Simon Jenkins

GWWC: Birmingham Launch

This blog post is going to be a kind of summary of the recent and very exciting launch event for Giving What We Can: Birmingham. Summaries are rarely exciting, and I would have said “review” but I can’t really review an event that I had a hand in organising without being accused of bias. So, rather than trying to be guarded against bias by carefully selecting a spread of positive and negative things to say about the event, I’m just going to wholeheartedly embrace my bias and go on and on about how great the launch was. As well as being an opportunity to blow my own trumpet, this blog post might provide some useful tips for anyone else looking to launch a Giving What We Can chapter or similar event (though saying that might just be blowing my own trumpet too).

The launch was quite a long time in the making. The first step and the thing that really got the ball rolling was contacting potential speakers to give lectures at the event. I had prepared a sizeable list of potential speakers, and my plan was to start from the top and work my way down. As it turned out I didn’t have to move down the list very much at all and I was pleasantly surprised by how willing and able everybody was to help. The first thing that speakers usually want to know is “when is this going to be?” and so contacting the speakers provided the impetus needed to fix a date for the launch. This, then, was a point to work towards. A 

. And it got things working a lot faster.

After this I spent many evenings staying late (later than usual anyway) in the office making all kinds of arrangements for the event. Professor Larry Temkin, one of our speakers, and I sent each other thousands of emails discussing travel arrangements, hotel ideas, timings and all the rest of it. I think I’m probably now qualified to work as some kind of travel rep, but as I’m committed to not being an evil person, that isn’t the life for me (1). Prof Temkin even asked me about must-see sights in Birmingham. I think my response was something to do with curry.

After months of organising (obviously I was kind of doing other things too) the event finally loomed upon me, and on the day of the launch I was still desperately scrabbling around trying to get Skype installed in the room that we’d be using. Peter Singer was due to give his talk over Skype, and so obviously without Skype, this would have been deeply difficult to achieve. Fortunately some of the excellent people at Global Ethics and Political Science (departments here at the university who also helped greatly by funding the Birmingham leg of Larry Temkin’s European trip) came to the rescue and we got Skype set up, literally just a few minutes before Prof Singer was due to be live on the air, beamed into the room onto the screen of a laptop with a microphone pointed at the tinny laptop speakers. It was clumsy and lo-fi, and those with questions at the end had to come up to the front of the room and talk into the laptop like some bizarre audition, but it all worked pretty well.

But that is a digression into a technical headache. Let me put some meat on the bones by telling you about the talks themselves. The content was of course of a very high quality, as to be expected with three eminent profs in the room (three if you count Peter Singer’s virtual presence anyway). Larry Temkin (Rutgers University) gave a talk that was enviable in the elegance of both its construction and delivery, talking directly to the “but I’m a poor student and can’t do anything” response to charitable giving by illuminating the multitudinous ways in which people waste their money, but with a warmth and honesty (admitting that he himself has two fondue pots) that stopped it from being preachy. Peter Singer (Princeton University) used his time-honoured thought experiment of the child drowning in a shallow pond, and the idea that some in the room might have been hearing this example for the first time was as inspiring as watching a child being born. Finally, Alan Fenwick (director of Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, one of Giving What We Can’s top recommended charities) gave a talk that was both moving and visceral, not shying away from graphic detail (and video clips) of the horrors of the neglected tropical diseases that his organisation fights.

So there we have it. Giving What We Can: Birmingham has launched, and you can even watch a video of the launch event 

. Thanks to everyone for their help (there isn’t room but you know who you are) and I’ll see you at the philanthropy games next week, which I may as well shamelessly plug here: it’s a debate about where to allocate a real sum of money. Room G41, 90 Vincent Drive, University of Birmingham (Edgbaston Campus), Wednesday November 7th, 5.30-7.30pm. No prior skills/knowledge required, and for every person that comes, an extra £10 will be donated!

(1) DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT THINK ALL TRAVEL REPS ARE EVIL

Chuggers

This blog post is going to serve as something of a pep talk for charitably-minded people. But first, a story (of sorts).

I used to work as a charity fundraiser. When I say that, people usually imagine those guys you get in the street - "charity muggers", or "chuggers" as I've heard them called. Before I tell you what kind of fundraiser I actually was, I'd like to pick apart this delightful little moniker.

I appreciate the similarities. You get collared on the street by someone you weren't expecting to see, who ends up making you part with money that you ordinarily wouldn't part with. In a way, they're doing it for their own benefit - they get paid to do it, and sometimes they get commission based on how many people they sign up, too. So in that sense, too, they share a similarity with a mugger.

One difference that you might point to is the apparent weakness of will that must give rise to the suggestion that a person who ends up writing out his sort code and account number is somehow "mugged" into doing so. A mugger, typically, has some kind of threat on his side, to the tune of (and I was genuinely asked this once) 'do you want to be shanked*?' (my reply was 'no' - what else can you say?). Without this threat, your surrendering your bank details isn't a mugging - it's just you not being able to say "no".

I don't quite accept this line of argument, though. A charity fundraiser 

 have a kind of threat on his side. Fundraisers are trained not to use language quite as direct as this, but there is always an underlying hint that "if you don't give us some money, something bad will happen" (it's usually framed as "if you do give us some money, we can prevent something bad from happening"). That sounds quite threatening. There are, however, two important differences between the fundraiser's threat and that of the actual mugger. The first is that the fundraiser's threat isn't about you. The threat is that something bad will happen 

. Sure, if you don't act in a certain way, you might feel bad, go home and feel guilty, and so on. You might even kick the cat. In this way, the threat is 

 shared by you - it becomes "something bad will happen 

". But still, the reason you feel guilty is because something bad is happening to someone else. This, I think, is quite distinct from the rather direct threat of "give me money or I will shank you" offered by the mugger.

The second distinction is that the fundraiser, though they may be preaching about the threat, is not the one who is actually going to perpetrate the bad thing. They do not stand on street corners with kittens, threatening to shoot them unless someone gives them money. They are seeking funding for projects to avert badness, rather than considering the possibility of increasing the badness in the world but with a willingness to refrain if paid off.

The reason for this diatribe about the difference between muggers and "chuggers" is to make a wider point about the status of those who try to do good. While my last blog post bemoaned the fact that global suffering has become a cliché, the purpose of this one is to carp about the fact that those individuals who try to alleviate that suffering are criticised for doing so. The state of society needs some serious revision if it comes to be that the phrase "do-gooder" is a pejorative one. "Ergh, get a load of that guy - he wants to 

My overall message, then, to Giving What We Can members and charitable, altruistic people of any stripe, is not to feel downtrodden or browbeaten by those who would ridicule your efforts. Doing good is good, and I don't think this requires much argument. By the same token, doing the most good is the best thing to do. (I am in fact surprised (and a little disappointed) that my spellchecker did not attempt to correct "most good" to "best".) So, the overall moral of this story is not to feel bad about doing good - the incongruity of feeling that way should be obvious.

Oh, and I was a telephone fundraiser, but it doesn't really matter for this story.

**"Street" in this context is an adjective meaning "streetwise", for those of you who aren't as- oh, never mind.

Simon Jenkins

Articles

GWWC: Birmingham Launch

Chuggers