Dear Supporters of Invisible Children,
A lot of you may be confused at all the criticism that Invisible Children (IC) has faced as of late. Perhaps you feel that this criticism is coming from people who fail to understand the mission and nature of IC. Alternatively, perhaps, you may feel that this criticism - while having some merit - has been unfairly blown out of proportion.
What I think needs to be understood is that there is no such thing as black and white. Invisible Children, as an organization, isn't some nefarious evil group robbing people of their money. But, at the ...
We Speak For Ourselves
When it comes to international aid and development, we are all biased. It doesn't matter if you're a donor reading pamphlets, a celebrity or YouTuber endorsing your favorite NGO, a journalist interviewing villagers, an academic outside of the ivory tower, an experienced aid professional talking about "good aid", or even a free agent trying to be a bridge-maker.
There is nothing nefarious about this fact. We as human beings, while capable of untold capacities for empathy, will never have a complete verstehen and fully imagine the complexity of others. This is important because the arbiters of what is and is not ...
5 Steps for NGOs to Move from Guilt to Empowerment
My thoughts on how charities need to drop the guilt is getting tons of views. But the question remains: how does a charity drop the guilt? Can they do it overnight? Cold turkey?
As I mentioned some charities, like the US-branch of Save the Children, have already stopped using "poverty porn". I'd like to share something I've talked to them about behind closed doors.
I guess you can call it a 5 Step Program for NGOs using guilt:
3 Reasons Charities Need to Drop the Guilt
[caption id="attachment_3629" align="aligncenter" width="473" caption="A Charity Guilt-Ad Currently Airing in Canada"][/caption]
It's 2011 and we still live in a world where many charities think that the best way to raise funds to help those in need is by using guilt.
This needs to stop and here are three reasons why:
Meet Mindaugas Voldemaras. Mindaugas is one of the many people who submitted a video as part of the 2011 Davos Debates. Of all the efforts by applicants to get votes, Mindaugas was one of the more successful.
Mindaugas, a blogger from Lithuania, campaigned around the slogan: “Vote for Lithuania in Davos!”. He was appealing to his most salient constituency: Lithuanians.
Appealing for support from your constituency is really the best way to mobilize support on an issue. It’s a group that can be diverse but has a shared identity, kinship, and a sense of collective benefit.
From a "campaign poster" made for Mindaugas
Appealing to a salient constituency also makes it easier to find others who can help mobilize others. Mindaugas was able to find support from prominent Lithuanian tweeters, bloggers, and even Lithuanian sports fans.
The only hurdle in Mindaugas’s mobilization efforts was that everyone in Lithuania, being in the same time zone, went to sleep at more or less the same time and could only vote for him during waking hours.
When Mindaugas saw my efforts to get votes, he assumed I too was appealing to my constituency. He assumed my constituency was Canada. And, like him, he assumed I’d be limited to when Canadians were awake.
This assumption is why, thanks to you, we were able to take the #1 spot.
I want to go to Davos. I’ve been trying for the past four years and, right now, I’m trying again.
I’m not trying to go to Davos because I’m the only one who can talk about global poverty. There are no shortage of celebrity spokespeople, professionals, and anti-poverty advocates there.
I’m not trying to go to Davos because I’m the most articulate, intelligent, and well-spoken person on YouTube. I know that’s not the case because, last time I checked, my name wasn’t John Green.
I’m not even asking to go to Davos because I’m the foremost authority on aid and development. I actually laughed when I typed that last sentence. I may have gained a few unique insights, but I’m no expert.
I’m asking to go because I believe that the poor don’t need an ambassador, an advocate, or a spokesperson. The people who can speak best for the poor are the poor themselves.
One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s extremely easy to demonstrate the power of social media to connect people. Once they get it, rich or poor, things take-off themselves.
Villagers watching a YouTube video which feature them.
When I met a group of village women who were health workers for their community, they didn’t need to know what Formspring was. What mattered to them was that people around the world could ask them what challenges they faced and they could answerthemback right away.
When I joined a community meeting of village women in Bhola, I didn’t have to explain what Twitter was. What mattered to them was that it was essentially a “group SMS” service that allowed them to send out their concerns and get back and forth responses from people right away.
When I went to Barguna in rural Bangladesh, I didn’t have to explain what YouTube was. What mattered to them was that through this camera, they could bypass bureaucracy and directly tell people what they felt the pros and cons were of certain charity programs.
And, what I’ve learned through this, is that the poor like talking about their challenges to people instead of professionals or politicians. I’m not sure exactly why – I assume it’s probably the same reason we (rightly or wrongly) feel less stigmatized talking about our problems to a friend than a social worker.
My biggest fear for social media (whether it’s YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook) is that it becomes a mere marketing and fundraising platform. The real potential of social media in the fight against poverty is its capacity to foster truly empowered conversations between one community and another around the world.
But to achieve that doesn’t mean dumping technology on the poor. It requires charities, individuals, communities, and even corporations working together. The poor need bridgemakers – not spokespeople. If that isn’t a message worth bringing to Davos – I don’t know what is.
The World Economic Forum’s Official YouTube channel specifically encourages people to vote on the ideas submitted. If you’d like to vote on mine, here’s a video which explains how you can:
My friend Karen made this great video explaining how you can vote for me in the Davos Debates. There is less than 10 hours to go and I’m currently 70 votes behind the leader:
And my friend Reese made this great graphic showing how you can vote:
Make sure you are logged into YouTube. Created an account if you don’t already have one.
Scroll down and look for my video. It looks like this. You may need to sort by popularity if it’s not already visible.
Click the thumbs up.
You’re done
As a few of you who have been following my journey for a while may know, this my fourth attempt in four years to have a presence at Davos. In the past I’ve been lucky to have the most vocal and most democratic support – though in the past the selection process hasn’t always been vote-based and/or voting specifically within the YouTube community.
Voting ends 6:01 pm EST today. I’m currently a few dozen votes behind the most voted candidate who is running on a “a vote for me is a vote for my homeland of Lithuania”-style campaign. It’s hard to compete with that so I’ll definitely be praying for a miracle and hope you consider casting a vote my way.
Earlier today, I booked my ticket back to Bangladesh. It’s just for a month and it’s just for one or two small projects. But, the familiar butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling has returned as a million worries come into play.
I don’t have enough money to rent my own place, so where will I stay? Will I have enough money to pay for internet and stay connected with you guys? What about if I get sick? How will I pay for unexpected costs?
It’s times like this that I want to play Devil’s Advocate a bit and explain why some of the biggest and best charities in the world take their overhead and administration costs from donations from the public.
Do you have 96 minutes to spare this Sunday afternoon? Want to learn about global economics and development? Then watch this video about Marilyn Waring:
You see, only a handful of decades ago, money for aid and development used to skew towards men (well… skew more than it is today). There were a few reasons for this.
Most of the studies on aid and development focused on income and income generation. By this measure, in most poor countries, men were the income earners. So aid and development was focused on what could help men earn more money (more education, better tools to work with, etc).
But what Marilyn Waring started pushing was the idea that a focus on money and income generation ignored women. Women, she argued, were working just as hard (if not harder) than men. Women were being overlooked because what they were doing (child care, food preparation, etc) wasn’t deemed income generating.
She argued that, if you measure things based on time spent working instead of income generated, you’d find a more accurate picture of what was going on. And, guess what? Women were working harder and longer than men were. In fact, in many villages, women (unlike men) were working virtually every waking hour.
Ms. Waring used this to make the case that helping women save time would ultimately help families earn more and pull families out of poverty. For example, women would often spend more than half a day preparing meals. With proper cooking equipment that time could be more than halved. The extra time could be used to let women earn their own income.
I thought I’d share this today because it’s an important reminder that we can invest heavily in studies on and research into poverty, aid, and development and still overlook major factors. I’m no Marilyn Waring, but this is what I feel is the case with what the poor are telling me about 1-to-1 help and overhead.
Many of the aid bloggers who have commented on my previous post (where I talk about charity overhead) insist that aid recipients don’t care whether overhead is covered by donations or through separate and distinct funding. This couldn’t be further from my experience.
When local villagers learn of the approach I’m doing they love it. Not only do they love it but they also compare it to more traditional forms of giving outside of the NGO-system. I wish I got a dime every time some villager, off-camera and just barely in earshot, would be talking to another saying (in Bengali) “for the first time, donations have been spent wisely”.
At the same time, I don’t deny that all the studies on aid recipient satisfaction may have no data on attitudes towards overhead (and whether or not overhead should be collected and raised separately). What I can say, as a sociologist, is that studies can overlook things. This is especially true depending on who’s counting.
Yes, this is a real ad campaign by KFC for Double Down sandwiches.
Let’s say some fast food restaurant is running a slick and savvy ad campaign that’s caught my attention. When I go to buy their food, do I complain that part of the price they are charging me is meant to cover part of the cost of their ad campaign?
What if I get a heart attack after eating all that fast food? Should I complain that part of the hospital bill goes to covering the doctor’s salary so he can earn enough to repay his student loans and justify spending all those years in med school?
As consumers, we will always be paying for expenses over and above the goods and services we directly benefit from. The same is true for charity: there are expenses over and above the help that any individual or community directly benefits from.
This is a no-brainer to everyone reading this. But I feel I need to state the obvious because what I’ve been saying about trackable donations and charity overhead has been misunderstood by aid bloggers who have stumbled across this project.
I’m not saying that overhead is bad. I’m not saying that overhead isn’t required. I’m not even saying that charities need to reduce overhead. What I am saying is that there is value in charities considering a different approach to covering overhead.
They should consider this because this matters to a lot of people.
Lately, this project has attracted a lot of attention from NGO and charity professionals from big organizations. They’ve all been trying to drive home the point that things like tracking donations, not taking overhead from donations, and connecting you directly with those you help are not sustainable, scalable, or something they want to do.
Let’s ignore that for a moment and watch this video:
When I started this project, I was advocating that we need to change the conversation about global poverty. That means we need to move away from controlled charity messages that are about guilting us into donating and disconnecting us from those we want to help.
The fact that there is now a charity director (Scott Harrison) preaching the same thing just blows my mind. And, I can’t commend him enough for having the guts to share this failure with us. I’ve been talking a lot about transparency – it doesn’t get more transparent than publicizing your failures for the world to see.
I haven’t worked with Charity: Water (yet) but let me tell you what I think will happen based on my own experiences. First, existing donors who see this will admire Scott’s honesty and transparency. Some of them will actually even donate more. That’s actually what has happened with me whenever I’ve talked & tweeted about my mistakes & failures.
Secondly, and most importantly, people on the ground will respect Charity: Water even more. Villagers aren’t dumb – they know when a charity wants to hide failures from the public. If the people Scott encounters are anything like the villagers I’ve encountered – they will respect him more for keeping the cameras rolling during this failure.
It will be respect well earned. And something worth supporting.
P.S. As a note to big NGO professionals who remind me that Charity: Water is small scale. I’d like to point out that, Charity: Water has been growing at an astronomical rate year-after-year. This is a growth during a bad economy no less! If you don’t think Charity: Water isn’t in this to scale even larger – keep watching them.
This is not a charity, organization, or anything formal. It’s my journey to try and make the world a better place - one meaningful difference at a time. To learn more click here.
