Charity Detox

What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

Robert D. Lupton

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780062307286
• eBook ISBN: 9780062307293
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry
• Index: Social Sciences

The veteran urban activist and author of the revolutionary Toxic Charity returns with a headline-making book that offers proven, results-oriented ideas for transforming our system of giving.

In Toxic Charity, Robert D. Lupton revealed the truth about modern charity programs meant to help the poor and disenfranchised. While charity makes donors feel better, he argued, it often hurts those it seeks to help. At the forefront of this burgeoning yet ineffective compassion industry are American churches, which spend billions on dependency-producing programs, including food pantries. But what would charity look like if we, instead, measured it by its ability to alleviate poverty and needs?

That is the question at the heart of Charity Detox. Drawing on his many decades of experience, Lupton outlines how to structure programs that actually improve the quality of life of the poor and disenfranchised. He introduces many strategies that are revolutionizing what we do with our charity dollars, and offers numerous examples of organizations that have successfully adopted these groundbreaking new models. Only by redirecting our strategies and becoming committed to results, he argues, can charity enterprises truly become as transformative as our ideals.

CHAPTER ONE

The Bad News About Good Works

CHARITY OFTEN HURTS THE PEOPLE it was designed to help. No, I am not a right-wing lobbyist or think-tank libertarian. I am an urban activist who has worked with poor people for over four decades. This fact, that most non-crisis-specific charity is harmful, serves as an indictment of the field I work in, and so it is with a heaviness of heart that I report this sad and surprising truth. In 2011, I wrote Toxic Charity to shine the light of real-life experience on the largely unexamined impacts of philanthropy and aid. It was not my intention to offend generous givers; nor did I want to discourage kindhearted volunteers. But it was high time, I felt, for someone to admit the truth about a highly popular practice that was yielding troubling unintended consequences. I wasn’t being unkind. I was just being honest. And I felt we should be doing much, much better than we were (and are currently) doing.

As a seasoned practitioner in community development work, I have witnessed firsthand how food, clothing, and money given to assist those in need more often than not produce unhealthy dependency and end up harming those the donation was intended to help. After four decades of living and serving among the poor—decades spent coordinating hundreds of volunteer service projects and watching well-intentioned volunteers do for my neighbors what my neighbors should be doing for themselves—I felt it was finally time to take the risk of going public with the dirty little secret that on-the-ground charity workers know all too well but are loath to admit. The hard reality is that it takes more than compassionate hearts and generous gifts to elevate people in need out of poverty. In fact, giving to people in need what they could be gaining from their own initiative may well be the kindest way to destroy them.

My 2011 exposé stirred up considerable controversy. People were surprised by my news. How could any reasonable person claim that charity does more harm than good? How could anyone argue that a hot meal and a clean bed are harmful to a hungry homeless man shivering in the cold? Or that a hot shower and a fresh change of clothes could be anything but beneficial to a woman who has been sleeping under a bridge? To even suggest such things, some people charged, was akin to suggesting that loving one’s neighbor is a bad idea. Some even accused me of sabotaging the noble—indeed, biblical—cause of caring for the poor.

While I was hoping to create a lively discussion by writing Toxic Charity, I didn’t write it to stir up controversy. More than ever, I stand behind the surprising truths I uncovered, not just during the writing of the book, but during my decades of work both with the poor and with charities and ministries that genuinely want to serve and make a difference in the lives of others. The fact is, we cannot serve others out of poverty, no matter how much we may want to. That is a core concept of both my mission and this book. And the reason I am so passionate about broadcasting this bad news about the status quo is that I care deeply about charity’s goals and results: I want to move people out of poverty. That is my life’s work.

My calling first led me to found Family Consultation Service (FCS), an Atlanta-based nonprofit focused on the needs of inner-city youth and families in the community I came to call home. Over time the mission of FCS expanded into transforming entire urban neighborhoods, and its name was changed to Focused Community Strategies to more accurately describe its work. My commitment to moving people out of poverty then took me farther afield as I became an active board member of Opportunity Nicaragua and applied the principles learned in the United States’ urban experience to a developing country.

The insights I have learned through this work—through project after project both here and abroad—are counterintuitive. The truths I have learned are counterintuitive. For example, I believe now, as I did when I wrote Toxic Charity, that the only effective charity is the kind that asks more from those being served, rather than less. Asking for more sends an affirming message to the recipient that he or she also has something of value to offer.

It’s easy to get discouraged about all the poverty in the world. After all, Christ himself said, “The poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11 and elsewhere). As a result, we may feel helpless in the face of trying to solve the problem of global destitution. But in this book, I will offer inspiring new avenues that are open to us for making true and lasting change, especially through the use of social enterprise. This exciting shift from the traditional dynamic of charitable giving is a powerful weapon in the war against poverty.

In other words, I don’t have only bad news to tell you. Many dedicated people who work among the poor are just as frustrated as I am with the non-results of our traditional methods. Many of them are pioneering new models of charity, ones that keep their eyes focused on what truly makes a difference. I will talk about these new models, and how we can support them, throughout this book. Following their lead is how we can best detox our toxic charity.

The work I have done in the past, and much of what I discuss in this book, concerns organizations that work with giving, but I will also outline how you, as an individual, can bring about meaningful change in the world and in the lives of others. This might take the form of teaching what you know about business to someone who can use this knowledge to better his or her life. Or it may mean being a good neighbor—organizing a crime watch, being active in the PTA, and helping transform your community for everyone who lives there. Or it could be as simple as using the criteria I develop in this book as a guide to what charities and ministries you support financially. All of us, however, need to detox our charities and learn new rules in order for the results to match our ideals.

The Doctor Will Kill You Now

IS HURTFUL CHARITY BETTER than no charity at all? The answer is no. Take an honest look at the outcomes of our benevolence—from the soup kitchen in inner-city Atlanta to the entire country of Haiti—and the answer becomes obvious. Despite our most charitable efforts, the world’s poor are not emerging from poverty. The poverty gap in the United States is increasing; and across the globe, in those lands where our aid is most concentrated, the poor are getting poorer.

I understand how disheartening it can be to discover that one’s sincere acts of caring harm the very ones we intended to help. The truth is disturbing, but if the poor are ever to emerge from poverty, we all have to face this truth, regardless of how it makes us feel.

As a sobering example of how entrenched wrong thinking can be, and why we need to work so hard in order to change our models, consider the eighteenth-century physician. Back then medical doctors were taught that the time-honored practice of bloodletting would help cure sick patients by removing bad or stagnant blood. Unchallenged for more than four thousand years, bloodletting was universally accepted as the most effective remedy for almost every disease. Although it seems archaic today, the prevailing theory before the circulatory system was fully understood was that blood could stagnate in the extremities. A buildup of bad blood was thought to cause all manner of maladies. The cure was to purge.

And everyone bought in. For eons. Ancient cultures like the Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, endorsed bloodletting as an effective treatment. As did Socrates and Plato. The Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, specified certain days for bloodletting, while early Christian writings offered advice on which saints’ days were most favorable for the practice. Bloodletting was prescribed for everything from cholera to cancer, tetanus to tuberculosis, gout to gangrene. The more blood, the better. In 1799, George Washington, suffering from a throat infection, requested that his physician drain four pints of blood. Not surprisingly, shortly after the procedure, Washington died.

Modern medical advances finally exposed as harmful this once-common practice. Young scientist Louis Pasteur discovered that it was germs, not bad blood, that caused disease. The revelation was a medical game-changer. Imagine the shock experienced by doctors who learned that their attempts to heal had actually harmed or even killed their patients. And yet this misguided model had persisted for four thousand years! That is the power of an entrenched paradigm.

And that is what we are up against when we try to change how we think about charity. Our very models of what it means to be and do good are wrapped up with images of food pantries, homeless shelters, and giveaway programs—despite the fact that no one can show that these efforts help people move out of poverty. Just as doctors did not want to hear that their treatment strategies were not just ineffective but detrimental, neither do charity workers or dedicated volunteers want to hear that their efforts have not only failed to do good but have actually harmed those they wanted to help.

Yes, we have been giving handouts to the poor for thousands of years, but that does not make it an effective strategy for moving people out of poverty—especially now that we have other, proven models that do work.

Recently, I explained the harm of toxic charity to a very active civic group. They had organized a large-scale gardening initiative to grow fresh produce, which they then gave to their city’s homeless. Though their work was rightly motivated, the initiative was fostering unhealthy dependency. I suggested that they “detoxify” their program by involving the recipients in the growing process—a proposal that was clearly unwelcome.

When I suggested that the positive feelings the civic group received from their participation was at the heart of their program, rather than its effectiveness in helping the homeless, I got this response from one of the coordinators: “This is a lot of work. I would have quit a long time ago if there weren’t so many hungry people. If I wanted to feel good, I’d be sitting on the beach with a book.” In his mind, the program simply had to be right—look how hard volunteers were working.

Resistance is an understandable reaction to new insights, especially when they call into question traditional methods of care. But resistance can also hinder the discovery of more effective ways to serve. Worse than resistance, however, is denial. Denial is failing to admit—to even consider—that a method of treatment may actually be causing harm.

Just Following God’s Orders

UNFORTUNATELY, ONE OF THE most powerful drivers of American compassion is one of its greatest abusers. American churches are at the forefront of the burgeoning compassion industry, spending billions on dependency-producing food pantries, clothes closets, service projects, and mission trips that serve mainly themselves and inadvertently turn people into beggars. Unexamined charity—charity that fails to ask the hard questions about outcomes—only perpetuates poverty, despite its best intentions. As megachurch pastor Rick Warren states in his foreword to Wayne Grudem and Barry Asmus’s The Poverty of Nations, “Having traveled the globe for thirty years and trained leaders in 164 countries, I’ve witnessed firsthand that almost every government and NGO (nonprofit) poverty program is actually harmful to the poor, hurting them in the long run rather than helping them. The typical poverty program creates dependency, robs people of dignity, stifles initiative, and can foster a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ sense of entitlement.”

Responsible charity, on the other hand, engages not only the heart but the mind as well. One of the most significant, rational decisions that determine the outcome of our charity is distinguishing between crisis and chronic need. In times of crisis, an immediate emergency intervention is required. When an earthquake devastates Haiti, for example, an emergency response is the right—and only—response. Food, water, shelter, and medical supplies are essential to save lives. But when the bleeding has stopped, when emergency supplies have been distributed, when people are housed in temporary shelters, it is time for rebuilding to begin. The strategy of crisis intervention must then shift to a strategy of development.

And herein lies the problem. It is far easier to raise money and mobilize volunteers for emergency assistance than it is to plan and execute the long, painstaking process of rebuilding lives. Thus agencies and volunteers tend to remain in relief mode long after the transition to development should have taken place. When crisis intervention persists beyond the crisis, it produces diminishing returns.

Much of the giving in America is misplaced. We respond generously to stories of people in crisis, but in fact most of our charity goes to people who face predictable, solvable problems of chronic poverty. An emergency response to chronic need is at best counterproductive and, over time, is actually harmful.

Take hunger, for example. Is it a crisis, or is it a chronic issue? Well, that depends. When a famine sweeps sub-Saharan Africa, starvation is a life-and-death crisis. But in urban America, hunger is a chronic issue, not a crisis. In urban America, we do not have starvation. We have temporary hunger, yes—but not starvation. In my forty-plus years of inner-city work, I have never seen a starving person. I have seen plenty of poor nutrition and food insecurity, but never outright starvation. And yet charities and churches continue to use crisis-intervention strategies that foster dependence. Food pantries and soup kitchens are among the worst offenders. Although they are simply trying to combat hunger, they continue to feed a man a fish, when they really need to teach him how to fish.

Churches may respond, “But isn’t serving the poor exactly what Jesus asks us to do?” On the surface, yes: feeding, clothing, and sheltering the poor seems to fulfill Jesus’s mandate that we serve him when we serve those most in need (Matthew 25:31–46). Our unconditional giving seems to reflect the unconditional grace we have received from God. A closer look, however, reveals a less redemptive reality. What if such giving is perpetuating unhealthy dependency? What if it’s supporting a destructive lifestyle? What if these well-meaning services diminish the dignity of recipients and erode their work ethic? Surely Christ intended the church’s compassion to be helpful, not hurtful.

While our motives are noble, our charitable practice is often poor in comparison. The outpouring of compassion from churches and charitable groups in times of calamity is immediate, generous, and effective, a shining attribute of our culture that should, rightfully, make us proud. But our methods of caring for those in chronic poverty, both here and abroad, have been largely counterproductive. Charity that frees the poor from poverty requires a more thoughtful approach—one that is admittedly much more complex and time-consuming, and one that requires far more personal involvement in the lives of those we serve.

Converting to Results-Based Charity

SO I ASK AGAIN, is harmful charity better than no charity at all? We have certainly concluded that no medical treatment is better than misinformed malpractice (thank you, Dr. Pasteur). Fortunately, it is beginning to dawn on the world of compassion that the root causes of poverty can be addressed effectively only through development, not through one-way giving. This insight may be as transformative as the medical profession’s discovery that blood transfusions, not bloodletting, was a key to curing sick patients.

One organization that is making great strides in restructuring, or what I would call “detoxifying,” its charitable endeavors is the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, which has been helping the homeless in North America since the 1870s. For the first time in their centuries-old history, they are currently reconsidering their free-service policies. At their recent national conferences they have engaged in lively debates about their historic “giveaway” philosophy. New thought leaders are reexamining their “grace is free and so is our service” theology. And new voices are emerging, challenging the organization’s old paradigm, arguing instead that “everyone has something to contribute.”

Darryl Bartlett runs the Holland Rescue Mission, where he has implemented a “personal development” system to help the homeless population of Holland, Michigan. The results have been extraordinary. In exchange for a free week of lodging and meals, guests are required to contribute in meaningful ways—making up their bed, performing kitchen duty, mopping floors, doing laundry. During their “free” week, guests work closely with a caseworker, who helps them establish a personalized growth plan, manage their finances, and take first steps toward self-sufficiency. Guests also enjoy full access to the facility’s laundry room and telephone banks and receive appropriate clothing for job interviews. Guests who demonstrate initiative are invited to stay on longer and enter a job training program that provides real-life employment experience at the mission, a paycheck, and mandatory financial management.

At Holland Rescue Mission, success is measured not by the number of beds filled or meals served, but by the number of guests who “graduate” drug-free, secure stable employment, settle existing debts, move into independent living, and connect with a church or other support group. Word on the street in Holland is: “If you’re ready to change, go to the Holland Rescue Mission.” It may take a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Bad News About Good Works
• Chapter 2: Partnering with Business
• Chapter 3: Social Entrepreneurs
• Chapter 4: Return on Investment
• Chapter 5: Meeting Market Demands
• Chapter 6: Reciprocal Exchange: Food
• Chapter 7: The Three Rs of Community Development
• Chapter 8: Gentrification with Justice: Education and Economic Development
• Chapter 9: For-Profit Missions: International Development
• Conclusion
• About the Author
• About FCS Urban Ministries
• Also by Robert D. Lupton
• Credits
• Back Ad
• Copyright
• About the Publisher