ADVENTURE TOURS FOR CHARITY

In almost any magazine or newspaper in England, you can find advertisements for adventure tours to exotic¹ places. These exciting tours can be bicycling, hiking, or even motorcycle trips across deserts, over mountains, and around live volcanoes! Many of these tours are conditional on a requirement that makes them more interesting to some people—you must raise money for charity² first.

One advertisement offers people something called the "Scottish Highlands Triple Challenge." The advertisement describes it as a weekend of cycling, trekking³, and canoeing, ending at the top of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the UK. The organization that sets up this tour is advertising for people who can give time and effort to raising money for a good cause. For their hard work, these people will also be able to take the holiday of a lifetime.

The first thing that people have to do is sign up for the tour. The number of people who can go on each tour is limited, and many tours fill up fast. Those who sign up then have to pay a deposit⁴ of £350 (US$480) in order to hold their place on the tour. People cannot get their deposit back later if they change their minds, so they had better be sure they really want to go.

Next, each person must choose a charity and raise a minimum amount of money for it. They can choose from a long list of organizations working on important causes, from animal shelters to medical care for the elderly⁵. The required amount is usually between £1,500 and £2,500 (US$2,000 to $3,500). In order to raise this much money, some people send letters to friends and relatives asking for sponsorships. Other people have big parties where all of the guests must pay admission⁶—or they even hold contests. One farmer divided up his field into one-meter squares to raise money. People could buy one square of the field for £1 each. Then the farmer let his cow walk across the field. The entrant who had bought the square where the cow dropped its first "cow patty" won a prize. Surprisingly, the majority of people who go on the adventure tours end up collecting more than the minimum money required.

Some people question the morality of this system, saying that it is wrong for part of the money that people collect to be used for someone's vacation. However, the companies try to keep the overall cost of the tours low so that at least sixty or seventy percent of the money that is raised goes to the charity. Why not mix capitalism with giving, they ask? One company, which runs ten to fifteen tours a year, said they make about £50,000 on each one.

Do people really want to spend their vacations doing something like bicycling for 400 kilometers when they could be lounging⁷ on a beach? These tours are not for everybody. But the people who sign up for them all agree that it is a great experience.

After trekking across the Namib Desert, a young construction worker from London cried as he hugged all of the other people in his tour group. Everyone cried. Most of them never thought that they could take part in an adventure like that. They had not only completed a once-in-a-lifetime trip, but the price they paid for it was to help someone in need. To them, that's a great bargain.

• morality
• conditional
• entrant
• sponsorship
• bargain
• capitalism

Help Yourself by Helping Others

Most of us are taught that we should be giving and helpful to others because it is the right thing to do. But it turns out that by helping other people, we benefit ourselves in multiple ways as well.

Behaving in a kind and generous way simply makes people feel good. In a 2008 experiment at Harvard Business School, participants who gave money to someone else ended up in a better mood than those who spent it on themselves. This was no surprise to the happiness expert Dr. Sonja Lyubormirsky. She advocates doing acts of kindness as one of the most reliable ways of becoming happier and of building connections with others, which increases happiness even more. In 2012, Lyubormirsky published a study on nine- to eleven-year-old children. After doing acts of kindness for several weeks, they were not only happier but also more popular.

Giving your time to charity can even make you physically healthier. Research has found that helping someone can actually decrease stress and lower blood pressure. This effect may be especially important for older people. A study on elderly couples found that those who did volunteer work were much less likely to die over a five-year period than those who didn't, and this was true regardless of age, exercise habits, and general health. Interestingly, the study found no link between receiving help and living longer. Apparently, as the saying goes, it really is better to give than to receive.