A few years back I took a decision to try and pivot towards working with charities and other “for purpose” businesses and organisations.
I figured that instead of working for the capitalist machine, or brands that only care about selling as many products as possible and thus pleasing their shareholders (often to the detriment of the planet or society) I would instead absolve myself of being a just another cog in the machine - and will thus serve to support charities and other worthy causes.
I should point out at this point I could likely only make this choice due to my white, UK based upbringing, with all the institutional benefits I will have received, conscious or otherwise.
If I had to summarise my current work situation - whilst generally I am happy to feel I’m not helping to participate in over-consumption and all the destruction left in its wake, and to at times feel a part of some really important causes, ultimately I feel that most charities are also a big part of the problem.
How Charities serve to prop-up (not tackle) the causes they proclaim to support
(I should state here that this is not an attack on any of the charities or clients I have been lucky enough to work with - I don’t aim to lay the blame at the feet of any of these people - instead this is more of a criticism of the charity sector at the systematic level).
Charities by definition are, according to Wikipedia, an “organization whose primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being (e.g. educational, religious or other activities serving the public interest or common good).”
This is all well and good, but for me the issue arises when we look at how they are funded, and how they are governed - or perhaps to put it bluntly - to whom they are held responsible. Legally they are expected to act with reasonable care and skill, are responsible to a board of trustees, and ultimately to any such charity regulators, such as the government-run Charity Commission in the UK.
Charities are typically funded by voluntary donations - from individuals, corporations and foundations. There may also be grants from government bodies and private trusts. Some charities may help themselves by generating funds selling goods and services, and sometimes a mix of all the above.
So - if a charity is largely dependent on a government grant (which will have its own specific rules and stipulations) - we can assume that the charity has to ensure it is very careful as to what it says and does. It must “stay within its lane” or it will risk any such funding (which is vital to their operation) from being pulled, which could cause the charity to fold.
What happens therefore when a charity that aims to end poverty realises that actually in order to get to the heart of the matter that needs resolving (inequality for example), this actually leads to critiquing the very government or establishment which is responsible for their funding? This is where a charity realises it has veered to far from its lane and must correct its course. This is obvious because otherwise the charity puts itself at great risk - and so it becomes stuck in this cycle.
A charity operating in the food poverty space might therefore pivot from getting to the actual heart of the matter, and focus instead on doing as best as they can to limit the problem. It is like putting a plaster or bandage on a severed leg - it might feel like you are helping (and maybe it does stem the flow temporarily) but clearly it never properly solves the issue at hand.
A meme I generated to help visualise the above scenario...
So the charity starts handing out food packages via local foodbanks, or provides food to shelters. Again this feels important, needy work - and it is - because there are people who genuinely need this food because they’ve fallen through the cracks of society™ as some may put it (despite actually society being designed in an oppressive way that intentionally makes things harder for specific groups - aka those who aren’t white from a fairly middle class upbringing).
Therefore, charities get stuck in this modus operandi and to be honest a lot of them will have known this, they will see the wheels falling off, but their hands are tied because they’re too busy fundraising, coordinating efforts on the ground, dealing with budget cuts and a growing situation where more and more people need access to foodbanks in order to survive.
To give another metaphor - they are busy desperately bailing out water on their boat (HMS Good Endeavours) whilst they are slowly sinking...
So - clearly more radical solutions are required here - but charities and such organisations have had their wings clipped to such an extent that they can barely walk, let alone fly (if “too fly” was to free people from an oppressive society!).
Who am I to comment - I’m just an SEO consultant after all!
I’m sometimes reluctant to share such thoughts, especially when it can easily backfire on me (which sane charity CEO would want to work with someone who harbours such views!) - but for me I find it is getting harder and harder to bite my tongue when I see the state of things around the world.
As you can probably imagine, as an SEO and web consultant, ultimately my role is simple - I’m here to help ensure people can find, and visit, your website via search engines. I need to ensure your website is visible for your target audience. And clearly this is quite distanced from providing advice on how a charity should really be run. Or, how we need to “break the chains of capitalism” to free us all! It probably wouldn’t make for a great pitch if I was in the market for new clients to work with…
But ultimately (and funnily enough) that is what lead me down this path of wanting to work with charities.
I wanted to feel like I was part of the solution, not part of the problem, as cliché as that sounds. But in actual fact spending time with charities (and doing some light reading in my sparetime) has actually helped to crystalise my views on certain topics - namely how institutions and government establishments actually help to cause and prolong issues such as food poverty and inequality, not to solve them (if you are curious, a good book on this topic is "How the Other Half Dies by Susan George").
Charities have long been considered as a catch-all insurance system for a failed government - in my opinion if we had a healthy society we would have no need for charities. Their existence comes into play because of their urgent need. They are doing the best given their circumstances, but it shouldn’t be this way.
Imagine what a post-growth world would look like, when we no longer obsess over constant growth and measuring GDP as a metric of progression - how does this metric allow us to rate whether a society is happy and healthy?
In such a post-growth world, where human and planetary health is put first on the agenda, what role is there for charities? Hopefully they would cease to exist. Humanity would organise itself in such a way that everyone has access to property, to food, to warmth, meaningful work, and so on.
If we were to rebuild a society that prioritises the health and happiness of the people, then I genuinely think that as an entity charity would have no function because it has become inbuilt to the system. But clearly, this can only happen through some kind of massive event (revolution?!) - and until then, charities and purpose-driven organisations will operate as some kind of mime, stuck within a capitalist branded box...
In Summary - How I thought working with Charities would solve all my problems (but hasn’t)...
I wanted to work with charities because it felt like more meaningful, purpose-driven work than working for normal businesses.
Sidenote here that I did also try to attract businesses in the sustainability space - those who are trying to operate within the circular economy or within the Doughnut Economics framework for example, because clearly they understand we can’t continue within this business-as-usual (BAU) framework. But sometimes trying to appeal to these business types actually meant that I had to try and “decode” whether a business is greenwashing or not! (I took on a small project with a carbon offset company which I later came to regret - offsetting is a license to continue polluting).
Whilst the underlying cause of the charities and purpose-driven organisations here is usually legitimate, charities in particular are stuck operating within layers of bureaucracy and are never able to get to the root of the issue they claim to exist to resolve. Therefore they are stuck in this cycle.
And I do also think that the bigger the charity is, the less likely they are to be getting to the heart of the issue at hand.
This isn’t usually the fault of the charity staff - it is more a critique of the underlying capitalist environment in which they operate (where they are under the ownership and control of their biggest donors). Why rock the boat if it means they may have critical funding removed?
It has become harder (for me, anyway) to determine which organisations are genuinely getting to the crux of the matter at hand. This also applies to companies in the sustainability sector - many of these seem to exist within the BAU framework, and/or are greenwashing on steroids. Unless you are advocating for a rapid reduction in resource usage (at least in the west), I'm not sure you are actually aligned with what it means to be sustainable.
I have personally come to believe that the only genuine movements worth supporting, which do get to tackle the root of many of our problems are as follows:
- Any movements that aim to propose alternative, more “radical” economies
- Any movements which aim to decolonise the establishment (or to overthrow it)
- Any movements that aim to shift us away from a business as usual (BAU) operation
- Any movements that aim to propose degrowth or postgrowth societies
- Any movements that advocate for and support human rights
(this means is by no means exhaustive; I have likely missed out various worthy causes/movements)
In my opinion these are all 100% worth supporting because they do get to the heart of our issues. And there is also a lot of overlap amongst the above.
This leads to a slight issue whereby many of these movements lack funding and support - exactly because they do get to the heart of the issue! This is what you might call "The Charity Paradox - a condition in which charitable action within capitalist systems mitigate symptoms of inequality while depending on the continuation of those inequalities for its own existence."
And this is largely why I don’t believe that to continue to operate within this capitalist society is good for anyone, except the 1% of course. But of course I will - and we all will - because that's the system we have.
