Up close and personal - a donor's perspective

Seeing a bundle of blankets on the ground with a human sleeping inside them outside her flash inner city apartment made it very clear to Sarah Chrisp why she needed to donate to the Christchurch City Mission.

City Mission Careforce donor, Sarah Chrisp

“You can easily live in a bubble if you choose to, and pretend it doesn’t exist, but in the central city you literally can’t. You can’t not see it. I looked outside my window, I saw all of this need, and I didn’t know what to do. I needed people that know what to do.”

The City Mission is the lead welfare organisation in Christchurch which helps people sleeping rough on the streets and from her new Hereford Street apartment (just 400m from the Mission) Sarah could see also how we operated.

“The City Mission is just such an amazing, inclusive charity and so I know that all support that is given to it truly makes a difference. I could directly see, living down the road from the City Mission, how much was being done, and also how innovative a lot of things were.”

She says it astonishes and saddens her that so many wealthy people in some of the circles she moves in “pretend this doesn’t exist”.

A wide range of people support us, but Sarah is unique in a number of ways, especially her youth. She’s only 34 and has enjoyed a wildly successful online career.

She was raised in Christchurch and within a church which had a tithing expectation on families and while she says she no longer attends that church she says much of the culture has stayed with her, including the idea that she should donate a significant percentage of her income to charity.

In Sarah’s case, she is fortunate that her income is considerable as a result of her launching a successful YouTube channel Wholesale Ted, which now has 1.28 million subscribers, and she also operates other businesses.

Through the Covid years she was able to donate $500 a week to us but now she has other charities to support too.

Sarah believes it is part of her being a good citizen and caring about others around her. She wouldn’t normally do interviews but said she was happy to show her ongoing support for us and to reveal to others why she believes the City Mission’s work is so important.

For our part, although we share stories about our work and people to show the great need in our community, Sarah is special because she is someone who literally lived alongside us and saw with her own eyes the suffering of our clients. She saw what we were doing about it and she supported us because of that.

Sarah describes her successful seven-year career on YouTube as a result of having a deep curiosity about everything and a willingness to work hard. She explored search optimisation, made videos to test it, and ended up with a channel that rose to the top. Her curiosity and caring about what she saw in the inner-city led her to us. “I am extremely grateful the City Mission exists. I realised I did not have the knowledge or capability to do it myself, so I am grateful that very smart, dedicated and innovative people run the City Mission