THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 21, 1996 TAG: 9610190017
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 37 lines
``The chief business of the American people,'' as Calvin Coolidge famously said (to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1925), ``is business.''
But helping one another, starting in the household, is also the business of human beings everywhere - or ought to be. We are our brothers' and sisters' keepers, which is among the memorable moral lessons taught in the Book of Genesis.
In the Western world, Christianity was the primary - often the only - corporate force ministering to the needy. The Christian religion, along with practical considerations, moved rulers to respond to pleas for help from their neediest subjects. Religion motivated the founding of countless charities to care, however imperfectly and incompletely, for the hungry, the sick, the abandoned, the homeless, the imprisoned. . . .
In the United States, community funds - predecessors of the United Way - spread across the country in the first half of the 20th century to simplify, prioritize and boost charitable contributions by donors large, medium and small.
Many charities failed to pass muster with community-fund boards, but over time more and more were included. The South Hampton Roads United Way last year aided 68 agencies United Way-certified and 375 other human-service agencies.
Midway through the 1996 fund-raising effort, the South Hampton Roads United Way, the Combined Federal Campaign and the Combined Virginia Campaign have procured pledges totaling roughly 50 percent of the $15.3 million that is this year's goal. Two-thirds of United Way contributions come from payroll deductions of less than $500. The balance comes from individuals who pledge more than $500.
The more contributors - at whatever level - the better. United Way dollars do heaps of good. Be a do-gooder.
KEYWORDS: UNITED WAY by CNB