"I'm not a cynic, let alone a hypocrite."
My Board was asking me recently about our business model. These notes are from the minutes:
TREASURER: Let’s say one of our individual donors gives us $10. What have they done? Have they bought $10 worth of our services?
ME: They are not consuming the services, and they don’t collect and pass on the benefits they have just ‘bought’ from us; they could even disappear from the scene and nothing less would happen in the field. How can they be considered to be our customer?
VICE-CHAIR: Let’s say instead that they are selling us something then. What is it exactly? And what are we paying with?
ME: Difficult.
FUND RAISING PORTFOLIO: Let’s take a look from the other end: the service receiver. Are they our customers? They receive something from us. But what do they pay with?
ME: It is hard to say exactly what they pay with in a tangible sense. (I wrote a note to myself but didn’t speak it: “Sometimes, they pay with their souls –as they become dependant on us or confer sufficient gratitude to make our staff feel good about themselves.”)
PURCHASING PORTFOLIO: Could they be our suppliers then? They certainly supply us with opportunities to intervene – and plenty of them.
BENEFICIARY REPRESENTATIVE (No voting power- a token presence only): Maybe I could contribute and see if it takes us forwards: The individual private donor has sold their soul already by allowing themself to perpetuate a globally unjust set of systems that benefit them at the expense of others. (I wrote myself another unspoken note: “perhaps they have sold their soul to development NGOs since we do encourage them to remain blind – or pretending to be so; we pay with the distaste of our misrepresenting encouragement.”)
PRESIDENT (No voting power and we try to ignore him – he’s only on board because he used to be eminent): Yes I see it! They try to buy forgiveness (mediated by guilt or other masked motives leading them to make a ‘gift’ or even a more explicit ‘pay-off’) through us and we act as a broker to buy up forgiveness in communities of globally excluded people (mediated by projects and programmes).
CHAIRMAN (Above the ensuing clamor): But we all have a vested interest in not seeing it like this. Donors have a legitimate right to their ascendancy; they really are simply purchasing a service (again I wrote a private note to myself: “Never mind the patronization which goes with buying services on someone else’s behalf unless they are intimately involved in the negotiations”); the excluded are poor through no one’s fault (except sometimes their own) and should be grateful for ‘help’ proffered.
Of course, there had a to be a second ‘Board’ meeting afterwards – as some of us adjourned to the pub. A couple of hours later, I recall the following said:
PRESIDENT: And government ‘donors’? They can hardly be said to be contracted on behalf of poor country governments to purchase development services on behalf of their respective communities – though un-tied sectoral payments into ‘good governing’ department budgets can provide a cunning façade. It looks more like they are mandated to demonstrate at a large scale the same set of guilt-removing principles and processes that operate at the individual level amongst private donors. No wonder they want to regulate us. They have to be accountable to maximize the guilt reduction by so-called ‘quality services’ and need to legitimate their actions by appearing to suggest they are better than NGOs who are suddenly required to somehow ‘match up’.
ME: But it’s all we deserve if we insist on perpetuating the idea that we are ‘helping’. And they have every right on behalf of society to prevent us actually stealing.
BENEFICIARY REPRESENTATIVE: Never mind that ‘donations’ by the rich to the poor do nothing to bring about equity let alone equality. If individual donors or governments actually started ‘sharing’ instead of ‘giving’, it could be an entirely different story.
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