Opinion: Charity Walks Are a Puzzling Way to Help the Needy

Charity fund-raising walks are “a peculiar institution” motivated by sincerity but characterized by “many lost opportunity costs,” a journalism professor writes in a New York Times opinion column.

Recalling watching thousands of people pass near his Boston home in that city’s Walk for Hunger, Ted Gup, an Emerson College professor, says such events represent “a resource diverted from its true purpose” in which the time and energy expended by participants and volunteers could be applied to direct aid to the poor.

“Think of the houses that might be built, roofs repaired, gardens planted and harvested, public spaces improved, and meals delivered to shut-ins,” he writes.

But Mr. Gup acknowledges “an exquisite—albeit attenuated–logic” to charity walks in that they personalize poverty, motivating people to give on behalf of a participating friend or relative and “literally turning the abstract into the concrete, converting perspiration into philanthropy.”