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Kurt Sansone
Did a sluggish economy, all round uncertainty, and a public wary of future exorbitant utility bills have an impact on charity in 2004?
It certainly seems so with the two major yearly events, the Kerygma volleyball marathon and charity telethon L-Istrina, together raising Lm292,000 less than the amounts collected the year before.
By any standard the Lm815,000 collected during last Sunday’s TV marathon is an astounding figure yet it still fell Lm200,000 short of the one million plus mark reached in 2003.
Similarly, the Kerygma volleyball marathon held last Summer collected Lm92,000 less than in 2003.
With the number of households in Malta totalling around 130,000, in 2003 every household donated an average of Lm7.83 for l-Istrina and Lm1.80 for the Kerygma marathon.
In 2004, every Maltese household donated Lm6.26 for L-Istrina and Lm1.10 for the volleyball marathon.
It was evident early in the afternoon l-Istrina was not going to reach the target of over one million.
Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s first budget with its additional financial burdens on families, including the controversial electricity surcharge, appeared to be still fresh in people’s minds.
To make matters worse a news report appearing in The Sunday Times that very same morning announced another price hike for Maltese bread.
With the middle classes feeling the pinch of what promises to be yet another austere year it was no wonder that the quarter of a million Liri in prize give-aways and Peppi Azzopardi’s incessant pleading, nauseating at times, were not enough to entice viewers to temporarily forget the growing hole in their pockets.
The organisers did not help matters by limiting donations to Lm5 and Lm10. Individuals who wanted to donate lesser amounts either by phone or SMS could not do so and probably ended up donating nothing at all.
There may have been other reasons for the failure to reach the Lm1 million mark, among them society’s growing sensitivity towards accountability issues.
An article by lawyer Anna Mallia in l-orizzont two weeks before L-Istrina pertinently asked why PBS had never published a set of audited accounts for the money collected in 2003 through L-Istrina.
Anna Mallia was a vocal supporter of L-Istrina in the years when the Labour Party boycotted the charity event, hers was not criticism borne out of personal pique.
Indeed, Anna Mallia’s concerns are increasingly becoming the concerns of many who donate their hard-earned cash to charitable institutions.
There is little to suggest that the record-breaking amounts collected in 2003 by l-Istrina and the Kerygma marathon (a global sum of more than Lm1.2 million) will be repeated in 2005.
With an economy unlikely to take off and an inflation rate on a constant incline for 13 consecutive months families will be further constrained to tighten their spending in 2005 and charities will most probably once again feel the pinch.
kurt@newsworksltd.com
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