinging to the old ways though the new technologies have made them superfluous. What does the old system have that keeps us using it? If we can identify those things and then incorporate them into our new system, we will have a great improvement.

What Charity Has

A giver (a person who wants to help someone)

A receiver ( a person who who can benefit from what the giver has to give)

A way of transferring something between giver and receiver (e..g. advice, cash in the hand)

What Charities Have

Reputation

Which one of us listens to the hymn of the brook when the tempest speaks?

Kahlil Gibran

The charity produces advertising which reassures the giver that the group or cause that they want to support is benefiting from the giver’s contributions. We don’t have this. Only a big corporation with many members can afford to spend the kind of money needed to advertise to large numbers. Their voice drowns out those of the smaller organisations, soaking up most of the money. Anyone advocating a system that doesn’t profit themselves has no chance to compete in this way.

Instead we need to provide a system whereby the givers and receivers can communicate directly with each other. It’s like when you help out a neighbour; you know that what you intended to happen has in fact happened. You don’t need a third party with a financial interest in your continued investment to verify it because you can see it with your own eyes. We find that we can replace reputation with something far better. We replace it with knowledge.

Ease of use

With most corporate charities, you can just send them money and they will send you a nice glossy brochure full of reassuring facts and statistics (for some reason they seem to feel a need for lots of jargon too). That’s pretty easy dopamine.

That’s hard to compete with, but with bitcoin it’s quite possible to make it even easier, once a person has got themselves fixed up with the right kind of wallet. That’s definitely not as hard as opening a bank account. But bitcoin payments and the modern web technologies make it possible (for those who want to) to go way beyond such mundanity and reconnect with a real human virtue, something that can’t be matched by 40 dollars a month and a newsletter subscription.

A giver could watch, chat, and participate in the projects of worldwide innovators, while they go about the business of making their world a better place.

Rewards For Givers

Drugs are only bad when you didn’t make them yourself. The drugs your body makes are much better. Dopamine is addictive. Giving money to a big charity organisation is like posting on Social Media, it doesn’t really satisfy a need, merely alleviates it temporarily. Many studies have shown that (for non-psychopaths) helping people and giving have a huge beneficial effect on health— a bigger and longer lasting effect than any drug. It’s said that you can’t have health, wealth and happiness, so charity’s the best value for money you can get.

Conclusion

This stripping down and then rebuilding with the new materials approach has clear benefits, not least in the costs eliminated by cutting out the bankers and the cumbersome systems that they make necessary. A big forest (full of food ) can be grown for $40,000 over 4 years, and then feed the whole community for ever. Compare that to the old system, it would cost millions! The place would be swarming with “experts” and teams of bureaucrats. Government would interfere and in the end there would be nothing very useful except as a way of balancing some corporate books and making a couple of new millionaires.

This thing just has to be done; the mafia did a better job of charity! Take back our humanity, only do direct charity.