Walk for something or do something more useful for something? (Yes. I know. I'm a literary genius for coming up with that title.)

So yeah. Copying over this rant from a Facebook post I wrote a couple of summers ago. Right now, we are smack in the middle of winter. But don't you worry, this rant will start becoming relevant very very soon.

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Its that time of year again. Summer-ish weather and walks for one thing or another. And this year, I'm finally writing my rant about this. I wanted to come up with some nice articulate article about this, hence the procrastination. But what the hell...here goes :

I don't get it!
I don't get why walking for something helps.
Wouldn't it be more effective if people just donated money directly instead of the tons of money required to advertise for walks and t-shirts, etc.?

Not to mention that long walks sometimes encourage participants to push themselves beyond what they can handle. For example, a friend of mine got giant enough blisters during a walk for hunger to need to go to the doctor and have her feet bandaged for days. What about the healthcare costs incurred here? Wouldn't it have been better for hunger that her co-pay be donated to hunger rather than overdoing the walk and paying the clinic?

I understand that apparently these events encourage the participants to go and fundraise for the organization. But how effective is this really? And isn't there a better way to do this?
For example, there are always walks for hunger...well, couldn't we do something where we say, cook for hunger?? and actually provide direct aid to hungry ppl while also fundraising for hunger?
If that sounds really unwieldy, how about at least doing an activity thats relevant? I like fast-a-thons, for example, because then you at least learn something about hunger itself directly.
Or how about doing something else useful like harvesting all the energy people expend walking?
Those are just a couple of (possibly not that great) examples off the top of my head. I'm sure we can think of awesome ways of using the time and energy of motivated people that directly aids in the solution of a problem in addition to fundraising rather than X mile walks that provide questionable value to the cause and to the partipants.
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Addendum: a friend of mine suggests a walk for obesity. I think this is an excellent idea.



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