Chuggers and Charity, a second draft

Abused by drunks, spat at and called obscene names, chuggers have a lot more to deal with than public prejudices. But do they deserve your charity?

It was my first day, I was standing on Liverpool high street and the weather was atrocious. I was armed with a clip board, and already people were giving me disapproving looks. The first person I tried to talk to just raised his arm and walked on by. Another person was drunk, he started hitting me over the head with a soggy newspaper, then he tried to hug me and then he started hitting me over the head with his newspaper again. It was scary, people walked past as though nothing out of the normal was happening. Nobody seemed to care what happened to the chugger.

I’d gone through a lengthy telephone interview, a gruelling four hour face to face screening process and two days of meticulous training but nothing properly prepared me for unexpected incidents that happen on the high streets of the UK. As a street fundraiser you need to demonstrate positivity, imagination and passion, but when the rain is pouring down in Liverpool and you’re being abused by a drunk, all these attributes evaporate.

The term chugger, a blend of the words charity and mugger, is an example of the negative labels that, along with an identity card, hang around the neck of every street fundraiser. Abuse at the hands of the public is relentless; I was spat at, verbally abused and frequently ignored. However every now and again I met someone who makes it all worthwhile. I remember when I was fundraising for Oxfam and I met a Somalian student at Manchester University who thanked me for what I was doing, he told me how Oxfam had built a well in his village and how many lives had been saved by the work Oxfam did with the community.

Most members of the public have a story to tell about how they were bullied by a chugger, just as they have a story about a rude waiter in a restaurant. However, unlike waiters, a negative experience with a fundraiser tends to linger. People love to hate chuggers, not because of the odd bad experience, but because a chugger is the bearer of bad news. No one wants to walk down a street in the morning, coffee in one hand, paper in the other, and be reminded of breast cancer or of the continuing crisis in Darfur, but keeping these issues in the forefront of the public mind is the only way to remind people that these are crises that continue to threaten the fabric of our community.

It is unlikely that the negative publicity and abuse will cease to surround street fundraisers but it should be remembered that these are dedicated, passionate people who risk abuse and discrimination to raise funds for worthwhile causes. It’s a thankless job but somebody needs to do it.