Results tagged “advice” from Uncivil Society
Women's Wear Daily had an interesting sidebar yesterday re an emerging controversy over Madonna's charity, Raising Malawi. Here's the story, followed some facts that I've dug up that suggest there might have been a better way to handle this:
On Wednesday, foxnews.com claimed the singer "has conned both UNICEF USA and Gucci into helping her raise money for the Kabbalah Centre and Madonna's patron gurus, the Berg family." The article claimed Madonna's charity, Raising Malawi, is a front for the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, and thus implied that Gucci's Feb. 6 benefit to aid UNICEF and Raising Malawi, which Madonna cohosts, ultimately benefits the Kabbalah Centre.
"I think that the claims in the story are outrageous, they are incorrect, inaccurate, hurtful and malicious," Liz Rosenberg, Madonna's publicist, told WWD. "The reality is — and it's never been a secret — that the Raising Malawi organization was cofounded by Madonna and Michael Berg, who is one of the spearheading executives of the Kabbalah organization. The Raising Malawi organization is completely separate from the Kabbalah, and they are run as two separate organizations."
The foxnews.com report also suggested Raising Malawi had plans to indoctrinate "unsuspecting Malawi orphans into their brand of mysticism," having flown in teachers from Malawi to Los Angeles to "retrofit them for Kabbalah."
"There are no religious lessons being taught to the children of Malawi," Rosenberg said of those claims. "It's tragic, because Madonna has put her passion and love and money behind a project that is saving children's lives, giving them food, health care and schooling. The money that is being raised at the Gucci benefit is being divided between UNICEF and Raising Malawi."
She added that the funds raised that night are earmarked for the building of a girls' school in Malawi. "There is a board, where accountability will be very clear and very specific, and all funds will be accounted for," Rosenberg said.
Gucci, too, issued a statement refuting the claims: "The accusations are not true. By agreement with Raising Malawi, the gifts and donations dedicated to Raising Malawi from this event will go directly to Raising Malawi, which is a legally distinct entity from the Kabbalah Centre or from any religious organization. Proceeds from this event are specifically allocated to support programs for orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS, including the building of a girls' academy in Malawi."
Sounds pretty straightforward, no?
Yet there remains, pardon the pun, a loose thread that could give rise to further accusations that Raising Malawi is not being forthright with the facts. Go to the Raising Malawi site and you'll find a reference to the charity's partnership with Spirituality for Kids, an organization dedicated to providing children with the "spiritual tools" that will help them find "true spirituality." A quick trip over to Guidestar reveals that the president of SFK is Karen Berg, co-founder of the Kabbalah Centre and Michael Berg's wife.
Is any of this in violation of the law? Is it weird or underhanded or cultish? No, not at all. Having a religious motive, working with a religious organization and partnering with one's spouse in a charitable endeavor are not illegal in the least.
But that's not how the PR teams responded. Instead, they disclaimed any and all connection between Madonna's charity and religious instruction--an assertion that Raising Malawi's own website undercuts.
How should the charity have responded? More below:
I thought that I'd spend tonight summing up what I said about social enterprise over the past few days, but instead I've spent my time back home absorbed in the unfolding Givewell controversy. The situation in a nutshell: after a high-profile publicity blitzkrieg touting Givewell as a revolution in charitable transparency and accountability, its founder was caught using false identities--i.e., sock puppets--to promote Givewell and to criticize other groups, including its main competitors. Ground zero for the scandal: this thread on MetaFilter.
The founder, Holden Karnofsky, has already admitted that what he did was wrong, and if all this story involved was a guy copping to sock puppetry I probably would have stopped reading the myriad blog posts and comments hours ago. What has made this incident particularly compelling for me has been the response of professionals in the charity community. I'll probably come back to this story later for a big-picture look, but for now, a few quick lessons:
- Doing good ain't hula hoops. To be blunt, Givewell director Lucy Bernholz' evident lack of familiarity with MetaFilter, the reputational dynamics of its online community and the ethics of sock puppetry and astroturfing make all the 2.0 lingo on Philanthropy 2173 seem little more than superficial trendhopping. Defending her tech savvy by saying that she uses Facebook does not help. The danger here goes way beyond technology: so-called nonprofit experts have a dismal track record of, to quote Bernholz's slogan, "remixing" their advice to fit the latest fads. Russia is an authoritarian country today in large part due to well-meaning but ignorant promoters of civil society; do we really want to base the future of philanthropy on a knack for Scrabulous?
- Don't attack the character of whistleblowers before you've checked out their claims. The same goes for the transparent technique of admit-the-confirmed-mistake-but--raise-oh-so-noble-questions-about-the-whistleblower. Not only is this likely to make you & your organization look even worse, as strategies they're ethically dubious at best--these responses are just a short jump away from the behavior seen in, say, Enron, the Catholic Church pedophilia cover-up and retaliation against reports of sexual harassment at Madison Square Garden. One of the persistent themes in scholarship on organizational dysfunction is the hidden danger of collective identity. The innate tendency to favor our own against others is not inherently benign; the same social glue that fosters loyalty can lead to violence and other forms of moral nihilism.
- Never forget that charities sell trust. Transparently trying to bribe online accusers with a "donation"--don't do this. An imprecise answer to a specific question won't silence your critics, nor will lame excuses. The occasional mistake is to be expected, even encouraged--after all, you can't break new ground without taking a risk. However, a sustained documentable pattern of lies and attacks followed by partial disclosure and defensive responses? If the folks at Givewell were trying to provide a case study of inflammatory and ineffective damage control, they succeeded. No matter how many times management may tout their ongoing commitment to corporate governance, they're toast.
- Which leads to the next point: karma's a bitch. While I agree in principle with the sacred virtue of forgiveness, Givewell is in a somewhat different position from your average sinner. Holden flew out of the gate loudly proclaiming his ethical superiority and judging other charities for not living up to his standards. His getting busted for fraud is a secular analog to discovering that Ted Haggard had gay sex or Jim Bakker covered up an affair. The issue isn't just a mistake--it's hypocrisy. If we're going to look to the Bible as our moral guide, perhaps a more relevant passage might be Matthew 7:3--"Why do you focus on the splinter in your brother's eye but ignore the log in your own?"
- In short, it all comes down to a lesson that we haven't seemed to learn from the earliest days of Greek drama: beware of hubris. Oedipus Rex was not about sex; it's a story about how pride can blind us to becoming what we despise. And as Plato observed in The Defense of Socrates, to confuse knowledge of one thing with a knowledge of everything is a systemic problem with specialized expertise. Still here we are, twenty-five-hundred years later, glibly proclaiming that a bit of experience with PR, tech or hedge funds makes one a master of the charitable universe. The only thing different about Givewell's hubris 2.0 is that instead taking a lifetime, Oedipus fell in a day.
Craig Weinrich of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York left a comment below with some useful resources. So no one misses it, here it is, with links:
NPCC usually gets about a dozen calls a week on starting a nonprofit, and although we do not assist in this area, aside from the checklist, we refer people onto Community Resource Exchange (www.crenyc.org) who have a fantastic book called "From Vision to Reality" as well as workshops and consultants to help. Additionally, we refer people to both Lawyers Alliance for New York (www.lawyersalliance.org) and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (www.nylpi.org) for legal assistance.
Or "Dahran," as it's called in the latest issue, which has Thor's alter ego, Dr. Don Blake, working there on a humanitarian mission with Medicins san Frontieres. The story makes a point that any number of us in the do-gooder community would do well to learn: while outside assistance can be useful, for change to be sustainable it must come from within.
- Does your venture offer value-added beyond what other groups are already providing? Â For example, is it solving an unsolved problem, offering a better solution, working in a different geographical area or helping people yet unserved?Â
- Is there an existing organization you can join and perhaps improve?
- Are there identifiable funders likely to support your effort over the long term? Â Or, if you're selling goods or services, is there truly a sufficient market to support an organization that is financially self-sustaining organization or financed through a blend of earned revenue and grants?
Remember, people, campus-speak is not normal.
Yale Vice President for Development Inge Reichenbach said the dispute provides an important lesson for all universities accepting restricted gifts.
“The Princeton situation highlights the need for all institutions accepting gifts from donors to carefully determine the expectations of the donor and the institution’s ability to fulfill them, not just in the short term, but also longer term,†she said in an e-mail.
It is important for universities to inform the donor how his donation is spent, Reichenbach said. Such a step, she said, can help prevent misunderstandings from growing into significant disputes.
When accepting a restricted gift, Yale always considers whether or not it can sustain the gift’s original purpose over time, Reichenbach said. While creating an agreement for a restricted gift, she said Yale’s donors are asked how they would like their funds to be used if the needs for the money evolve over time.
Yale has taken special precautions to prevent disagreements with donors, Reichenbach said. After a dispute during the 1990s with billionaire donor Lee Bass ’79, University President Richard Levin established the “Gift Stewardship Committee,†which regularly compares the stipulations of a restricted gift with the way it is actually being used.
Fortunately for you, Carl Alviani over at Coroflot's CreativeSeeds has done a bang-up job on the subject in his recent post on (1st year job) = (last year school). His recommendations are excellent, and not just for young graphic designers. Be sure to read the whole post; here are a few of my thoughts on some of the key points
- "Be humble"--this is important especially if you know, just know that you're better than everyone in the joint. Humility doesn't just open you up to learning new things; it also generates trust, which makes people more open to accepting your brilliant ideas.
- "Make friends with people who know how to do things you don't." Again not just for knowledge, but for connections. People love to feel smart, needed, helpful, appreciated for being who they are--you can leverage this to build a network of patrons committed to your success.
- Learn the business/technical side: The more you know these pesky details, the more you can make them work for you.
- Go to events, with business cards: And not just conferences and business meetings. New York is full of parties. Clueless people think they're a place to get drunk and score. (Helpful hint: don't be Aquagirl.) But the tao of parties is that people create a zone outside of business so they can connect in an environment beyond mere exchange . . . which in turn builds the trust and connections from which business opportunities emerge.
- "Understand that you'll probably be working somewhere else in five years." Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan wrote that in the electric age the permanent job is dead; people will change jobs five times in their lifetime. He was right and wrong--jobs are fluid, but often more like five times a decade. That's OK--it's the new normal. Focus on having roles to play, and you'll naturally flow through any number of different opportunities.
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