thoughts in my head: not all nonprofits are made equal.

As my hiatus from my 30 Day Photo Challenge persists a little longer, I’ve been prompted with some tough questions and wonderful inspiration concerning the actual “work” I will be doing in Uganda this summer. And all of these questions find their root in the same idea: not all nonprofits were made equal.

My dear friend and mentor Thera wrote an incredible blog post today about a counter-movement to the One Day Without Shoes event called One Day Without Dignity. I highly encourage you to read it!

In her post she explains her qualms with the One Day Without Shoes event; mainly, that one-time drop-off gifts of charity (like shoes, clothing, or school supplies) are bad aid. The one-time hand out harms the local economy by making free what many local artisans, merchants, and businesspeople work very hard to make and depend on sales for their livelihood. It undermines much of local culture and also embodies a lot of really inconsiderate Western presumptions.

While many one-time gifts are made with the absolute best of intentions they more often than not cause strife and dependency among people who are perfectly capable of being resourceful in their own right. Thus her (and my) qualm with One Day Without Shoes: TOMS is a for-profit company. Thus, the Day Without Dignity campaign was launched by members of various NGOs around the world to talk about what makes a good NON-profit. 

However, after poking around on TOMS' website a little more, I did learn that they are more invested in the communities they do "shoe drops" in that I originally realized.There are 5 facets to the TOMS campaign that make their program more sustainable then others, and they are (in their own words from their website): 

1. Giving Partners must be able to repeat giving shoes as the children grow.

2. Shoes must aid their giving partner's existing goals for the health and education for children who otherwise would not have this opportunity.

3. Providing shoes may not have a negative impact on the local economy.

4. Giving Partners must be able to receive large shipments of shoes.

5. Giving Partners can only give shoes in conjunction with health and education efforts.  

So, yes, TOMS is a for-profit company. But they are making an enormous effort to be a sustainable, good influence where they "drop" shoes, which I immensely respect. 

This brings me to my second prompt of inspiration, Hank Green’s three-part vlog about his trip to Haiti with water.org. Again, I warmly recommend you to watch all three of these videos. His third has yet to be released but, based on what he said in the second vlog, I’m going to wager a guess about what it will concern: what makes water.org such a wonderful nonprofit.

In his words, water.org functions on a “new model of charity” in which the recipients of aid are encouraged to be independent, rather than dependent, concerning their need. This is because water.org, which essentially builds wells in communities in need of clean water (something mentioned as a pretty explicit need in Thera’s marvelous blog post), works incredibly hard to make sure that within the community where the new well is built there is an infrastructure of sustainability in place both ecologically and socially within the community.

No charity or non-profit is perfect, because nothing is. But it is important for me as a volunteer and as a donor to be aware and conscientious of which charities and partnership organizations I choose to support. This is because I absolutely believe hand-outs are not the stuff of real change in communities of need.

This lesson I learned in an extremely visceral and hard manner, which I want to share with you if only so that I can explain from my own experiences why I know for my own that hand-out charities are not good.

When I was in Uganda when I was fourteen, my mother and I brought with us some gently used toys my brothers and I no longer wanted with the express intention of sharing them with the children of the communities we would visit. We had the absolute best of intentions, believe me. In my world, I treasured my toys growing up. They were a vessel by which my imagined stories became real. But I was fourteen and knew only my own world of growing up in the privileged USA.

It was a few days into the trip when the group was climbing off the bus in Gulu, Northern Uganda. A cluster of children had gathered around to watch and seeing them, my mom and I decided to give them some of the toys we’d brought.

This decision is one I think I will always regret and feel guilty for. The children started fighting for the toys and suddenly the bag was ripped from our hands as the oldest kids pushed the younger ones out of the way to take as many as possible. It was horrible to watch and I had no idea what to do.

They were just kids living in a really tough world, and I had wanted to share with them something that had brought me joy as a little one. But I did not think that hand outs mostly go to those who can get them, not necessarily those who have more need. I had made a lot of presumptions in my own saintly-ness for parting with these toys and in my eagerness I did not stop and think about how best to give the toys to those who needed them most. And these were just toys, not even food or water or clothing.

Yes, I was young and yes, I really didn’t know any better. If I had been older and wiser I would have asked the leaders of a community in varying capacities about who in their town had children with some serious need. I would have then asked them to discretely deliver the toys, or, better yet, I would have given the toys to an organization with a long-term relationship with a community that perhaps had serious needs already satisfied, so toys would have been a nice treat for ill children.

Water.org is by no means the first or only organization to figure out how the best of intentions can wring the worst of outcomes. There’s a little saying my mother always told me “If you give someone a fish, you’ve fed them for a meal- but if you teach someone to fish, you’ve fed them for a lifetime. However, they must be willing to learn how to fish.”

This is a model that has existed for a long, long time. But when charities send out shoes at the first sign of bare feet without first asking if these shoes are wanted, needed, or going to go to the right place that promotes giving fish and not the willingness to learn or the ability to fish. Yes, that’s a gross overstatement and by no means am I saying people who have received TOMS shoes don’t have innovation or a desire to learn or grow, nor am I calling TOMS a terrible company with the worst of intentions. I am saying that the model of the "charity" needs to progress, quickly, into a model of partnership. I am saying we need to recognize TOMS is a for-profit company with some really wonderful intentions to promote positive growth.

Obviously I like TOMS, having participated in the One Day Without Shoes event and owning two pair. So call me a hypocrite. Or, call me an educated consumer.

I love my TOMS because they’re cute and comfy shoes and both pairs were loving gifts by my Aunt and Uncle and father, respectively. I treasure them because, as I might have mentioned, I’m damn lucky to have as many shoes and love in my life as I do. And I like that they are trying, as a company for profit, to use their profit for providing shoes. But I also support fully organizations like MCC, water.org, and Habitat for Humanity that were created to make lasting and educated change.

And now, for the third source difficult inspiration for this post: a dinner conversation. Last night at a lovely, lovely dinner in Cape Cod (a post on that to come) a friend of my friend’s asked me what I was doing this summer. When I replied with my plans to live in Uganda for two and a half months, she asked a little sharply “Is this a Bible thing?”

And in that question flooded a thousand thoughts. My anger at groups that function not only as hand-outs, but self-congratulating hand-out charities that do so in the name of a religion. My further frustration that I, who identify as a Christian but one who also reads the Upanishads of Hinduism and the writings of the Buddha and would die for the acceptance of people of all sexual orientations and believes in the validity of all faiths, am immediately judged to be someone who also promotes such convert-the-heathens-with-self-loving-grins charity. And perhaps most of the internal dilemma of what in heaven, hell, and earth I am going to do with this inescapable call to Africa in “the real world.”

So I picked the more tangible reply with “Well, sort of. I’m working with the Diocese of the Church of Uganda, but it’s not a convert-the-heathens deal.” I went on to explain that I want to live my life as a servant and a learner, that I am a pilgrim going home and it’s a complicated growing-up thing, and that above all I am going to LEARN and not to teach.

What do I know, anyway?

I can recite passages from Harry Potter. I know more about women’s aviation history than anyone in their right mind should. But the real stuff? I’m wandering in a big forest of knowledge and desperately trying to take every second in and praying to God I do something with my life that will make my Mom and Dad proud. I want to love and learn as much as possible. And God knows that’s enough for me right now.

So that’s why I am going to Uganda, and that’s why I think we all need to carefully think about what change we want to promote. I love my TOMS, I loved participating in the One Day event, and that doesn’t change. We’re all broken, and I think most of us just want to make the world a little happier each day, self-congratulating hand-out charities included. Let’s take these good intentions, though, and apply them in a model of non-profits that functions as a partnership, not a charity. Yeah, it’s going to be a whole lot harder. But change is hard. 


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current jam: tchaikovsky's serenade for strings
best thing in my life right now: SPRINGTIME!
days until departure: 55

The 30 Day Photo Challenge: Day 12, One Day Without Shoes Edition

Day 12: A Picture of Your Feet

    

Today’s prompt was picked with a very particular reasoning in mind; today, April 5, 2011, is the One Day Without Shoes event sponsored by TOMS Shoes. On this day across the globe people are taking one day, as they are able, to go about their lives while taking a stance against poverty. We are doing this by spending one day without shoes, socks, or any kind of protective footwear.

This is my first year participating fully, because it’s the first year I wouldn’t be breaking any school rules by going barefoot whilst carrying out my daily routine. I’m writing this post around 1:00 PM, which means I have now spent about 6 ½ hours sans sneakers. Let me tell you, friends, I am learning a whole lot.

While to some degree I do think this day is a tool by which TOMS Shoes can get super-prime advertising, the movement itself is something I think worthy of consideration and participation (obviously). It has already challenged me physically and mentally to remember how blessed and fortunate I am that, at the end of today, I will go home to a closet full of shoes, socks, and band-aids for the blisters. In many ways today’s events remind me of the other day-long movement I try to partake in every year: Day of Silence.

The Day of Silence as an act is pretty self-explanatory: on one pre-assigned day every year we are asked, as we are able, to take one day to remain silent. This act is to protest anti-LGBTQ bullying and harrasment across the United States and to remember the gift it is to be able to use our voices, and to be heard. On this event every year, I always endure people saying to me “but you know, I don’t think being silent on an issue makes a difference. I didn’t notice you being quiet,” to which I always want to reply “Well one, yes you did notice, because you’re telling me why you don’t like this day; and two, this is also an internal process. For me, it is more a reminder to use my voice whenever possible because I can without threat but also to take time to reflect on how best I can vocalize my beliefs in an empowering manner without sounding condescending.”

However, whatever attention Day of Silence does or does not receive, going one day without shoes had certainly garnered some attention.

This morning, as I packed my backpack for the day and headed out the door to brave the weather barefoot I contemplated what sort of reactions I would have. Quite literally the moment I stepped outside I knew. The women I passed all had a mix of reactions; some did not notice, some glared, but most looked at my feet and then avoided all eye contact (of the people whom I did not know).

Perhaps they thought I was so preoccupied with my thoughts that I forgot to put on shoes (Einstein was famous for this, you know[1]). Others might have presumed I was communing with the linoleum to speak to the earth, which, considering how common it is to see women wearing capes on this campus, is not a wholly unjustified supposition. Maybe some knew about the event. Maybe they just thought I was weird.

Whatever they thought, most would look at me questioningly without actually asking where on God’s green earth I had left my footwear. And trust me on this one, friends, but when I stepped outside to walk to class this morning I asked myself the same question.

Because there has been torrential rain pouring down all day long. So not only was I shoe-less walking on the painful pavement to class, I was shoe-less on the painful FREEZING COLD pavement. I’m still getting feeling back in my toes.

And this made me think about how we perceive poverty.

Poverty is not wholly naked pot-bellied children in refugee camps, as so many National Geographic cover stories would have us believe. Yes, that is real. I’ve seen it; I’ve been to Pabo and Gulu, Northern Uganda. I will be living there this summer. But the nakedness, the hunger is not all that these children- or peoples, or nations- are. Dually, poverty is not restrained continentally or culturally.

There is poverty right here, right now in America. Mere miles away from my Ivory Tower is Holyoke, MA, the heroin center of the USA. Subsequently, it is one of the most destitute and dangerous places in the country. In my hometown there was an ever-increasing homeless population.

When I am still the subject of many a grossed out glare that quickly shifs to avoid eye contact, I am learning so much from them. This morning, for one split second, I think I understood what it means to be so shunned as a homeless or impoverished member of a community. To have been reduced to begging for money, while we walk past muttering how the homeless should get a job, disregarding their circumstances that led them to this point.

The difference is for me this lasted one tiny second whilst I was piling my plate with toast to eat in a building I call home. That difference is the distinction of worlds, realities. 

There are marvelous people in the world fighting to end homelessness; I have friends who organized bi-weekly trips to the soup kitchen to cook for those in our town who needed a meal; my family has gone on Habitat for Humanity builds; the list is ever-growing. Those are commendable and important jobs.

But how do we rethink poverty? Where do we begin to realize it can exist in the littlest of things, the basic necessities like food and clothing and shelter and love.

After all, there are all kinds of poverty. Poverty of the soul, to me, is far worse than poverty of the material

But do we not need the material to survive? To eat, to sleep, to carry onward?

When I was wrangling over nonviolence for my Religion paper a few weeks ago I read and re-read Chapter 10 from the Gosepl of Matthew, taken from the Christian Testament.

26 “So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.^[b^] 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (TNIV)

A theme that has persisted in this class has been the idea of the body being separate from the soul. In this passage, Christ makes it pretty plain that Christians should “not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” which makes plain the distinction between the two entities. Yet the body is obviously of consequence, for “the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” In this vein, the body is sacred but second to the soul, but in order to achieve freedom (in whatever religious definition of Nirvana, heaven, rebirth…) humanity is called upon to endure torture to raise conscious thought of the persecutors.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then, they will have my dead body. Not my obedience.” Again, even in another religious (but equally valid) context, the soul is prized higher than the physical realm. It is through the suffering of the body in the face of oppression, however, that freedom is found.

Which is why what is done to our bodies matters, and why today- a day spent without shoes, has been so important to me.

Because at the end of the day (though it is not yet over, believe you me) this movement is not about how much the cold rain hurt my feet, or how many weird looks I got. It is, like Day of Silence, about an internal reflection on poverty of soul and material. My feet have carried me to Africa twice, and I will be there again this summer. They still ache and kind of burn from the cold water and pavement I sloshed through today, but tomorrow when I wear shoes I will be all the more appreciative.

One of my favorite quotes from the civil rights movement is from a woman by the name of Sister Pollard, who was in her 70s in 1955. While walking to work amidst the 13-month-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, a reporter asked her if she was exhausted or ready to ride in a vehicle once more.

Her reply: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

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[1] Because obviously, I’m a physics wizard and therefore should be compared to Einstein. 

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current jam: "aeroplane over the sea" neutral milk hotel

best thing in my life right now: being admitted to the 341 seminar i wanted next semester!

days until departure: 61