Children's Enthusiasm for Sale! Buy it up quick!

I've spent a fair amount of time pondering the WE charity "scandal" that the news is fixating on. I don't really know what happened with regards to Trudeau and the attempt to give WE a contract to administer a program designed to put money into the hands of young people who's employment prospects seem pretty bleak this summer. After long reflection I've come to the conclusion that just about everyone is getting the story wrong. Let me explain---. 

My biggest stumbling block was trying to figure out what WE actually does. It's not easy. I looked at a lot of promotional videos and official websites, but I couldn't figure out what was going on. Eventually, I came across the video below which seems to be the closest thing I could find to an explanation.

It's a bit long, but worth the effort of watching. As near as I can tell, here are the key elements of the charity.

Building the Membership

WE works by getting young people to work extremely hard at building it's membership. It does this by making the price of engagement extremely low. Being involved with WE doesn't require any understanding of the importance of economics and politics to the existence of poverty. Nor does it require the sort of significant commitment that most social justice organizations demand as the price of actually changing the world. It's vision of economic development has been "dumbed down" as much as absolutely possible---it really does look like economic development as envisioned by a 12 year old child. 

One part of the model involves personalizing charity by focusing on specific individuals instead of systemic problems. This is a proven way of dramatically increasing donations from individuals---which was the secret behind the old "Foster Parent Plan" campaigns that encouraged people to donate "a dollar a day" to save one individual child. In the case of WE, it does this by working with groups of people---the "WE villages"---instead of abstract economic policy or political issues.

Organizing "WE days" 

As near as I can tell, these are vacuous musical events where people make powerful statements in favour of "change" and "working together". This gives the kiddies a bit of a treat while at the same time ensuring that no parents or corporate sponsors hear anything that might make them feel uncomfortable. 

Here's a video clip from a "WE day" in Toronto. Take a moment to think about what this guy is saying. I think it can be summed up as "you can make a difference if you work together with others". Well, duh. Anyone---from Mohandas Gandhi to Adolph Hitler---could have said exactly the same thing and actually meant it. The point is "how much of a difference?" and "what should you be doing?" And how you answer those two questions tends to divide people along ideological, political, religious, etc, lines. The thing to remember about WE is that it gets access to school children and can fill giant arenas specifically because it never says or does anything that would threaten the existing social order or make people in authority the slightest bit uncomfortable. 

There's a long history of people getting access to school children in order to go through the motions of public mobilization while removing any content that could conceivably be seen as controversial. When I was in high school, for example, we were taken to a school "assembly" where we were subjected to a "soft rock" ensemble called "Up With People". I managed to find their dumb theme song on YouTube, so here it is:

 

Selling Crap and Advertising Other People's Crap

If you can fill arenas with naive children, there are businesses that would do almost anything to get a chance to sell stuff to them. ME to WE gets some "fair trade chocolate" and "friendship bracelets" made at their WE villages, but I suspect that these are just "the nose of the camel" that allows them to build relationships with corporate sponsors. Some of them sell these WE trinkets in exchange for being able to advertise with WE. 

You can get their chocolate here---why not get something else while you're there?

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that ME to WE sells coffee too. 

You can purchase it here (why not get a croissant too?)

If you want to buy a bracelet, why not get it at one of these places?

Of course, you need to buy a ticket first at some of these places. If not, they 
also have other neat stuff to buy too.

Heck, why even bother with seeking out ME to WE chocolate, coffee, and friendship bracelets? There are corporate sponsors who have their own products that ME to WE endorses. 

Buy their stuff---I'm sure that it helps in one way or another!

As the website says 

Make an impact with our partners: shop everyday products that give back. We’re proud to partner with incredible brands to empower people to make a difference through their everyday purchases. From lifestyle products to gifts, when you see our logo on a product in-store or online you’ll know you’re making an impact.

I shouldn't have to say this, but giving money to a charity in order to get advertising really isn't "charity"---it's buying advertising. And once you start selling advertising, where does it end? If you don't pay too much attention to the track record of the company---it's just corporate camouflage. And how much money does a business have to "give" to a charity before it gets access to the database of givers or volunteers? How much do you think a huge database of naive, "do-gooders" might be worth to a corporation? Or a political party? Once a charity gets used to corporate sponsorship how dependent would it become? I suspect that the proper analogy would probably be "like a junkie and his regular hit of heroin". Do junkies pay much attention to where their fix comes from?
 

Burning Jet Fuel: Tourism Volunteer, or, Regular

The WE charity encourages people to travel to their WE villages. Here's an example of a ME to WE trip to their project in India:

1. Late evening arrival into Delhi and then transfer to your hotel for the night. Meet your ME to WE guide.
2. Enjoy breakfast at the hotel before your flight to Udaipur. After arrival, head to Araveli Cottages and Tented Camp to settle in for the week. Learn about the local communities and WE Charity’s work in the region.
3. Wake up with a morning yoga class and learn some Hindi before your community welcome. Start your volunteer building project.
4. Spend the morning with the women of the community to understand their roles in rural India. After lunch, try your hand at Mewari painting and continue working on your development project.
5. Continue working on your development project. In the early evening, dust off your dancing shoes for some Bollywood dancing.
6. Spend the morning on your development project. After a delicious lunch, relax at Araveli or join a cricket or volleyball game.
7. Finish your work on your development project in the morning. In the afternoon, spend time with the community to learn more about their daily lives.
8. Enjoy a camel ride toward the Kumbhalgarh Fort, the world’s second-longest wall, housing years of rich history. In the afternoon, celebrate your time with the community at a farewell ceremony.
9. Depart Araveli for Udaipur. Enjoy a morning of sightseeing in Udaipur before flying back to Delhi. Relax in a day room before transferring to the airport for your flight home.

This package price for one person starts at $3995 USD (that's $5,275.00 Canadian). Among the "Mewari painting", "Bollywood dancing", "camel riding", etc, you will be working on a "development project". From what I've seen, this usually involves something like laying bricks or banging nails---which I'm sure some local could probably do a lot better if some bucks were thrown his or her way. And this is what really irks me about this thing. If you threw the entire $5,000 that this junket costs at whatever the charity is supposed to be doing, I think that you'd be helping a LOT more people---depending on the project (which of course is another one of my pet peeves). 

If corporate giving is advertised, it isn't giving---it's advertising. The same thing applies to "voluntourism"---it's just rich people going on trips. And don't forget all that jet fuel being burned! Helping people by accelerating climate change that will probably destroy them isn't helping---it's actually being part of the problem. Moreover, traveling overseas so you can visit "quaint" and "picturesque" "traditional cultures" isn't really all that removed from traditional colonialism. Indeed, it strikes me as being extremely similar to the way aristocrats in the 18th century used to dress up like shepherds and hold picnics on pastures in order to hearken back to the "simpler" "pastoral" life of the rustics. (You know, the poor slobs who busted their asses so the local Lord could live in luxury.)  

In case you were wondering, this is a Mewari painting.
Public Domain image, c/o Wikimedia Commons.

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How much good does WE actually do? I'm not about to wade into the minutia of how it accounts for the money raised and spent. But I think we can get an inkling from the following You Tube video. Since the Kielburgers are such extreme "hard sell" pitchmen, I would suggest that the numbers cited in this video are possibly exaggerated. But even if they are accurate, it's important to put the claims that they are making into the context of world poverty and the other means that people have developed to deal with it.

Take a look at the following graph which I've got from Wikipedia but originally comes from Our World in Data.

That's a significant decline in the world's most poor people between 1990 and 2015, that's from 1.9 billion to 730 million, or, from 36% to 9.9% (don't forget that the world's population has dramatically increased over the same period of time---which influences the percentages). 

I'm not about to do any more than hazard a couple guesses about why there has been such a huge decline in the worst of the world's poverty during my lifetime, so take what follows for what it's worth. I think most orthodox economists would say that this has come about because of significant economic growth in many third world nations (think about China, Korea, India, Brazil, etc). A lot of that would be driven by dramatic increases in trade between nations as more and more trade deals have been signed around the world. Personally, I'd also like to point out that this trend began shortly after the old colonial empires fell apart after the end of World War II. Of course, technological progress is probably very important too.

I'm not trying to make any ultimate statement about the nature of poverty or the future of the world economy other than just to point out that world poverty is an absolutely immense problem and ending it is very complex. The Kielburger brothers and WE charity's efforts are effectively dwarfed by the effects of government policy---such as free trade deals. This means that if you really want to have a big impact on poverty you need to get involved in politics or some sort of specific "choke point" where a relatively small amount of money can have an out-sized impact. (For example, the Bill and Melinda Gate's Foundation's attempt to eradicate Malaria.)  General welfare programs aimed at small villages of people, in contrast, are like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.  

What they are, however, are very easy to explain to people and extremely inoffensive. There's nothing about the Kielburger approach to poverty that is going to offend teachers, parents, or, corporate interests. And it isn't going to bore youngsters who don't want to wade through complex issues like economics, trade deals, and so on. In a sense, this is a case of the "street light effect".  That's when people mistakenly choose a solution not for it's intrinsic efficacy but because of the ease with which it can be done.

This is an ancient "Mutt and Jeff" cartoon based on the street light effect.
I am assuming that it is public domain because of it's extreme age.

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Moreover I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!