Spare Change and Children

Like other foreign travelers, Americans who go abroad tend regularly to return home bearing modest collections of drachmas, pfennigs, pence, yen, shekels, balboas and whatever other kinds of coin and currency are circulated in the countries that they visit. This leftover money usually has only slight value. There isn’t enough of it to buy things with while still overseas, or enough of it for the banks to bother converting. So the loose and essentially worthless change almost always is put aside and forgotten.

Suppose, though, that a way could be found to collect these insignificant amounts of money and pool them to spend on a good cause? That’s the idea that occurred a few years ago to Howard Simons, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Simons began by generalizing from his own experience and assuming that an average visitor leaving a foreign country ends up with about 50 cents worth of unspent local money. If tourists to Spain, France and the United States alone contributed their leftover change, Simons calculated, up to $45 million a year could be collected. And if that money could be channeled to, say, UNICEF, the United Nations-directed organization for children, efforts to combat illness and premature death could be helped immeasurably.

Simons called his idea “Change for Good,” and it is now becoming a reality. Earlier this summer a small airline, Virgin Atlantic, agreed to put collection envelopes for unwanted foreign change on two of its flights between London and the East Coast. Based on its first-month experience, the airline projects that it can collect $500,000 a year in throwaway coinage.

That would be a staggering accomplishment. If other international air carriers adopted similar efforts, then almost certainly tens of millions of dollars could be raised each year to help save the lives of threatened children. This simple, sensible and low-cost humanitarian effort deserves the fullest cooperation.