Hope, Inc.

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/07/2020 (1609 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If there was one thing that, at least for a time, the WE Charity did very well, it was to sell hope. The message, told and packaged in a multitude of ways, was that everyone can change the world, and there’s an irresistible allure to that promise. It’s a beautiful beacon, especially when so much feels helpless.

So, on the back of that hope, the organization that brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger founded in 1995, when they were just teens, grew into a massive organization that included everything from education programs for schools to brand partnerships (“products that change lives”) and on-the-ground international development work.

Of all of these efforts, the most famous was WE Day, a series of concert-like extravaganzas held in arenas, designed to whip up youth engagement in global citizenship. The events were eye-popping, sponsored by big corporations and attended by thousands of students: “the Super Bowl of doing good,” the Kielburgers once called them.

The brand was sparkling. At WE Days, students listened to superstar speakers such as Prince Harry, activist and Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai and, in Canada, several Trudeaus.

In promotional videos, bright-eyed youth cheered, wiped tears from their cheeks and gushed about how WE Day had changed their lives. No doubt, for many, it did. There is a power in hope, and even more when it is celebrated together.

But the full story, as we now know, is not that simple. This summer, after WE was awarded a contract to administer a $912-million federal student grant program, long-simmering questions about its practices exploded into the full glare of public view, in part due to the charity’s ties with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau.

In early July, as the federal ethics commissioner launched an investigation, WE and the federal government agreed to cancel the contract. Days later, as scrutiny over its practices mounted, the charity announced a slew of sweeping changes, pledging to cancel WE Days, restructure and “return to its roots” of international development work.

The WE story is difficult to penetrate, in no small part because its organizational structure is so confusing. Reporters looking into the “WE Movement,” as the Kielburgers call the entire operation, have to pick the threads apart carefully, which makes it challenging for readers to follow along where each one leads.

There’s the primary non-profit, WE Charity. There’s a for-profit business, ME to WE, which sells sustainably-made goods and volunteer trips overseas, and which ostensibly exists to channel some of its profits back into the charity. There is also a separate non-profit with few assets, the WE Charity Foundation.

In and around this, the WE Movement also includes significant real-estate holdings and various brands and entities in the U.S. and Canada. The organization has stated the boundaries between them are clear, but in the public eye, lines are often blurred; the federal student grant contract, for instance, was actually signed with the foundation.

There is still much that isn’t clear about this story and the public debate, perhaps unsurprisingly, has rapidly become entrenched along political lines. Journalists digging into the story and opposition politicians pushing for answers have been accused of wantonly destroying a wonderful non-profit just to get at the prime minister.

No doubt, politicians have political motives; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t follow the smoke to understand the scope of the fire. When nearly $1 billion of federal money is entrusted to an organization with close ties to Liberal leadership and question marks around its operations, it’s healthy for that to be scrutinized.

But there’s another part of this story that ought to be explored, and it goes beyond the WE Movement itself. It is also time to consider the social and cultural factors around the entity’s rise. The ones that allowed it to turn a mission into a brand, make minor celebrities of its founders and become so closely linked with the powers that be.

Or, perhaps, it is time to discuss how the idea of charity itself is used to sell hope, and what that can conceal.

This is a hard topic to approach on a broad scale. The public, understandably, tends to be forgiving of charity work, at least unless and until willful wrongdoing is conclusively proven. The intent to do good, even if it is professed more than practised, becomes a comforting cloak under which a lot of problems can hide.

To take one example, consider the practice of “voluntourism,” in which folks from wealthy nations pay to travel to developing countries to undertake basic labour, such as building a school. (ME to WE sold these trips to its work sites, in countries including Ecuador and Kenya, where it touted a chance to meet Maasai warriors.)

The issue there is that developing countries do not lack for labour; what they lack are jobs, often as a result of global economic structure that sucks resources out of poor communities to benefit wealthy ones. In most cases, the money spent on airfare would be better spent on fair wages for local residents to build needed infrastructure themselves.

But there again comes a complication, which is that charity cannot replace functional public systems. That’s a much more difficult thing to build, and one that cannot be established by moonlighting visitors; there have been reports of school buildings built by volunteers that then languish for lack of money in a community to pay teachers.

That’s just one example; there are others. Often, a common thread between those practices hinges on how wealthy countries perceive the developing world, a perception that is inextricably linked to race and power: one is in need of being saved, the other the saviour. The question of why injustice persists is allowed to fade from view.

In this light, the corporatization of charity, which the WE Movement increasingly courted as it grew, is appealing; it confers the sense of doing good without the responsibility attendant in seeing it through. Corporations sponsored WE events because it gave them a direct line to youth; but that is marketing, not justice.

It’s easy to slap a charity brand on a package, but tackling the roots of global inequality is much harder to do.

None of this is to say that non-profit work doesn’t do good in the world. It does, and there are countless organizations, small and large, that do incredible work to build lives and hope. But in the scrutiny over the WE Movement, and some of its activities and connections, perhaps there is a larger lesson to take away.

To build hope is a beautiful thing, but we should be vigilant and ask questions when it’s being sold.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca