TEDx 1- Removing Labels
The Problem: Moving From Labels
When I shared that I believed “charities often, in an attempt to do good, mislabel people as poor and broken," I meant it. It was a tough thought to synthesize, but it does happen “often.” It does not “always,” and it’s hard, but it’s the only thing I could say to make sense of the situation.
I live in rural Oklahoma on a street with 5 houses, one worth, well, ALOT, and one worth a little and a good range in between. We chip in to help a family that struggles when we have to get our gravel road fixed (which gets all rutted up and messy every year) but we go talk to them first, ask what they can do, let them provide their options, and work out a solution that works for us all. That’s how charity plays itself out in relationships. I know their names, I see what they drive and heck, how many times amazon shows up each week and we look eye to eye each time with dignity as we figure it out. Outside of relationships, however, we label an entire country or continent as poor and somehow think we’re going to fix all the metaphorical gravel roads for perpetuity.
I get it, it's easier. It’s how it’s marketed. It’s how we can digest such a problem of magnitude. But it doesn’t make it right.
We end up lumping people into categories based on where they are now, based on how much stuff they have around them in assets, not really asking questions about what doing things for them, in ways that don’t involve them, says about their dignity, potential, and futures.
The scale of charity involvement means many people in developing countries are having dozens of groups come through and say through actions that “you sit there, we’re in quite the hurry, lots to do, you’re poor, so we’ll take care of this for you.” It’s like we went beyond helicopter parenting in this past generation to helicopter charity.
RE: “The way we’re using compassion is the thing that’s broken.”
Sometimes looking at other issues helps us see the one before us more clearly. So since i’m in a mood to be controversial, here’s another doozy. Medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States. It is generally accepted that harm from doctors - not including risks from hospital germs - accounts for more deaths than any single cancer. There is a reason doctors must recite and accept the Hippocratic oath of "first, do no harm". “No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, '' wrote an ancient Greek satirist, ``no soldier from the peace of his city.”
Charities, in the same way, are created to solve poverty, so they tend to find poverty everywhere they go. “If you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail”... So we head off with our bags of compassion to the streets, villages and towns in developing countries and start trying to “fix” people rather than assessing the systems these people are living in from their perspective and then partner with them to build more robust systems, including income generation, that might actually change the SITUATION of poverty. I say situation, because people aren’t poor, they are experiencing material poverty. “Poor people” is a label that says “this is who you are”, “experiencing poverty” is a situational state, which means you can move from that state to another.
This is hard because we’ve built a whole system of charity that feeds off annual funding cycles, grants, and outputs (i.e. something you can touch) over outcomes (something that changes the system.) If modern water charity (and modern medicine) were going to change the situation they claim to exist to change, why after the billions and billions of dollars that have been thrown at it, are things not improving at a dramatic pace?
I’ll finish with my own words from here: “And the people facing problems can and must be the principal actors of change, not some problem we’re trying to solve.
We have to see the strength of those experiencing problems and use charity to pass the baton as a step to self-reliance, not for a daily dose of life support, but to rally people to discover and achieve their best.”
If you ask someone experiencing poverty what they want, most will answer “a way to make money.” When you make money, you take care of your families needs. At Water4, we’re tackling the water crisis through income generating jobs and liberating lost incomes to families through the avoidance of medical costs from unsafe water, BUT it’s going to take the whole charity sector to focus on job creation, market creating innovations, and individual-focused solutions—we have to drop the hammer and learn to go hand in hand. You can’t cure poverty with handouts so we have to find another way. Yes, there is real need for aid based development, but when you build a system built on giving someone something that they could earn/do themselves, you’re not helping, you’re hurting. America’s development was built on entrepreneurs and since the other model isn’t working, why not give what worked for us a try?
To be continued…