More thoughts on growing democracy - continued
When we think of Africa - if we think of it at all - we picture a continent struggling to overcome its colonial past. Tragically for the people who live there, this image is not entirely wrong; Africa has seen nine military coups since 2020. But like elsewhere youth in Africa are the continent’s hope, and Africa is a very young continent, with an average age in 2023 of just under nineteen. Education levels are rising though progress has been slow, due in part to a largely indifferent West. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), despite almost innumerable setbacks, positive strides are being made and there are valuable lessons to be learned if only we would take note. DRC and its people are working to overcome deplorable handicaps to create a government that is, to borrow a phrase, by the people and for the people.
When DRC does get mentioned, it’s because of either disease or warfare. This is largely due to the nature of the media beast; both what it is and what it isn’t. The media consists of profit-seeking businesses, and like any business it provides us with what it knows, or at least believes, we want. What it’s not is a pacifier ready to soothe our jangled nerves. Simply put, bad news sells. The news we get out of DRC is very much a case in point. There are positive developments, but we won’t read about this in mainstream media, not because of any sort of cover-up but rather out of rational business decisions. Thus democracy is evolving in the midst of a continent deserving of far more attention than it gets.
But before we can get to those positives we need to illustrate the circumstances out of which they have grown. This is really the only way we can appreciate what the people of DRC have suffered and continue to endure in their ongoing and heroic attempts to free themselves and achieve what so many of the rest of us take for granted.
DRC lies at the very centre of the African continent. With an area of 2.3 million square kilometres, it’s the second largest African nation after Algeria. It became a Belgian colon y in 1908 but Europeans had ‘discovered’ the country well before that; in 1890 Joseph Conrad spent time there and later used it as the setting for Heart of Darkness. The book is a critique both of Belgian exploitation and an attitude toward Congo, and by extension all of Africa, that persists to this day.

Many of us continue to think of Africa as if it was one big country when in fact it contains fifty-four fully independent nations. Ethnically and culturally it’s at least as diverse as any other continent. In terms of its natural resources, DRC is amongst the wealthiest nations on Earth but its people are amongst the poorest. The Belgian colonizers exploited the country’s rubber reserves and more recently many nations, including Canada, have taken advantage of DRC’s vast quantities of copper, cobalt, zinc, silver, gold, bauxite, uranium and coltan. In all, minerals account for 90 per cent of DRC’s exports. To illustrate just one example, eighty per cent of the world’s supply of coltan comes from DRC and that mineral is in all the cell phones and laptops you and I use every day. Much of the mining in DRC is referred-to as ‘artisanal’, a euphemism which when put into plain English, means men and children, typically boys, working as miners with no safety gear and little or no equipment of any kind beyond pickaxes. The coltan in our phones and computers has very likely come from one of these ‘artisanal’ mining operations. This is in no way meant to suggest we shouldn’t own these things, only that we should be aware; that we should be ready to take positive steps to give back in some way; to end the exploitation. DRC officially gained its independence from Belgium on June 30th 1960. But the country was utterly unprepared to run its own affairs since the Belgians had taken no steps to prepare their former colonials for the challenges of self rule. A republican government was established, with both a President and Prime Minister. Patrice Lumumba,, a leader of the independence movement, and the country’s first Prime Minister, was both an African nationalist and a member of the pan-African movement.

This meant he supported national self-determination and believed in strengthening bonds between all indigenous Africans and the global African diaspora. He played a major role in taking the nation from colony to independence. But his left-of-centre political views, in the midst of the Cold War, made him dangerous in the eyes of several western nations, particularly the United States.
The independence celebrations were short-lived; within a very few days the new nation was faced with what came to be known as the Congo Crisis. With Belgian support the provinces of Katanga and South Kasai seceded and there was also a revolt by members of the military as Black soldiers were no longer willing to accept orders from white officers. The United Nations was preparing to send troops to aid the government against the secessionists but the secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, made a last minute decision not to do so. In response, Lumumba called for assistance from the Soviet Union, which sent ‘military advisors’. The Soviet presence caused a split in the
government between Lumumba and the President, Joseph Kasa-Vubu. It was at this point that Joseph-Désiré Mobutu Sese-Seko, a lieutenant-colonel and Lumumba’s chief military advisor, stepped in to break the deadlock by leading a coup-d’etat. Supported by both Belgium and the United States, he expelled the Soviets and established a government that supported his view of Lumumba as a danger to the country. He led a second coup in 1965 that made himself President. About 100,000 people died during this period of political conflict, including Lumumba, who was assassinated on January 17, 1961. Mobutu ruled from 1965 to 1997. In 1971 he changed the country’s name to Zaire. His thirty-year rule also saw European investors expelled and the nationalizing of their companies. He looted the nation’s treasury. In 1990 he agreed to end the ban he had imposed on a multi-party state and formed a transitional government while retaining considerable political power. In 1994 he agreed to the appointment of Kengo Wa Dondo, an advocate for free-market reforms, as Prime Minister.
That same year in neighbouring Rwanda, between April and July, armed groups consisting of Hutu fighters committed genocide against the Tutsi people. Over 800,000 victims, mostly Tutsis, were killed and the violence spread into DRC as small groups of Hutu extremists formed militia groups. Such militias continue to operate in DRC to this day, funded largely by the Rwandan government under the leadership of Paul Kagame.
Kagame, who is Tutsi, was a commander of a militia that sought, successfully, to put an end to the genocide. However he later initiated two rebel wars in DRC, the First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997, immediately followed by the Second Congo War of 1998 to 2003. Among horrific atrocities committed was the serial rape and murder of Congolese women. Canada’s Trudeau government, usually so ready to condemn such acts, has remained entirely silent about the continuing actions of the militia groups in DRC. As
recently as July 13th of this year, seventy-two people were killed by armed militia in a village about one hundred kilometres east of the nation’s capital, Kinshasa.
While the equally horrific acts occurring in Ukraine are breathlessly reported
within hours, this slaughter in DRC was reported in a Toronto newspaper four days after the event and was buried at the bottom of page five.
Mineral wealth provides the incentive for the ongoing violence. Recent reports
indicate that Rwanda’s national army, the Rwandan Defence Force, has deployed as many as four thousand soldiers to DRC. Their mission appears to be aiding the militia groups and facilitating the smuggling of minerals into Rwanda. The Rwandan army now has more soldiers in DRC than one of the largest militia groups, which calls itself March 23 but is generally known as M23. This and other Rwandan-backed militias have taken control of coltan and other mineral-mining operations. The Congolese government estimates that it loses $1 billion (U.S.) each year because of these illegal activities. The
Congolese army is fighting to halt these operations but finds itself facing an enemy that is very well armed with modern weapons such as so-called mortar drones. People continue to be forced to flee their homes, a harsh reality in eastern DRC for almost thirty years. This violence has also resulted in severe food shortages as farms are abandoned in areas controlled by militia groups. The only realistic way to put an end to all this would be to confront the Rwandan government directly, with military force if needed. Why this
has gone on for nearly thirty years with no response from the West is a matter for conjecture, though it’s by no means far-fetched to suggest having access to relatively cheap minerals plays a role. A case can also be made that Western governments feel no pressure to act because their citizens are uninformed by media.
DRC has also been plagued by outbreaks of disease. In 1976 the country made
headlines due to the outbreak of ebola, a disease named after a tributary of the Congo River. The ebola virus was first detected in a village about 110 kilometres from the river but it was decided to name the disease ebola in order to avoid having the village become forever known as the starting point of this often - though not always - fatal pathogen.
There have been subsequent outbreaks that have killed thousands of people. Work to create vaccines began to make progress in 2014. The World Health Organization did much to speed the process and an effective vaccine began to be used in 2016. Recent outbreaks have been quickly brought under control.

There are organizations in the West who lay claim to knowledge of the situation in DRC. Freedom House, a Washington D.C.- based non-profit that assesses how democratic various nations are, continues to list DRC as “not free”. However, a review of current trends suggests that the Freedom House ranking should be reviewed.
In January 2019, when Felix Tshisekedi became President, it marked the first
time since independence that the presidency was peacefully transferred from one political party to another. Tshisekedi freed seven hundred political prisoners jailed by his predecessor. Understanding that education is vital to building a free and democratic state, he also invested heavily in schools for DRC’s next generation.
In December 2023 he faced another election, as the country’s constitution
requires. Western media tended to focus on claims of voting irregularities that
originated mostly with defeated candidates. Voter turnout was 48.8 per cent despite three provinces being unable to safely participate due to ongoing militia violence. That figure marks a small but important increase from the prior election in 2018 when 45.5 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot (voter turnout in the most recent election in Ontario was forty-three per cent). Tshisekedi was re-elected by a comfortable margin and reports from well-informed sources within DRC state that the majority of Congolais
believe the election was run fairly, the results are credible and that the re-elected President had achieved some positive change that ordinary citizens could see for themselves. The really crucial point is this: if the majority of people in DRC see themselves as living in a democracy, how legitimate can it be for outsiders like Freedom House to claim otherwise?

DRC is just one of many countries that has had a long, hard struggle to achieve
democracy, and the hard work of maintaining what has been won never stops. The people of that nation have overcome crushing obstacles, and the progress they’ve made continues to be under siege by those both in Africa and abroad who have very different interests.
It has been said that journalism is history’s first draft. By largely ignoring
developments in DRC, our media is writing an incomplete and thus misleading history.


Confessions of a long-time NGO Volunteer - continued
​(It's a long piece because it tells an important and complex story.)

So I had a lot to learn when I began working with an all-volunteer NGO based in a major North American City that was doing development work in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s. I got involved because I was so impressed by the seasoned volunteers who seemed to have such a firm grasp on the bewildering complexity of staging fundraisers in this new and exciting metropolitan setting.
They all started with trendy downtown venues — and that was just the beginning of the expenses as food and drink, entertainment and advertising all ran up costs. These might be modified with careful negotiation but this required seasoned and well-connected volunteers who had to be recruited, trained, encouraged, rewarded and reassured.
And all these preparations were not sufficient to assure success: Folks came to these events for swag. They expected raffles and silent auctions and door prizes and giveaways. Local businesses and merchants could be persuaded to donate such items but this was another task for already over-burdened volunteers. And the constantly rising expectations eventually became untenable. At one point I shamelessly eavesdropped on two young bankers on a commuter train who were discussing their respective Saturday nights. One had attended a fundraiser where each attendee had received a cashmere scarf. The second banker admitted that he had been tempted by the scarf but had opted for an event that had offered a free bottle
of champagne and what he figured was a pretty good chance of getting laid. Between them they had dropped more than $2500 (and got laid) and they “felt really good about being able to support such worthwhile causes”. They ended up sharing a good laugh because neither of them could quite remember what those causes were.
They could hardly be faulted for that. When I first began began working fundraisers I was doggedly determined to use them to inform our donors about the plight of rural Congolese struggling to recover from civil war and the runaway corporate raiding of their country’s natural resources. The older, more experienced volunteers were wonderfully patient in explaining that perhaps this kind of “sharing” was not entirely compatible with showing our donors a good time.
As soon as such an event was over these volunteers, drained by organizational stresses, personality conflicts and overwork, had to begin planning the next one, where the stakes and expectations would be even higher. One way to avoid total volunteer burnout was to farm out as much of the work as possible. And this is where I first became seriously acquainted with the modern Charity Industry. I met armies of attractive young people who had turned their backs on the corporate world to work for non-profits with soft-edged logos that rented out venues for
fundraisers, who handled publicity for fundraisers, who catered fundraisers, who ran silent auctions for fundraisers. They all felt really good about being able to do such worthwhile work and at the end of the evening they had all done pretty well by themselves while our NGO saw our net takings, always modest, shrink even further.
I found myself haunted by Carole Lombard’s famous line about a fashionable charity scavenger hunt in the 1936 movie, My Man Godfrey: “…the one who wins gets a prize only there really isn’t a prize, it’s just the honor of winning because all the money goes to charity, that is, if there is any money left over but then there never is...”
Eighty years after Carole’s dilemma I was having no more success in trying to make sense of this same charity machine. And soon I saw that change, revolutionary change, to charitable fundraising was already outpacing the model I was still struggling to understand.
Publicity had always been a major part of the elaborate preparations for a fundraiser. It had to be lined up weeks in advance, tickets printed and sold, media spots booked and flyers printed and distributed. Five years into the new millennium all this was being done electronically, and all within a week of the event itself. One of the first things people learned from the internet was not to commit to any event in advance. One of the first things our NGO learned from the internet was: Why go to all the effort and expense of planning a fundraiser at all when you could get people to donate by clicking a button?
We developed a website and set about scaling the steep learning curve. The technological changes were relatively simple. The real challenge was navigating the swarms of fundraising platforms that had so quickly infested the internet and, for some of us, trying to figure out exactly what “platforms ” were and how they worked.
Obviously, they worked by charging for their services. Scams abounded, of course, but once one found a platform that suited one’s organization, their services were worth the cost. But frequently the perfect platform had been constructed as a CV enhancing project by an operator who was looking for a non-virtual job. As soon as this materialized the platform disappeared. In this brave new world even the most basic functions were ephemeral.
Even with all the goodwill in the world on display — and here it was, literally on display — I found the landscape confused, shifting and even more dehumanizing than the old fundraisers. There was another whole world of help for people like myself; slickly optimistic webinars and workshops held in conventions centers that would teach us to optimize our potential and become impactful. They would provide us with inside information about granting agencies and lists of insiders inside those agencies and all this for $75 or $125 or $300. These events were manned by the attractive, corporation-fleeing idealists with whom I was becoming familiar. Oddly enough, they were also attended by the same kind of high-minded mavericks, as the volunteer pools of old realized that they had been giving away skills that they could use to support themselves in the rapidly evolving gig economy. They used these events to do the networking they had been taught in the mid-life-career-change courses they had taken at the community colleges that had also taught them how to write grant proposals. Grant proposals. Strategic plans. Impact statements. Business plans. Vision and mission statements. Our remaining volunteers had a whole new vocabulary and skill set to master.
Another new internet development was The Active Fundraiser where people could enlist friends and family to sponsor them on-line as they walked, ran, swam or climbed to raise money for their chosen cause. Members of our board proposed climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro as a fundraiser and the idea was immediately popular.
Turns out folks really want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and they want to feel good about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. We went on-line and found a company who organized such group-climbs who impressed us with their commitment. They had abandoned the corporate rat-race to pursue their passion and to make a real contribution to the world. They were experienced and organized, the climb went off without a hitch and our bank balance got a nice boost. It was only on the last day of the climb that the participants learned that the local guides who had led them up and down the mountain, had carried their luggage, had pitched their tents and privies and cooked their food and soothed their altitude sickness, had not been paid, had never expected to be paid: the tips left by the climbers would be their only recompense. Our group managed to leave them a record-breaking sum and we learned another important lesson about fundraising.
By this time our NGO had completed several small-scale projects in DRC and we realized that our fundraising efforts would have to be scaled up to support the larger and more long-term projects we wanted to pursue. Our dependable supporters were wonderfully faithful but we relied heavily on the Friday/ Saturday/Sunday Morning crowd. These were people who understood how long term, regular support got work done but they were primarily committed, often deeply committed, to the efforts of their faith communities. It was clear that if we were to survive we would have to turn to larger-scale corporate funding.
It was a revelation when the head of a very successful NGO that was doing amazing development work in Tanzania came to one of our board meetings to help us make this shift in our approach to fundraising. He was an inspiringly gregarious businessman who went over our vision statement, our business plan and said, “Great. Now all you have to do is play golf with millionaires.” We laughed uncertainly —was he joking? — and we admitted that none of us knew how to play golf. His parting remark: “Learn.”
But these massive changes in fundraising were not the earthquake that finally rocked my commitment as a volunteer. I had my WTF moment about the real revolution during an encounter with a potential donor at one of our last fundraisers. We were discussing our plans to build a medical clinic in a community of people who had been displaced by war and the contamination of their land by mining runoff, in the course of which he swilled his glass of white wine, fixed me with a knowing smile and said, “So, say I help you get your clinic built. What’s the return on my investment?” If he had wanted to end the discussion so that he could enjoy hisevening in peace he succeeded very effectively because I was stunned into silence:
Never in all my born days had I heard anything so strange. But he just wanted to continue the discussion on his own terms and he proceeded to explain to me that“we’ve been pouring money into Africa for decades and it just goes from bad to worse.” He was “sick and tired of giving these people so much they don’t have any incentive to do anything for themselves.” I had been working in the NGO long enough not to be shocked by this perennial cry of the fatigued donor though, as always, I wondered why people who get tax credits for donating a little extra cash never seem to tire of draining massive amounts of wealth out of these countries to goose their stock portfolios which provide the extra cash... But this was something
new: my first encounter with social entrepreneurship. It was unfortunate, obviously, that it had been with a particularly mean-spirited dick, but it led me to start paying more attention to this late 20th century development.
In case you haven’t been following the story: Globalization and Neo-Liberalism had a baby and they named it Social Entrepreneurship. It was an attempt to avoid precisely the grind of the eternal charity-machine in which our NGO was trapped. It began as an honest attempt to free donor and recipient alike of this unwieldy and vastly inefficient cycle of frustrated intentions by creating a “win-win” solution for everyone: instead of being deprived of any portion of their well-deserved wealth, donors could help disadvantaged communities by helping them developing their economies, investing in them and establishing businesses that would free these communities from a disastrous dependence on charity.
The idea isn’t a new one and has long been voiced in the adage, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and he can feed himself for the rest of his life”. This is so basic and sound a principle that the rapid and almost universal embrace of this model is easy to understand. What perplexed me — what perplexes me still — is how rapidly the latter part of this adage has been modified to read, “Teach him to fish and he can feed himself as long as I get unfettered access to unregulated markets, exemption from labor and environmental laws and a double digit return on my investment.”
That summary may sound harsh but it is nothing compared to the brutal speed at which social entrepreneurship has been accepted as the reigning paradigm of wealth redistribution in the world, embraced, curiously, by all shades of the political spectrum.
This is not an attempt at an analysis of neo-liberalism’s and social entrepreneurship’s astonishing ascendancy over every other economic order in the world (excepting, of course, Organized Crime which, like The Poor, is always with us). This is an effort to clarify a very personal dilemma. As a volunteer I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about how charitable organizations function and how they are evolving with the vagaries of the global economy. Given that I have little aptitude for the work and none of the social and business
connections that are its essential foundation, how can I justify my continued commitment of time and money?
This question immediately led me to a more direct one: How can I justify asking others to donate their time and money to this effort? The work we’d undertaken was so clearly worthwhile that I began by assuming that the answer was self-evident. I have come to understand that the underlying question was even more basic: Why does anyone give anything to anyone?
When I ask people this question directly the responses are several different kinds of heartbreaking. The youngest respondents tend to look at me blankly and say, “You mean crowdfunding?” When I concede this point they tell me that “if you don’t give anything no one will like you”. Posting their charitable deeds on social media helps them maintain their profile and then, almost always, they add, “and it makes me feel good”.
Their elders’ responses are much warier. Those who make a practice of sustained donations often site a family member or friend who suffered from a medical condition that had made them aware of the need for treatment or research. They also mention environment concerns and on-going awareness of the mistreatment of animals as the reason for their commitment to long-term giving.
The great divide comes when adult human beings are the intended beneficiaries of their largesse. A common response is, “I work hard for my money and I pay taxes. I don’t owe anyone anything”. Would they donate to help people in another country? This usually gets a shrug and a lecture on what scams such charities were. All too often they were able to detail specific examples of donations that never reached their intended recipients. I’ve heard a lot about Haiti. When I point out that our NGO is an all-volunteer organization and that except for bare-bone expenses all donations went directly to DRC I’ve got used to being told that this alone is proof
that we were too insignificant to be worthy of their support.
When I ask people if they do volunteer work of any description in their community the response is the same regardless of age. Many people clearly enjoy participating in charity runs/climbs/walks, pretty much any large-scale, one-off event that involves free t-shirts. Are they involved in any organization that required a permanent, long-term commitment? The response is almost invariable in its wording: they have “neither time nor energy for that sort of thing”.
Besides talking directly to people I have done my homework. I have read the statistics; the supposedly scientific evidence that neo-liberal policies are responsible for lifting massive numbers of the world’s population from subsistence level poverty into dynamic prosperity. But I’ve worked in the analytical chemistry industry long enough to know that economic statistics are not sacrosanct scientific proofs. They are tools that supply evidence to justify and facilitate economic policies and practices. They are applied science, or technology. They can be extremely useful tools but one must be very clear about whose hands are wielding those tools, and to what ends.
Trickle-down and austerity economics were unleashed on the world as statistically based methods of resolving financial problems. They have since proven to be both ineffective and more scientific-sounding than soundly scientific. The more I heard about win-win solutions to global financial distress the more it seemed to be little more than the third spoke of an unholy trinity of dubious panaceas.
Win-win is not a balanced mathematical equation, nor is it a replicable scientific theory. It is a political catch-phrase that has opened world markets to the tender mercies of post-capitalistic speculation with tax-breaks for the dominant, usually western, partner and perpetual subjugation for their partners who now have all the fish they can eat. At least theoretically.
I’m not corporation-bashing here. It would be far too easy to pile the weight of the world’s financial inequities on their hefty shoulders. But I’m real clear on corporations and the corporations themselves are even clearer: Small, big or enormous, they exist for one reason and one reason only: to maximize returns to their shareholders. Period, full stop, amen. They are very very good at it and with strict, external regulation they have a critical role to play in any attempt to deal with our global economic ponzi scheme, but to charge them with formulating and carrying out any re-balancing of the global economy is in direct opposition to their prime directive and is more than naively unrealistic: It is madness worthy of an Orwellian fantasy.
For everyone’s sake I have to hope that there is some truth to their claims of having lowered the poverty rates in developing countries but even if the statistics can be backed up it still begs the question that I live with every day. What is this economic model doing to those of us who are living the life to which those countries aspire?
That is the question that volunteer service forces me to confront. I have watched the clumsy corruption of the charity industry give way to the meaningless, efficient productivity of entrepreneurship, social and otherwise. On one hand I have worked with actively engaged citizens who, despite their sometimes muddled motivations, never doubted that they had a responsibility to some commonweal outside their own interests. On the other hand I have met increasingly passive consumers with neither the will nor the stamina to do anything more than click on icons that make them feel good, knowing that Bill Gates will take care of the rest.
This is not a point I need to labour or prove. Recent US history has already done that: election results alone prove that roughly half of American citizens don’t care where Bill Gates — or Stephen Miller or Elon Musk or Rupert Murdock or the Walton family or Perdue Pharma — takes them, as long as their taxes are reduced along the way.
What I must do is make the pragmatic, personal decision I have tried to elucidate, and I must make it in the light of these powerful and complex forces that I can scarcely hope to understand.
I have gained a limited understanding of other relevant forces, in no small part because of my years of volunteering. I’ve had a boots-on-the-ground education about the history and global economy that makes my very, very comfortable life possible. I have been humbled by knowing people whose daily sacrifices to stay alive, to stay human — to help other people stay alive and stay human — havechanged my life. Sometimes these same people make me crazy, but that is another thing I’ve learned: people are a lot harder to work with than demographics. I have nothing against Microsoft, or at least not much, but I’m sorry Bill. This one is too big for you to handle.
The irony is, of course, that now I have wrangled my thoughts into some kind of order my dilemma may well be resolved by forces stronger than even the global economy. Everything I’ve written here is ancient history now. Whether our NGO or the farmers who eke out a living on the land we’ve so far managed to protect from real estate speculators will survive Covid19 and its economic fall-out is out of our hands.
It would be an even greater irony if, in the economic landscape scoured raw by the pandemic, the two prevailing models of wealth distribution turn out to be surprisingly familiar. There will always be the Friday/Saturday/Sunday morning crowd and all their weekday counterparts who gather together on a regular basis and who donate towards their shared vision on a regular basis. They will do so out of a hopelessly tangled knot of obligation, community, fear and gratitude. Their efforts might be effective or fruitless; they will always be particular and limited. In time they will be corrupted, perhaps beyond recognition. But they will be able to be judged solely by the word that defines them: charity, from the Greek caritas. Love.
Then there will be the partiers, Saturday night or otherwise. And what a party we’re looking at: AI and increasingly esoteric algorithms will continue to transform the global economy. Genetic engineering will perform medical and technological miracles. The number of female entrepreneurs in the world will climb steadily. More and more people will be able to afford fuel-efficient cars. Green energy and sustainable agriculture will go mainstream. Celebrities will be paid millions to give motivational speeches to explain how generosity pays. Education levels will rise, household wealth will rise, the leading economic indicators will rise and the markets will soar. And the relevant demographics will feel really really good — as long as no one asks where all the money goes. Until I began working with an NGO based in a major North American city my fundraising experience was limited to the two local models that prevailed in the poor rural area of the USA where I was living.
The first one I called the Sunday Morning Model because it was based on regular church attendance and a strong sense of obligation: You’re going to pray that “God’s will be done on earth as in heaven”? OK, here’s the collection plate. The basic message could be couched in gentler terms or with considerable rigor, but it was simple and clear. And whatever its shortcomings, it worked, one of its chief advantages being its remarkable financial transparency. Whether or not the congregation lived up to its daunting spiritual mandate, regular financial meetings, sometimes long, tedious and contentious, meant that the books were open to all congregants.
Then there was the Saturday Night Model, an ad hoc event sponsored by the local bikers and/or the nearest fire hall. These “Beef ‘n Beers” were usually held in response to a local tragedy: a family confronted with an illness, an accident, or a fire. Although a few notices might be posted at the local convenience stores, publicity was mostly word-of-mouth thanks to the very effective rural grapevine.
Beef ‘n Beers were, in fact, just keggers with even more meat, booze, smoke and aggressively awful music than their youthful counterparts. They were wildly popular and successful, with many of thousands of dollars being raised in a single evening.
Transparency was not a problem because there was none. Many of the attendees had only hazy memories of what had happened on the night. The families who benefited from the event were understandably stunned with gratitude. The finances of the local fire halls were always conducted in masonic secrecy and no one — but no one — was going to ask the bikers anything about money.
So I had a lot to learn when I began working with an all-volunteer NGO based in a major North American City that was doing development work in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s. I got involved because I was so impressed by the seasoned volunteers who seemed to have such a firm grasp on the bewildering complexity of staging fundraisers in this new and exciting metropolitan setting.
They all started with trendy downtown venues — and that was just the beginning of the expenses as food and drink, entertainment and advertising all ran up costs. These might be modified with careful negotiation but this required seasoned and well-connected volunteers who had to be recruited, trained, encouraged, rewarded and reassured.
And all these preparations were not sufficient to assure success: Folks came to these events for swag. They expected raffles and silent auctions and door prizes and giveaways. Local businesses and merchants could be persuaded to donate such items but this was another task for already over-burdened volunteers. And the constantly rising expectations eventually became untenable. At one point I shamelessly eavesdropped on two young bankers on a commuter train who were discussing their respective Saturday nights. One had attended a fundraiser where each attendee had received a cashmere scarf. The second banker admitted that he had been tempted by the scarf but had opted for an event that had offered a free bottle
of champagne and what he figured was a pretty good chance of getting laid. Between them they had dropped more than $2500 (and got laid) and they “felt really good about being able to support such worthwhile causes”. They ended up sharing a good laugh because neither of them could quite remember what those causes were.
They could hardly be faulted for that. When I first began began working fundraisers I was doggedly determined to use them to inform our donors about the plight of rural Congolese struggling to recover from civil war and the runaway corporate raiding of their country’s natural resources. The older, more experienced volunteers were wonderfully patient in explaining that perhaps this kind of “sharing” was not entirely compatible with showing our donors a good time.
As soon as such an event was over these volunteers, drained by organizational stresses, personality conflicts and overwork, had to begin planning the next one, where the stakes and expectations would be even higher. One way to avoid total volunteer burnout was to farm out as much of the work as possible. And this is where I first became seriously acquainted with the modern Charity Industry. I met armies of attractive young people who had turned their backs on the corporate world to work for non-profits with soft-edged logos that rented out venues for
fundraisers, who handled publicity for fundraisers, who catered fundraisers, who ran silent auctions for fundraisers. They all felt really good about being able to do such worthwhile work and at the end of the evening they had all done pretty well by themselves while our NGO saw our net takings, always modest, shrink even further.
I found myself haunted by Carole Lombard’s famous line about a fashionable charity scavenger hunt in the 1936 movie, My Man Godfrey: “…the one who wins gets a prize only there really isn’t a prize, it’s just the honor of winning because all the money goes to charity, that is, if there is any money left over but then there never is...”
Eighty years after Carole’s dilemma I was having no more success in trying to make sense of this same charity machine. And soon I saw that change, revolutionary change, to charitable fundraising was already outpacing the model I was still struggling to understand.
Publicity had always been a major part of the elaborate preparations for a fundraiser. It had to be lined up weeks in advance, tickets printed and sold, media spots booked and flyers printed and distributed. Five years into the new millennium all this was being done electronically, and all within a week of the event itself. One of the first things people learned from the internet was not to commit to any event in advance. One of the first things our NGO learned from the internet was: Why go to all the effort and expense of planning a fundraiser at all when you could get people to donate by clicking a button?
We developed a website and set about scaling the steep learning curve. The technological changes were relatively simple. The real challenge was navigating the swarms of fundraising platforms that had so quickly infested the internet and, for some of us, trying to figure out exactly what “platforms ” were and how they worked.
Obviously, they worked by charging for their services. Scams abounded, of course, but once one found a platform that suited one’s organization, their services were worth the cost. But frequently the perfect platform had been constructed as a CVenhancing project by an operator who was looking for a non-virtual job. As soon as this materialized the platform disappeared. In this brave new world even the most basic functions were ephemeral.
Even with all the goodwill in the world on display — and here it was, literally on display — I found the landscape confused, shifting and even more dehumanizing than the old fundraisers. There was another whole world of help for people like myself; slickly optimistic webinars and workshops held in conventions centers that would teach us to optimize our potential and become impactful. They would provide us with inside information about granting agencies and lists of insiders inside those agencies and all this for $75 or $125 or $300. These events were manned by the attractive, corporation-fleeing idealists with whom I was becoming familiar. Oddly enough, they were also attended by the same kind of high-minded mavericks, as the volunteer pools of old realized that they had been giving away skills that they could use to support themselves in the rapidly evolving gig economy. They used these events to do the networking they had been taught in the mid-life-career-change courses they had taken at the community colleges that had also taught them how to write grant proposals. Grant proposals. Strategic plans. Impact statements. Business plans. Vision and mission statements. Our remaining volunteers had a whole new vocabulary and skill set to master.
Another new internet development was The Active Fundraiser where people could enlist friends and family to sponsor them on-line as they walked, ran, swam or climbed to raise money for their chosen cause. Members of our board proposed climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro as a fundraiser and the idea was immediately popular.
Turns out folks really want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and they want to feel good about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. We went on-line and found a company who organized such group-climbs who impressed us with their commitment. They had abandoned the corporate rat-race to pursue their passion and to make a real contribution to the world. They were experienced and organized, the climb went off without a hitch and our bank balance got a nice boost. It was only on the last day of the climb that the participants learned that the local guides who had led them up and down the mountain, had carried their luggage, had pitched their tents and privies and cooked their food and soothed their altitude sickness, had not been paid, had never expected to be paid: the tips left by the climbers would be their only recompense. Our group managed to leave them a record-breaking sum and we learned another important lesson about fundraising.
By this time our NGO had completed several small-scale projects in DRC and we realized that our fundraising efforts would have to be scaled up to support the larger and more long-term projects we wanted to pursue. Our dependable supporters were wonderfully faithful but we relied heavily on the Friday/ Saturday/Sunday Morning crowd. These were people who understood how long term, regular support got work done but they were primarily committed, often deeply committed, to the efforts of their faith communities. It was clear that if we were to survive we would have to turn to larger-scale corporate funding.
It was a revelation when the head of a very successful NGO that was doing amazing development work in Tanzania came to one of our board meetings to help us make this shift in our approach to fundraising. He was an inspiringly gregarious businessman who went over our vision statement, our business plan and said, “Great. Now all you have to do is play golf with millionaires.” We laughed uncertainly —was he joking? — and we admitted that none of us knew how to play golf. His parting remark: “Learn.”
But these massive changes in fundraising were not the earthquake that finally rocked my commitment as a volunteer. I had my WTF moment about the real revolution during an encounter with a potential donor at one of our last fundraisers. We were discussing our plans to build a medical clinic in a community of people who had been displaced by war and the contamination of their land by mining runoff, in the course of which he swilled his glass of white wine, fixed me with a knowing smile and said, “So, say I help you get your clinic built. What’s the return on my investment?” If he had wanted to end the discussion so that he could enjoy hisevening in peace he succeeded very effectively because I was stunned into silence:
Never in all my born days had I heard anything so strange. But he just wanted to continue the discussion on his own terms and he proceeded to explain to me that“we’ve been pouring money into Africa for decades and it just goes from bad to worse.” He was “sick and tired of giving these people so much they don’t have any incentive to do anything for themselves.” I had been working in the NGO long enough not to be shocked by this perennial cry of the fatigued donor though, as always, I wondered why people who get tax credits for donating a little extra cash never seem to tire of draining massive amounts of wealth out of these countries to goose their stock portfolios which provide the extra cash... But this was something
new: my first encounter with social entrepreneurship. It was unfortunate, obviously, that it had been with a particularly mean-spirited dick, but it led me to start paying more attention to this late 20th century development.
In case you haven’t been following the story: Globalization and Neo-Liberalism had a baby and they named it Social Entrepreneurship. It was an attempt to avoid precisely the grind of the eternal charity-machine in which our NGO was trapped. It began as an honest attempt to free donor and recipient alike of this unwieldy and vastly inefficient cycle of frustrated intentions by creating a “win-win” solution for everyone: instead of being deprived of any portion of their well-deserved wealth, donors could help disadvantaged communities by helping them developing their economies, investing in them and establishing businesses that would free these communities from a disastrous dependence on charity.
The idea isn’t a new one and has long been voiced in the adage, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and he can feed himself for the rest of his life”. This is so basic and sound a principle that the rapid and almost universal embrace of this model is easy to understand. What perplexed me — what perplexes me still — is how rapidly the latter part of this adage has been modified to read, “Teach him to fish and he can feed himself as long as I get unfettered access to unregulated markets, exemption from labor and environmental laws and a double digit return on my investment.”
That summary may sound harsh but it is nothing compared to the brutal speed at which social entrepreneurship has been accepted as the reigning paradigm of wealth redistribution in the world, embraced, curiously, by all shades of the political spectrum.
This is not an attempt at an analysis of neo-liberalism’s and social entrepreneurship’s astonishing ascendancy over every other economic order in the world (excepting, of course, Organized Crime which, like The Poor, is always with us). This is an effort to clarify a very personal dilemma. As a volunteer I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about how charitable organizations function and how they are evolving with the vagaries of the global economy. Given that I have little aptitude for the work and none of the social and business
connections that are its essential foundation, how can I justify my continued commitment of time and money?
This question immediately led me to a more direct one: How can I justify asking others to donate their time and money to this effort? The work we’d undertaken was so clearly worthwhile that I began by assuming that the answer was self-evident. I have come to understand that the underlying question was even more basic: Why does anyone give anything to anyone?
When I ask people this question directly the responses are several different kinds of heartbreaking. The youngest respondents tend to look at me blankly and say, “You mean crowdfunding?” When I concede this point they tell me that “if you don’t give anything no one will like you”. Posting their charitable deeds on social media helps them maintain their profile and then, almost always, they add, “and it makes me feel good”.
Their elders’ responses are much warier. Those who make a practice of sustained donations often site a family member or friend who suffered from a medical condition that had made them aware of the need for treatment or research. They also mention environment concerns and on-going awareness of the mistreatment of animals as the reason for their commitment to long-term giving.
The great divide comes when adult human beings are the intended beneficiaries of their largesse. A common response is, “I work hard for my money and I pay taxes. I don’t owe anyone anything”. Would they donate to help people in another country? This usually gets a shrug and a lecture on what scams such charities were. All too often they were able to detail specific examples of donations that never reached their intended recipients. I’ve heard a lot about Haiti. When I point out that our NGO is an all-volunteer organization and that except for bare-bone expenses all donations went directly to DRC I’ve got used to being told that this alone is proof
that we were too insignificant to be worthy of their support.
When I ask people if they do volunteer work of any description in their community the response is the same regardless of age. Many people clearly enjoy participating in charity runs/climbs/walks, pretty much any large-scale, one-off event that involves free t-shirts. Are they involved in any organization that required a permanent, long-term commitment? The response is almost invariable in its wording: they have “neither time nor energy for that sort of thing”.
Besides talking directly to people I have done my homework. I have read the statistics; the supposedly scientific evidence that neo-liberal policies are responsible for lifting massive numbers of the world’s population from subsistence level poverty into dynamic prosperity. But I’ve worked in the analytical chemistry industry long enough to know that economic statistics are not sacrosanct scientific proofs. They are tools that supply evidence to justify and facilitate economic policies and practices. They are applied science, or technology. They can be extremely useful tools but one must be very clear about whose hands are wielding those tools, and to what ends.
Trickle-down and austerity economics were unleashed on the world as statistically based methods of resolving financial problems. They have since proven to be both ineffective and more scientific-sounding than soundly scientific. The more I heard about win-win solutions to global financial distress the more it seemed to be little more than the third spoke of an unholy trinity of dubious panaceas.
Win-win is not a balanced mathematical equation, nor is it a replicable scientific theory. It is a political catch-phrase that has opened world markets to the tender mercies of post-capitalistic speculation with tax-breaks for the dominant, usually western, partner and perpetual subjugation for their partners who now have all the fish they can eat. At least theoretically.
I’m not corporation-bashing here. It would be far too easy to pile the weight of the world’s financial inequities on their hefty shoulders. But I’m real clear on corporations and the corporations themselves are even clearer: Small, big or enormous, they exist for one reason and one reason only: to maximize returns to their shareholders. Period, full stop, amen. They are very very good at it and with strict, external regulation they have a critical role to play in any attempt to deal with our global economic ponzi scheme, but to charge them with formulating and carrying out any re-balancing of the global economy is in direct opposition to their prime directive and is more than naively unrealistic: It is madness worthy of an Orwellian fantasy.
For everyone’s sake I have to hope that there is some truth to their claims of having lowered the poverty rates in developing countries but even if the statistics can be backed up it still begs the question that I live with every day. What is this economic model doing to those of us who are living the life to which those countries aspire?
That is the question that volunteer service forces me to confront. I have watched the clumsy corruption of the charity industry give way to the meaningless, efficient productivity of entrepreneurship, social and otherwise. On one hand I have worked with actively engaged citizens who, despite their sometimes muddled motivations, never doubted that they had a responsibility to some commonweal outside their own interests. On the other hand I have met increasingly passive consumers with neither the will nor the stamina to do anything more than click on icons that make them feel good, knowing that Bill Gates will take care of the rest.
This is not a point I need to labour or prove. Recent US history has already done that: election results alone prove that roughly half of American citizens don’t care where Bill Gates — or Stephen Miller or Elon Musk or Rupert Murdock or the Walton family or Perdue Pharma — takes them, as long as their taxes are reduced along the way.
What I must do is make the pragmatic, personal decision I have tried to elucidate, and I must make it in the light of these powerful and complex forces that I can scarcely hope to understand.
I have gained a limited understanding of other relevant forces, in no small part because of my years of volunteering. I’ve had a boots-on-the-ground education about the history and global economy that makes my very, very comfortable life possible. I have been humbled by knowing people whose daily sacrifices to stay alive, to stay human — to help other people stay alive and stay human — havechanged my life. Sometimes these same people make me crazy, but that is another thing I’ve learned: people are a lot harder to work with than demographics. I have nothing against Microsoft, or at least not much, but I’m sorry Bill. This one is too big for you to handle.
The irony is, of course, that now I have wrangled my thoughts into some kind of order my dilemma may well be resolved by forces stronger than even the global economy. Everything I’ve written here is ancient history now. Whether our NGO or the farmers who eke out a living on the land we’ve so far managed to protect from real estate speculators will survive Covid19 and its economic fall-out is out of our hands.
It would be an even greater irony if, in the economic landscape scoured raw by the pandemic, the two prevailing models of wealth distribution turn out to be surprisingly familiar. There will always be the Friday/Saturday/Sunday morning crowd and all their weekday counterparts who gather together on a regular basis and who donate towards their shared vision on a regular basis. They will do so out of a hopelessly tangled knot of obligation, community, fear and gratitude. Their efforts might be effective or fruitless; they will always be particular and limited. In time they will be corrupted, perhaps beyond recognition. But they will be able to be judged solely by the word that defines them: charity, from the Greek caritas. Love.
Then there will be the partiers, Saturday night or otherwise. And what a party we’re looking at: AI and increasingly esoteric algorithms will continue to transform the global economy. Genetic engineering will perform medical and technological miracles. The number of female entrepreneurs in the world will climb steadily. More and more people will be able to afford fuel-efficient cars. Green energy and sustainable agriculture will go mainstream. Celebrities will be paid millions to give motivational speeches to explain how generosity pays. Education levels will rise, household wealth will rise, the leading economic indicators will rise and the markets will soar. And the relevant demographics will feel really really good — as long as no one asks where all the money goes.