Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Why We Fail at Helping Others

Boon Peng Robin Low

• Publisher: WS PROFESSIONAL
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9789813200593
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Disaster strikes, transforming cities and towns into graveyards and wastelands in a matter of minutes. But help is on its way: news channels and social media relay the information to all corners of the globe in real-time, mobilising hundreds of people and organisations to aid. Yet, with standard relief packages regardless of the location, and a lack of effort taken to match volunteers' skills with tasks, just how effective are we at helping others?Many people want to do good, but they like to do it at their convenience. These attempts at helping often fail, and the blame invariably falls on the disaster victims, rather than looking at the suitability of aid provided. Such help, offered without a thorough understanding of the context or the impact of actions, can create situations that leave the victims worse off than before.So how can we create real sustainable impact?Most communities have a lot of unused human capacity. When offering help, many aid providers fail to engage the local communities, thus excluding a critical group of people with the knowledge of local ways and needs.This book elaborates on a simple principle essential to effective aid — Never Help: Engage, Enable, Empower and Connect.It is important that we fully understand the problem before we try to solve it, and who better to help us with solutions than the local community?

1.Introduction

Many people mean well and want to contribute solutions to local and global needs. People often want to act for the sake of “doing something”. Often, this means poorly thought-out ideas that are often unsustainable, or have little measurable social impact. Are these efforts actually helping? Are they solving problems or creating new ones? What pitfalls should a concerned giver watch for?

I was in New York City in 2001. I went to the World Trade Center shortly after it collapsed and I’ve been involved in large scale disasters ever since. Initially, it was just volunteering for some of them, and working with charities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on the ground.

I am very passionate about new processes, ideas and technology. Getting involved in different businesses lets me continuously learn new skills and challenge myself in new tasks. When I started actively going to disaster areas, it allowed me to experience different communities in a harsh and extreme setting where decisions need to be made quickly and decisively. I do learn a lot from every experience, and what’s more, the knowledge that you have impacted someone’s life or saved a community of people makes your work there feel especially important, much more than anything else that you do day to day.

In 2008, I had various business setbacks. My father passed away and I had various bills to pay along with a foreclosure. Many of my companies were affected and my rich friends and business partners avoided me. It was a painful experience to sell away a lot of what I owned, walking away from a big property investment and terminating my rental lease in various countries.

My gamer friends and academic friends were very supportive and helped me readjust to a new lifestyle where I had more time to do what I enjoy doing, and focused less on making money just to pay for my large expenses.

With more time, I could also examine a lot of my life choices and ask many questions, as well as search for answers. At this time, I found many new passions which I got involved in, and one of them was social entrepreneurship. It felt like a brilliant idea where you can do good while make money, and I thought to myself, “Why is everyone not doing this?”

Rich People are Not the Solution

I’ve known many rich people who do not consider themselves rich. These people I know live in properties that cost in excess of US$25 million, run foundations or own businesses, and continue to generate a lot of income. Through my interactions with them, I have realized that most of them still have a lot of anxieties — anxieties relating to financial security.

Often, when I approach these people who run foundations, I’ve candidly asked them why they don’t do more for society personally, and I get the same answer all the time: “You know, the costs of education and necessities are getting more day by day, my businesses may be doing well now, but who knows what is going to happen tomorrow?” Sometimes, I do get puzzled as the small projects that I wish to be funded are under $10,000, and their response of financial insecurity in their Rolls Royce prompted me to follow up with another question: “So how much do you need to have in order to be financially secure?” The quick answer is often “$1 billion in the bank.”

Many people talk about doing social good, creating social impact, and many of them have the means to do it. Some who run foundations will get their foundation to be involved, but foundations usually do not spend time on small-scale prototypes, and many rich people do not seem to be financially secure enough to part with some money.

I’ve met public servants earning more than US$1 million dollars a year, refusing to support an educational project for local youths and who pointed me to government grants which either take too long to apply for, or simply are not the right match.

If you are in the business of fund-raising, you often get this common reply: “I’ll donate more next time when I have more money.” Boston College did a study on the Fears of the Super Rich, and found that even people with an average net worth of US$78 million are dissatisfied with their sizable fortunes.¹

So if you think that you will donate only when you are rich, the question you should ask yourself is, how much money do you need before you can consider yourself rich?

Social Enterprises — Really that Social?

When Social Entrepreneurship came along as a new and shiny concept, many people jumped on board. Many entrepreneurs like the idea of creating business that does good at the same time. Fundamentally, the very concept of a social enterprise is flawed. Companies pay taxes, and the taxes go to schools and roads. So, does that make all companies social enterprises? What’s more, when examining these concepts in practice, flaws are even further exposed. At the bottom of the social needs pyramid, the needs of people are more basic and less varied.

Poorer communities need basics like food, shelter and clean water. If you can sell to meet the needs of one community, you can also sell to others. As such, many enterprises that sell to one poor community will try to scale-up and sell to others. However, when a startup scales, it runs into problems. It can lose its ability to be nimble. It can become bureaucratic, and communication with the ground level can suffer. Social projects that scale too quickly often fail. When scaled too quickly, many social enterprises which may have seen success in the small scale may even lose their social impact and cause social harm.

Microfinance is a good social idea that allows poor people to have basic financial services. Recipients of microfinance could start a small business and are less likely to pull their kids out of school due to economic reasons. However, many people take the simple idea of giving loans to the poor and twist it to make it very profitable. Payday lenders are getting popular in many poorer parts of the country and each year, about 12 million Americans incur long-term debt by taking out a short-term loan that is intended to cover borrowers’ expenses until they receive their next paycheck. This causes many people to slip out of the middle class. Some of the lower income borrowers may pay up to 400% per annum in interest rates, causing up to 40% of them to default and push them closer to poverty.²

I am a serial entrepreneur and in my experience starting many companies and working on countless projects, I’ve experienced many failures which I’ve learned a lot from — some of them could have even be avoided if I had listened to advice.

I feel that the redistribution of resources is a very pressing issue that needs to be solved. Resource is definitely limited and especially for projects trying to help marginalized families, any waste of resource is detrimental to the efforts of making things better. I have volunteered and run many different projects in different countries trying to address pressing problems, and have failed. Sometimes I do not even know that my actions did not have any social impact on the ground. Just the feeling of doing good makes me feel better inside, but on having it pointed out to me, I then realize that it was a waste of resource and effort.

Many people want to do good. Some want to help one person at a time, and others want to change the world. Helping one person at a time creates intimacy, but some fear that the blunder may get personal, and even when it succeeds, it does not change anything in the big picture. Trying to change the world may be ambitious, cleaner and more abstract. But success is distant and unlikely, so people who attempt this often taste a noble failure.

I’ve met many people and learnt from many mentors, some even younger than me, trying to do good. Learning from their experience, models and failures, I realize that many people may not know the best way of doing good. Some do it because of their religions; others may like the feeling of helping someone. Everyone has their reasons. As I look at the result of their project, I realize that many people doing the same thing and getting the same results may come up with different conclusion of success or failure. Nevertheless, what matters most is the real impact of the effort. Is it moving in the right direction?

I have worked on many projects in the past 15 years. It is interesting to me that my perspective has changed in these years, and some projects which I’ve considered a success in the past, are failures to me now. My failures taught me a lot, and even if I cannot convince you about what you should do, let me at least share what not to do.

Doing Good

In doing good, there is no “best way”. Doing something is often better than doing nothing. However, the result may vary depending on actions. Instead of saving a drowning boy in a shallow pond, for example, what if the clothes you would have soiled, had you jumped into the pond, could be sold for more money to donate to a charity that would save more than one boy? There are always options to weigh before you take your action. There may be no right or wrong. I can only share my opinions, experience and insight, in the hope that they can give you more options when it is your time to do good.

A person who is far away, whom you cannot see or hear, and with whom you have no memories or loyalties in common, cannot compel your help in the same way as a person right in front of you, or in some sense one of your own. Ignoring the cries of a drowning child would feel like a violation of the most basic kind of compassion; anyone who did it may seem less than human. However, cultivating sympathy for unseen and unknown people seems to be simply abstract, admirable, and “more than required of an ordinary person”.

Take for instance two similar disasters in different countries. I find it harder to garner support a country like Nepal — fewer people have personal or business connections or a physical or emotional connection causing them to care. On the other hand, it is easier to get support for Japan, where people may have Japanese classmates, colleagues and friends, or watch Japanese anime and own Japanese products, even though the country may already have the capacity to recover from the disaster.

To most people, the distance between themselves and another person — both physical as well as emotional — has a profound effect on their sense of duty. Many people want to do good or be seen as doing good, but may believe that if it was their duty to save one child, then why not five children — why not five thousand?

The fact is that most people would rather think up excuses for their behaviors of inaction, than find ways in which they can contribute in their current capacity. Supporting marginalized communities does not necessarily mean donations or volunteering, there could be other innovative ways to connect or engage the community which may lead to greater impact. Unfortunately, most people prefer to stay in their comfort zone, thinking of excuses.

For the few that want to make a difference, I admire their courage to step out and take action. In some cases, their actions do create much social impact for the community, and in other cases, the impact may be minimal. Bureaucracy and other reasons may be blamed, and again, the easy action is then to complain.

This book is not a guide on how to do good, but rather, a sharing of my experience on why complaining and maintaining status quo does not solve the most pressing of problems. For those who care and want to do more, they should focus on testing new solutions that will solve the problem. With the advancement of technology, there are a lot of problems which can be solved with new knowledge and tools.

There are also a lot more problems created with a bigger human population, and it is not enough if we do nothing. Humans are capable of doing terrible things, but humans are able to do heroic things that inspire as well. There is just one thing to remember, all heroes or saints were normal humans until they decided to take actions which set them apart.

¹ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/

² http://www.microfinancegateway.org/sites/default/files/mfg-en-paper-us-microfinance-at-the-crossroads-scale-and-sustainability-can-lessons-from-international-experience-help-guide-the-us-sector-sep-2012.pdf

2.Shifting Morals and Ethics

Comparison Chart

	Ethics	Morals
What are they?	Morals are concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character	Ethics are practical, conceived as shared principles promoting fairness in social and business interactions
Origin	Greek word “ethos” meaning “character”	Latin word “mos” meaning “custom”
Where do they come from?	Social System — External	Individual — Internal
Why do we do it?	Society accepts it	We believe it is right
How flexible are we?	They tend to be consistent within a certain context, but can vary between contexts. Largely dependent on the surroundings and others.	Mostly consistent, but change when an individual’s beliefs change, due to more knowledge gained or personal experience
How is it accepted?	Ethics are governed by professional and legal guidelines within a particular time and place. Largely dependent on culture	Morality transcends cultural norms

Conflict between Ethical versus Legal

“Legal” is an adjective and a noun used to describe anything that concerns the law or its workings. It is associated with all equipment, processes, procedures, practices, languages, cultures, and other relative concepts in the system of the law.

In many situations, the relationship between the law and ethics cla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Shifting Morals and Ethics
• 3. Why We Fail at Helping
• 4. Traveling Overseas to Help? Whom are You Helping?
• 5. Scapegoating
• 6. The Dangers of Social Intervention
• 7. The Curse of Exclusion
• 8. Paradox in the Social Sphere
• 9. The Great Convergence
• 10. Empowering State of Mind
• 11. Having More Social Enterprise is Not Enough
• 12. Case Study 1: Rescued Prostitutes
• 13. Case Study 2: Internet Comes to El Limón
• 14. Case Study 3: The Flower Lady
• 15. The Unequal Distribution of Resources
• 16. Giving Done Wrong
• 17. Free Destroys the Economy
• 18. Good Intentions Fail
• 19. Case Study 4: Sanitation Woes
• 20. Case Study 5: They Ate the Chickens
• 21. Case Study 6: Community Involvement Program Gone Wrong
• 22. Social Technology
• 23. Peace Technology, Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• 24. CSR 2.0
• 25. Social Intrapreneur
• 26. Social Business
• 27. Design Thinking and Social Innovation
• 28. Social Community
• 29. Crabs versus Turtles
• 30. Risk versus Innovation
• 31. Never Help; Engage, Enable, Empower & Connect
• 32. Case Study 7: Amazon Disaster Registry
• 33. Case Study 8: Disaster Recovery through Art and Tourism
• 34. Case Study 9: Relief B2B (Business to Business)
• 35. Case Study 10: Relief B2V (Business to Village)
• 36. Case Study 11: Relief Enterprise
• 37. Human-Centric Community Empowerment
• 38. Social Capital
• 39. Circular Economy
• 40. Case Study 12: Prison Entrepreneurship
• 41. Case Study 13: Solar Forward
• 42. Case Study 14: The Sustainability Place Of Destiny (“SPOD”)
• 43. Jump Start Self-Organizing
• 44. Conscious Consumerism — The Needed Change
• 45. Iteration versus Innovation
• 46. Social Innovation is Not an Easy Task
• 47. Responsibility & Reciprocity
• 48. Conclusion
• Appendix