My brother works as a mid manager for a company that is traded with stocks on wall street. The company makes a high end, highly advanced, engineered product that is used all over the world.

We were talking about people out of touch with reality. He said the upper management people after they get into that niche it is a virtual world they live in. They will come and lecture the mid-management on 'ethics, morals and values' but still remain clueless as to what service and caring really are. His example: They wanted us to go do a service clean up project for the community. Now I don't mind the toy drives and food drives, but for this one they wanted us to wear matching bright yellow t shirts with the company logo on it so we'd get good PR for the company. I hate it when the company wants to exploit it's people to make itself look good."
I then got to share about the TSCC's announcement of the $$$smillion of aid given to charity. When the numbers were crunched it added up to about 0.77 cents per member per year for twenty years. He was surprised.
Now I also know where the morg got the idea of matching t shirts for the Katrina clean up. Lookee lookee me!

any projects you know the church turned down doing because it might cost money or they wouldnt get a good pr write up in the paper?????

I have always thought it's because they can't call out the press and toot their own horns because all the other churches are doing it too and they don't call out the press.

Our church participates in many interfaith projects. We serve in the downtown Memphis soup kitchen on a rotating basis. It's always very gratifying but you have to "get your hands dirty," as opposed to just tying quilts in the church rec hall and letting someone else deal with the reality of getting close to the rif raff who needs the help. I think we have worked at the soup kitchen with groups from almost every kind of church in the community except Mormons and there are three mormon stakes, and a temple, in our area.

But I'm sure if we have a flood, we'll see the LDS in their matching shirts with their photographers in tow helping out in the upper class neighboroods.

I went to the church adult Christmas dinner this week and saw a SALVATION ARMY TOYS FOR KIDS box in the hall with some donations in it!

I didn't get to ask about it.

But when has the TSCC ever donated anything to other church charities??????

When the church announced that they wanted people to donate to the church humanitarian fund for that purpose, somebody in our ward said they were already donating through the Red Cross. The Bishop stated that it was better to go through the church because that way the church would get credit.

And on a local level--

When my son was 14 the Bishop decided that the Youth should start volunteering at the local soup kitchen. He said that there were other churches that volunteered regularly, and we needed to let the community know that we were here. This would be a great opportunity to get some exposure. No other reason was ever given.

So they started going once a month and it was a very good experience for them to see that homeless people were not just winos or crazy people, but families and kids just like themselves.

After a few months they stopped going, but my son and one Sister went every month for three more years. The people told him one time that they were so glad that he never tried to tell people there what church he was from, and how glad that he and the sister were willing to serve coffee (the Bishop stipulated that we would be glad to help but the kids were forbidden to serve coffee) .

If I were in the room, I would have innocently asked, "but, wait, I already paid tithing, where is that going?" Now I know better. Tithing does not go towards humanitarian causes. It gets reinvested in the church-owned businesses, so that they in turn can build malls.

According to something that was posted here a couple years ago, (because the UK makes the church show its financial records) reveals that none of that money was disbursed.

Where did it go?

I'm sure the church participates in other religious efforts. My son's Eagle Project was collecting dontations for an Interfaith Charity in Houston.

Ron