By Nadine Riopel | Photo by Meena Kadri
Inside a sweltering hot corrugated tin makeshift office in the slums on Hyderabad, India, Amanda was beginning to get the feeling that something was off.
An Alberta girl, she was in India earning her economics degree, when of the consulting contacts she had made approached her about participating in a monitoring exercise for a microfinance program. One of the first thoughts she had was, “Who wouldn’t say yes to that?”
The program was funded by Canadians through a non-governmental partner organization (NGO) dedicated to helping women in India achieve financial security and well being through micro-credit loans.
Amanda was to interview the women receiving the loans and find out if the objectives of the program were being reached. At first, the interviews (conducted through translators) seemed to be going well. The women were saying that they had purchased things like sewing machines and food stalls with the money; that they were using it to build businesses and reach financial independence.
But something seemed off to Amanda, it all seemed too pat.
So she changed her tactics. She started digging deeper and found that it wasn’t as rosy a picture as she had been led to believe.
Many of the women had not been using the money for business capital. They had been spending it on dowries for their daughters; something which is technically illegal in India. The women knew that wasn’t what the Canadian donor organizations wanted to hear, so they glossed over their stories to make their reports more palatable.
Amanda found this extremely unsettling and it put her in a difficult position. She soon realized that she couldn’t condemn these women for their actions. Looking at the slum around her she couldn’t deny that if economic stability was truly the goal, then for those women, marrying a daughter well was the surest way to achieve it.
The program she was there with wanted to improve the financial well-being of the women it served. The reality was that dowries were an effective way to achieve that. “Could I reconcile Canadian values to the realities of the situation these women were in? Was providing dowries something that the Canadian funders I was representing would be ok with? Did we really want to support funding dowries, even if the outcome was better economic stability for these families,” says Amanda
She began to question the whole enterprise. She began to wonder whether it was a good idea to be bringing programs based on Canadian values into such a foreign environment at all.
“Who was I,”, she says, “to be dictating strategies or objectives to people for their own development?”
With this new perspective, she began to see that when the women embroidered the truth, when they harangued her for not having brought them free tarps, when they evaded the program’s ‘rules’ about how they should be developing, what they were really saying was,
“What we need is not what you’re offering us.”
Amanda realized that she had gotten herself into something that had looked like a good idea on the surface but was actually a mismatch for her, her values, and the good she wanted to be a part of creating.
For anyone who wants to get involved, give back and make difference, this is a scary scenario. We want to believe that all well-intentioned charitable efforts are well managed, well researched, and truly doing good. But the truth of the matter is that not all charity is created equal.
Even organizations that are doing arguably good work may not be a good match for each of us. Amanda’s NGO was, technically, achieving its goal of helping women achieve financial stability. On paper, it looked great. Some people might have been perfectly comfortable with that, despite the conflict with Canadian values.
But for Amanda, it wasn’t something she personally felt right about. Unfortunately by the time she figured that out she was already neck-deep in it.
How could she have avoided this? The conventional answer is that she should have asked more questions before becoming involved. But would that really have prevented her unfortunate situation?
What we’re taught about how to be a discriminating charitable supporter tells us to ask about overhead and fundraising costs. We’re supposed to find out if the money really gets to ‘those who need it’. Any investigation usually produces a lot of info about the worthiness of the cause.
But would those answers have prevented Amanda’s dilemma?
Knowing about the NGO’s overhead costs would not have given any clue to what results their program was actually having. The money was definitely getting to ‘those who need it’; women living in an slum in India are unarguably in need of resources. And by the same token, the cause was worthy. Conventional questions would not have prevented Amanda from becoming involved with a charitable program that turned out not to be what she had expected.
So what can we do, if we want to make sure that the time and money we put into doing good is well invested? How can we avoid getting mixed up with organizations and activities that don’t put our contributions to the use we hope they will? How do we make charities accountable for doing the good we trust them to create?
Asking questions is the right approach, but the key is to ask the right ones. Accountability is important, but it has to be focused on the right things; mainly whether or not any good is actually getting done.
As a donor or volunteer, it’s your right to thoroughly understand the work of an organization before you give them anything. If this seems like a lot of work, it may be a good idea to narrow down your contributions to just a few organizations, and focus on issues you have a fairly good understanding of to begin with. Otherwise, you might find yourself doing a lot of homework to become informed enough to make good choices about who to support and how.
As for how to get at the really meaningful, juicy info and figure out if a charity is right for you, there is a tool available to help.
Three of the biggest non-profit resource organizations in the US have banded together to create something called Charting Impact. GuideStar, the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance, and Independent Sector are working together to help charities improve the quality of information they provide to their supporters. As part of the initiative, they’ve created a tool called The 5 Questions.
Although The 5 Questions tool was originally created to help charities write more meaningful reports about their work, it also represents a fantastic opportunity for anyone who wants to be a bit more careful about what they’re getting involved with.
Click here to check out The 5 Questions.
Giving isn’t a perfect science, and there are no guarantees that our contributions will always have the positive results we hope they will. But by asking the right questions, we can ally ourselves with the organizations that are the best fit for each of us to create the good we want to see in the world, decreasing the risk of giving and providing ourselves with a better shot at truly making a difference.
Former charity fundraiser Nadine Riopel is on a mission to help people who want to get involved and make a difference, but struggle with the way giving and volunteering usually goes. She works with them through writing, workshops, speaking engagements, and one-on-one consultations to find the best way to make the impact they crave. You can find out more about her at http://givesmart.ca
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