We carry on giving, but isn’t charity an offence to basic dignity?

John Harris in The Guardian


Someone needs cancer treatment only available in Germany. Someone else is leading a 187-mile bike ride across India to pay for research into brain tumours. Top right is a team of swimmers with learning disabilities who want to attend an international competition in Sheffield; bottom left is a girl who desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. And all around are numbers that dance in front of your eyes: “£64,994 raised by 2,773 supporters … £1,044 raised by 47 supporters … £900 raised by 23 supporters.”

The online donation platform JustGiving seemingly soothes the world’s ills with a sleek, altruistic efficiency the pre-digital world could get nowhere near. Since its foundation in 2001, it claims to have raised $4.2bn (£3.3bn) for “good causes” in 164 countries.

It also styles itself as a “for-profit, for-good organisation”, but those two elements might not mesh together quite as gracefully as its founders would like. The 5% that JustGiving skims off each donation – slightly more if they are gift-aided – reportedly amounts to £20m a year. According to its accounts, one director has a salary of £152,000 plus pension contributions of £46,600. Recently there have also been questions about the provenance of two high-profile appeals it has hosted, both related to the recent Westminster attack.

Somewhat unbelievably, online donation platforms fall outside the remit of the fundraising regulator and, as reported by the Guardian this week, there are now loud calls to correct such a glaring anomaly.

According to a recent survey by the Charities Aid Foundation, only 50% of us now think charities are trustworthy. On top of hostility to government and big business, the inward-looking sensibilities crystallised in the Brexit vote might be colouring public attitudes towards the so-called third sector.

There is a sense of the same sentiments in all that noise about aid spending, now the subject of an intervention by that great charitable icon Bill Gates, who wants Theresa May to stick with the UK’s commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid.

There again, even if a new public meanness partly explains some people’s scepticism, it may not explain it all. Many may well have more rational reasons: the sense of a world too beyond scrutiny, highlighted by the Kids Company saga; a reasonable suspicion that high-profile fundraising is often an easy way for governments to be let off the hook, and for wealthy people to draw attention away from their tax affairs.

But here is the strange thing. We still give almost as much to charity as we did 10 years ago, and the imperative to dig in one’s pocket has never been more ubiquitous. The shaking of tins on drizzly Saturday mornings is the stuff of the 20th century: now, charity is loud, brash and firmly built into the narcissistic, virtue-signalling world of social media. The unfortunate are helped via South American trekking and polar hikes; venturing to the other side of the world is said to be the most efficient way of helping the needy. Equally, few question the motives of the apparently selfless soul who has put up a JustGiving page or appealed for help via such platforms as GoFundMe.

Meanwhile, charity increasingly extends to things that once came out of our taxes, with the frontier between the two disappearing fast: NHS appeals for radiotherapy equipment in Swindon, support for people with dementia in Essex, cancer treatment in London, and much more. And whereas fundraising drives for state schools were once presented as a means of funding climbing frames, school trips or specialist sports equipment, donations now increasingly pay for the fundamental things that cuts are putting in jeopardy.

‘Help for Heroes is also a symbol of the fact that the state cannot adequately provide for the soldiers it puts in harm’s way.’ Photograph: Sam Frost

A primary school in Sheffield has just launched a campaign for the £100,000 it needs to fix its roof. In January, a headteacher from Brighton told the Guardian that every computer at her school was bought via fundraising, and that the proceeds from the annual school play now go on “resources to use in lessons”. In that context, if you have affluent parents and staff who know how to tap the right people, you survive. But what happens if you don’t?

Clearly, a lot of the worthy causes that benefit from sponsored walks, bake-offs and Indian bike-rides can easily be recast as examples of outrageous government negligence. There might be no better example than Help for Heroes – which nobly assists those who have “suffered injuries or illness as a result of their service to the nation”– but is also a symbol of the fact that the state cannot adequately provide for the soldiers it puts in harm’s way. Why does such a basic aspect of any advanced society require a begging bowl?

The word “normalisation” springs to mind. That said, some of us are old enough to remember the hardcore socialist values that once damned charity as a get-out for vested interests, and an offence to basic human dignity. As far as I can tell, the basic argument still stands: charity eats away at the idea of a decent life as a basic right, and turns its recipients into supplicants; not for nothing is it the favoured get-out of tyrants, tycoons and monarchs.

Scepticism about fundraising may be a sign that some of this critique lingers in the public mind; the pang of unease people feel when presented with heart-tugging appeals might be about something much deeper than the predicament of the people in the photographs.

Certain economic and cultural changes vividly denote our seemingly endless passage away from the postwar settlement into a much more Darwinian world. Trade union membership declines. Private debt soars. Public housing is consigned to history. And at every turn, what one group of people rely on is suddenly dependent on others’ generosity.

That is not to deny the sterling work charities do, or the inescapable compulsion to meet their appeals by reaching for your debit card. What bothers me is the future implied by some of the categories listed on JustGiving’s website: “education”, “international aid”, “health and medical”, and “disability”, the latter with a cutesy little icon of a wheelchair.

In the midst of an election called by a Tory vicar’s daughter in which the opposition is trying in vain to land arguments about austerity and poverty, the key question seems more relevant than ever: where is all this is taking us, and who will the bowl be passed to next?

Global Capitalism: Trump’s Big Economic Plans Fade

Richard D Wolff - Economics Professor (retired)  April 2017

March 2017

I was vulnerable and wanted a home. What I got was a workhouse

Daniel Lavelle in The Guardian


There are many reasons why I became homeless, but no one was surprised it happened. I’m just another care leaver who lost control of their life. Almost every person I lived with in children’s homes and foster placements has since experienced mental health problems, stints in prison, and battles with drug and alcohol addiction. What would make me so special that I could avoid the inevitable breakdown?

Homeless in Britain: ‘I graduated with honours – and ended up on the streets’


I spent periods in a tent on a campsite near Saddleworth Moor, where I was woken up every night by my neighbour, a cantankerous Yorkshireman who would liberate the grievances he had been bottling up all day in a series of piercing screams.

The local housing advice service was no help. I was told that to be considered a priority need, I had to demonstrate that I was more vulnerable than my homeless counterparts. As one adviser put it: “I have to establish that you would be worse off than me, if I were homeless.” It may interest people that local councils are now running a misery contest for housing, a sort of X Factor for the destitute. Maybe my audition would have gone better if I’d had a few more missing teeth, and wet myself while singing Oom-Pah-Pah.

And then I befriended a resident of a residential charity for the homeless. He was far more helpful than the housing advisers, and managed to organise a place for me at the charity.

When I entered its walls, which were inside a converted factory, the place immediately struck me as having similarities with a Victorian workhouse. I was told by the “community leader” that I would receive basic subsistence: a room, food, clothing and a modest weekly allowance, in exchange for 40 hours’ labour.

The word “workhouse” conjures up images of Oliver Twist, and of bleak Victorian institutions populated by bedraggled paupers forced into backbreaking labour in exchange for meagre slops of porridge. At the charity home we were not expected to pick oakum or break boulders, but the work was hard and the returns were meagre.

Part of my job involved delivering furniture. I spent day after day lifting heavy items such as wardrobes and three-piece suites, sometimes up and down several flights of stairs. The work is described as voluntary by the charity, but in reality neither I nor any of my fellow inmates had anywhere else to go, and so had little choice but to do it.

The charity describes itself as a “working community”. But as far as I was concerned this was a workhouse in all but name: a civil prison, and a punishment for poverty. How do such charities manage to require their residents to work up to 40 hours a week without a wage, paying them only a small allowance for food and accommodation?

In 1999 the New Labour government exempted charities and other institutions from paying workers the national minimum wage if prior to entering a work scheme they were homeless or residing in a homeless hostel. There is perhaps no better demonstration that this country is yet to shake off punitive Victorian attitudes towards the “undeserving” poor.

These regulations not only strip homeless people of the right to a decent wage, but of all their other employment rights too. Because residents of such charities are not classed as employees, they cannot claim unfair dismissal or sick pay. Many people have lived and worked at the charity for up to 15 years, yet they can be sacked and evicted with no legal right to appeal.

I accept that residents, some of whom have suffered with long-term alcoholism and drug dependency, are far better off within the charity home’s walls than they would be on the streets or living alone. The environment is predominantly a positive one, where residents are well fed and safe, and are overseen by conscientious staff. The charity does give individuals the chance to participate in meaningful work and contribute to a community, sometimes for the first time in their lives. But none of this alters the fact that residents are forced by poverty to work for no pay.

The homelessness reduction bill, which last week passed its final obstacle in parliament, provides an opportunity to change our approach. It will force local authorities to provide assistance to people threatened with becoming homeless 56 days before they lose their home, ending the misery contest I and others have been subjected to over the years.

This bill represents a very small step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done to address the reasons people find themselves on the streets in the first place. And ending the exploitation of homeless people for their labour should be one of the first goals.

It is ironic that a Labour government created a backdoor for the revival of workhouses when it was Attlee’s government that abolished the workhouse system. The idea that the poor should be forced to work for board and basic subsistence was once universally condemned, but it has been revived without a murmur of public disapproval.

No one else in our society can be mandated to work full time for no pay, with no rights, on pain of being condemned to a life on the streets. So why is it OK to treat homeless people this way?

Who will save us from Silicon Valley?

Evgeny Morozov in The Guardian


 
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have given $3bn to help cure all disease. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP



A world where billionaires were blunt and forthright, where they preferred pillaging the world to saving it, was far less confusing. The robber barons of the industrial era – from Carnegie to Ford to Rockefeller – did eventually commit some of their riches to charity but there was no mistaking one for the other. Oil and steel brought in the cash; education and arts helped to spend it.

Of course, the eponymous foundations were neither neutral nor apolitical. They pursued projects that were rarely at odds with US foreign policy and often shared many of its key ideological biases and presuppositions. From modernisation theory to democracy promotion, the civilising imperative behind them was not so hard to discern. Some of these foundations have eventually come to regret many of their dubious advocacy campaigns; the Rockefeller Foundation’s imprudent support for population control in India is just one example.

Today, when five of the world’s most valuable companies are technology firms, it’s very hard to see where their businesses end and their charity efforts begin. As digital platforms, they power diverse industries and sectors from education to health to transport and thus have an option that was not available to the oil and steel magnates of yesteryear: they can simply continue selling their core product – mostly hope, albeit wrapped up in infinite layers of data, screens and sensors – without having to divert their funds into any nonproductive activities.

The Chan Zuckerberg initiative, a limited liability company (a somewhat unusual format for a charity), was set up by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in December 2015, ostensibly to share their wealth with the rest of us. It has recently been in the news thanks to its founders’ ambitious commitment – to the tune of $3bn – to cure all disease.

Zuckerberg can surely afford this, given how little tax his company is paying: in the UK, its tax filings for 2015 show revenues of £210.7m, on which the company paid just £4.17m of taxes – an effective rate of 2% (itself a 1,000-fold increase on what it paid in 2014). Facebook, however, also managed to generate a tax credit of £11m, which it can use to reduce its future tax burden. The disease of tax avoidance is unlikely to be cured by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.


  Henry Ford in his first car, built in 1896. Photograph: Library of Congress/Getty Images

To speak of “philanthrocapitalism” here – as many have done, either to praise or bury it – seems misguided, if only because such projects bear so little resemblance to philanthropy proper. One doesn’t have to admire Ford or Rockefeller to notice that their philanthropic endeavours, whatever their real political goals, were not supposed to make extra cash. But is it really so with our new tech barons?

While Zuckerberg’s commitments in the health sector are still too recent and ambiguous to judge, he has a more extensive history in education. Following Zuckerberg’s personal commitment of $100m dollars to schools in New Jersey – an investment that is yet to bring the desired results – the Chan Zuckerberg initiative has invested in companies that supposedly help expand educational opportunities in the developing world.

Thus, it has poured money into Andela, a Lagos-based startup that trains coders, joining the likes of Google (via GV, its venture fund) and Omidyar Network, a similar philanthropic investment firm belonging to another tech billionaire. A few weeks later, one of Andela’s co-founders left to found a payments startup: apparently, there are a lot of arbitrage opportunities in saving the world.

That one can never fully understand what drives these investments, a profit motive or a genuine desire to help out, is a feature, not a bug. If the logic driving the Fords and the Carnegies was to atone for the sins of rapacious capitalism, the logic of the Zuckerbergs and the Omidyars is to convince us that rapacious capitalism, fully unleashed on society, will do lots of good.

The Chan Zuckerberg initiative also invested in BYJU, an Indian company that has developed an app that teaches students science and maths. A noble endeavour, but what attracted Zuckerberg to the firm was, by his own admission, its heavy reliance on personalised learning, which, of course, is only possible when large troves of user data are recorded and analysed. Does that remind you of any giant tech company?

This celebration of personalisation is also present in another educational project supported by Zuckerberg – a learning software made by a company called Summit Basecamp. The company has the luxury of having 20 Facebook staffers, from engineers to product managers, helping it with growth and expansion – the result of Zuckerberg touring one of its schools in 2013. And expand it did: according to the Washington Post, its software is now used by 20,000 students in more than 100 schools.



The Chan Zuckerberg initiative has poured money into Andela, a Lagos-based startup that trains coders. Photograph: Mohini Ufeli/Andela

Parents of these students can hope that Summit Basecamp will keep its word and that no personal data will ever leave the company. Such promises won’t be any more reassuring than those of the founders of WhatsApp, who, on being acquired by Facebook, promised to defend their users’ personal data, only to announce, a few months ago, that it will be shared with Facebook.
Zuckerberg also joined the rest of the Silicon Valley elite, from Bill Gates to Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, in investing in AltSchool, a startup founded by a former Google executive, which takes personalised learning to a whole new level. In a good Taylorist fashion, its classrooms feature cameras and microphones so that any glitches inherent in the learning process can be analysed and engineered away. AltSchool now wants to expand by selling licences to its software to other schools.

What passes for philanthropy these days is often just a sophisticated effort to make money on engineering the kinds of rational, entrepreneurial and quantitative souls that would delight at other types of personalisation. Such learning is, of course, well suited to the needs of consulting firms and technology giants. A recent profile of AltSchool in the New Yorker mentioned that its students read the Iliad armed with a spreadsheet where they mark how many times the theme of “rage” occurs in the text. Such schools can produce excellent auditors; poets, however, might need an alternative, to, well, the AltSchool.

The very same technology elites are also backing the charter school movement – a longrunning effort to bring more competition to the educational sector by supporting privately run but publicly funded educational initiatives. From Gates to Zuckerberg, technology billionaires are vocal defenders of this movement. It won’t be surprising if they deploy their big data weapons to advance the argument that the traditional educational system must be completely overhauled.

We should be careful not to fall victim to a perverse form of Stockholm syndrome, coming to sympathise with the corporate kidnappers of our democracy. On the one hand, given that the new tech billionaires pay very little tax, it’s not surprising that the public sector would fail to innovate as quickly. On the other, by constantly giving the private sector a head start through technologies that they own and develop, the new tech elites all but ensure that the public would rather choose slick but privatised technological solutions over quaint, but public, political ones.

That we can no longer differentiate between philanthropy and speculation is an occasion to worry, not celebrate. With Silicon Valley elites so keen on saving the world, shouldn’t we also ask who will eventually save us from Silicon Valley?

The trouble with philanthropy is that money can't buy equality

Courtney Martin in The Guardian

I spent Saturday morning at the public library with my 2.5-year-old daughter. She sat in the centre of a multi-racial, multi-lingual group of toddlers, spread her arms out as wide as they would go, and screamed: “He turned into a beautiful butterfly!” at the end of the consummate classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The parents and grandparents giggled at the collective exuberance of little ones. The kids’ insanely spongy brains soaked up the sea of words surrounding them.

This may sound like a mundane scene, but it’s a surprising triumph for philanthropic equity – one of the few that exists at a meaningful, functional scale in our increasingly unequal country. At a time when early childhood has exploded as a lucrative market opportunity, no money is exchanged at the nation’s public libraries.

Why? Because in the 1850s, a wealthy guy invited a poor, 13-year-old immigrant boy to spend Saturday afternoons at his private library in Pittsburgh.

That boy grew up to be steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie rememberedthat, as a child, “I resolved, if wealth ever came to me, that it should be used to establish free libraries.” True to his word, Carnegie’s funding built about half of the 3,500 public libraries that existed by 1920.

Philanthropy has come a long way since the “Patron Saint of Libraries” took a childhood experience and turned it into a national legacy. Too often, it feels like we’ve lost our core wisdom about how change actually happens.

As they say, money can’t buy love. It can’t, ultimately, buy equity either. Both start with the seed of relationship.

There would be no three-year-old black kid in Oakland screaming hungry caterpillar exuberance without Andrew Carnegie. And there would no Andrew Carnegie without that Pittsburgh bibliophile.

So what does this mean for philanthropy? It means that the only philanthropy worth engaging in – both ethically and strategically speaking – is the kind that honours the wisdom of relationships and the power of money.

In what organiser and human rights activist Ella Baker deemed the “foundation complex” in 1963, those with money usually call the shots. Typically, a foundation positions itself as the expert and judges the merits of a nonprofit to solve a particular problem, whether it’s childhood hunger, or deforestation, or homelessness.

A girl stamping her own book at the old Aberystwyth Carnegie-funded public library, Wales. Photograph: Keith Morris/Alamy

I’ve been on the phone myself, scrambling to feel worthy of a foundation officer’s attention and money; nothing has inflicted me with a more toxic form of impostor syndrome. The questions foundation representatives ask, like those little bubbles on a standardised test, seem to pop up one after the other. With each one, I feel my breath get shallow. I’m feverishly tap-dancing when what I want to be doing is have good faith, meaningful conversation.

With individual donors, the hierarchy is often softened with social graces – a cup of coffee, a chat about shared passions, the scent of camaraderie – but ultimately the power dynamic is no different. One of us has the means and therefore is in the position of judging the other’s “good works”. In some ways, these interactions can be even more demoralising because they are deeply confusing; sometimes it can feel like you are performing friendship.

In the midst of particularly demoralising experiences with wealthy philanthropists, I have often reminded myself of my own privilege – a white woman from an upper-middle-class background with an Ivy League degree. If these interactions make me feel this way, imagine how confusing and alienating they likely are for people even further afield of the social class of most philanthropists.

A note about philanthropists’ demographics: three-fourths of foundations’ full-time staff are white and nearly 90% are over 30. Women flourish at smaller foundations – about three of four fundraisers are female – but at those with assets of more than $750m, women comprise only 28.9% of CEOs and CGOs (chief growth officers).

Board leadership is even more demographically starved. “Fully 85% of foundation board members are white, while just 7% are African American and only 4% are Hispanic,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance. “Nearly three-quarters of foundations have no written policy on board diversity, and fewer than 10% of board members are under 40.”

This means a lot of people who are not white, male and older are hustling their asses off to understand the sensibility of those who are. They are spending energy being tactical about how they talk about their work and build relationships, however transactional or tokenising. I admire their commitment and acuity, but even if some get good at translating and tap-dancing for dollars, that should not comfort the philanthropic world about its own inclusivity or transparency.

It only means that some people are willing to put in the work to get good at the game, not that the game isn’t profoundly rigged or that it doesn’t distract from getting real work done.

And the truth is, I imagine it’s a disconcerting experience for most philanthropists, too. On some level, they must know that they’re not the wisest authorities on the issues they’re seeking to effect. Money doesn’t make you an expert on poverty alleviation; in fact, it can make you dumber with distance. And yet, traditional philanthropy is set up to put you – the one with financial wealth – in the position of playing god with something you deeply care about. Even if it strokes your ego to be the decider, it’s got to erode your sense of integrity.

How can we reinvent philanthropy with an eye toward true equity? How can we create new cultures and structures that allow resources – financial, experiential, energetic – to flow in ways that feel dignifying? How do we create paradigm-shifting shit together, not just send LinkedIn requests and push money and paper around?

One obvious thing we can do is work to change the demographics of those giving away money and sitting on boards. But even that isn’t a fix; it’s a good bet to slowly shift culture, but not a promise of radical restructuring. There has been a slight uptick in black executives at foundations, for example, but as soon as they arrive, many are looking for an out, according to the Association of Black Foundation Executives. They overwhelmingly cite as their reason for fleeing that they want to be “more directly engaged in creating community change.” Duh.

If we really want to reinvent philanthropy then we are going to have to look at the underlying historic and structural causes of poverty and work to dismantle them and put new systems in their place. It’s also about culture – intentionally creating boundary-bashing friendships, learning to ask better, more generous questions, taking up less space.

It’s about what we are willing to acknowledge about the origins of our own wealth and privilege. It’s about reclaiming values that privilege often robs us of: first and foremost, humility. But also trust in the ingenuity and goodness of other people, particularly those without financial wealth. And a more accurate sense of proportion – where and how are philanthropists really most crucial in the fight for a more just society?

Several groups are working to show us what this kind of giving might look like. An example: a group of trust fund kids, calling themselves the Gulf South Allied Funders, took their own inheritances, raised even more money from their own networks and then donated the sum to the Twenty-First Century Foundation, which has a long-standing presence in New Orleans. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they acknowledged their unfamiliarity with the community, and decided to funnel their resources to someone who could make a bigger difference.

Emergency response team volunteers clean up debris from a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

Another: poor families in Boston and Detroit and Fresno track data about their own strengths and goals and then come together on a regular basis to talk about what they’re learning and the kinds of support they need. The families provide the moral support, while Family Independence Initiative provides the financial support in the form of scholarships, small business grants and other capital, on an as-needed basis.

And another: Self-Help, a family of nonprofit credit unions in North Carolina, California, and Florida, counter predatory lenders and high-fee check cashers in underserved communities by providing low-interest banking and loan services, financing community development projects and rehabilitating historic buildings with local partners. They celebrate the ways in which their current banking structure is significantly imprinted with the historic intelligence of African-American credit unions so critical during the Jim Crow era.

What makes these different than the average “foundation complex” experience? They have authentic, trusting relationships at the centre. They acknowledge history and local context. They walk their talk – moving beyond radical theory to radical practice.

To their credit, many of the world’s most powerful donors have begun to question the ethical underpinnings and best practicesof status quo philanthropy. In 2013,Peter Buffett, chairman of the NoVo Foundation, wrote a manifesto that, at its essence, was a call for more structural consciousness and less cognitive dissonance among wealthy altruists: “Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.”

More recently, Darren Walker, the President of the Ford Foundation, has called fora “new ‘gospel of wealth’ for the 21st century” – one that addresses “the underlying causes that perpetuate human suffering. In other words, philanthropy can no longer grapple simply with what is happening in the world, but also withhow and why.”

The shift in zeitgeist is promising. A critical mass of people working within philanthropy is hungry to do work with more ethical rigor; more systemic, cultural, and emotional intelligence; less bureaucracy and hubris. There is a growing conversation about these shifts. On paper, the will is there.

But philanthropists need more than “big ideas” about how their profession could and should change. They need radically new habits or these ideas just become bold in theory.

As Vu Le, the Executive Director of Rainier Valley Corps, points out: “True Equity takes time, energy, and thoughtfulness. It requires us to reexamine everything we know and change systems and practices that we have been using for hundreds of years. This is often painful and uncomfortable.”

In part, this is about scale. Philanthropists must push themselves to give more, and in particular, give more to address American poverty. Only 12% of total giving in 2015 went to “human services,” according to Giving USA. Wealthy donors are more likely to support the arts and higher education and less likely to give to social service charities, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. And they’re not as generous as those with less income: “The wealthiest Americans – those who earned $200,000 or more – reduced the share of income they gave to charity by 4.6% from 2006 to 2012. Meanwhile, Americans who earned less than $100,000 chipped in 4.5% more of their income during the same time period.”

In 2014, the poverty rate in the US reached 15%. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images



How and where do you meet potential grantees?

If you don’t have genuine relationships with those outside of your racial or class category, you’re going to have a hell of a time finding out about the most interesting, powerful work going on to tackle poverty.

How do you approach general operating funds or capital campaigns?

Have you ever noticed that foundations feel justified in spending millions on beautifully designed headquarters, but frown on nonprofits using money to spend a fraction of that on dignifying spaces of their own? Poor people, and those that partner with them, deserve fair salaries and beauty, too.

How can grant reporting be redesigned so it doesn’t create such huge frustration and a misuse of time and energy on the part of grantee organisations?

Human-centered design is so often heralded by foundations these days, but too often their own bureaucracies are filled with soul-deadening detail that is anything but humanising.

Do you build relationships for the long, systemic haul?


Funding also shapes and dictates our work by forcing us to conceptualise our communities as victimsAdjoa Florência Jones de Almeida, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded

Gara LaMarche takes his peers to task for talking big game about sustainability, but then essentially treating grantees like “the right wing would treat single mothers on welfare, imposing strict time limits and cutoffs – the fact is that most sustainability strategies are aimed at helping grantees move from dependency on one foundation to another.”

This may all seem “in the weeds”, but it has a huge impact of the daily lives of those tackling poverty on the ground. How we treat one another every day, as cliched as it may sound, becomes the nature of our relationships, and the nature of our relationships, becomes the nature of our institutions and, ultimately, systems.

Perhaps the most profound question that philanthropists can ask themselves at this ripe time for reinvention is this: what stories do you want or expect grantees to tell you? What stories do you tell about yourself?

Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida of the Sista II Sista Collective in Brooklyn, NY,wrote in the groundbreaking anthology, The Revolution will not be Funded:

In theory, foundation funding provides us with the ability to do the work – it is supposed to facilitate what we do. But funding also shapes and dictates our work by forcing us to conceptualise our communities as victims. We are forced to talk about our members as being “disadvantaged” and “at risk”, and to highlight what we are doing to prevent them from getting pregnant or taking drugs – even when this is not, in essence, how we see them or the priority for our work.

Six years later, organiser and activist Mia Birdsong, took the TED stage and furthered the paradigm-shifting narrative: “The quarter-truths and limited plot lines have us convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing. What if we recognised that what’s working is the people and what’s broken is our approach?”

The story we’ve told about the poor in America, the story that we continue to ask them to tell in order to get funding, is that they’re broken. In fact, we are.

The ultimate irony of the way the philanthropic sector is structured is that it is actually the recipients – people of colour, the working class, women – that may be the most masterful at creating and maintaining long-lasting, catalytic relationships. They are disproportionately poor in terms of dollars and cents, but rich with experience of making a way out of no way and persevering in the face of huge, intractable, sometimes downright exploitative systems. This usually involves relying on friends and extended family, nurturing people’s gifts for the betterment of whole communities and having grace through challenge.

We have an ethical imperative to acknowledge and build new systems around that intelligence. Carnegie’s one ask of the public libraries that he funded, to be built in communities across the country, was that they each be engraved with an image of a rising sun and the words: “Let there be light.”

That light, for him, was present in books, but in truth, it was sparked by an unlikely relationship. Long-lasting change so often is.

The art of profitable giving - PhilanthroCapitalism

G Sampath in The Hindu




Not too long ago, public opinion was against philanthropy. A new book explains how attitudes have changed, and why we must scrutinise them.




Once upon a time there was charity. The haves gave some to the have-nots, and that was that. Sometimes the giving impulse was religious, sometimes guilt-induced. But charity was more about the soul of the giver than the welfare or rights or dignity of the receiver. This is why there can be no charity between equals. Or between friends. For all these reasons, charity had for long remained an activity rooted in the personal-private, quasi-religious sphere.

Then came philanthropy. Jeremy Beer, in his The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity, argues that the displacement of charity by philanthropy was “the result of a reconceptualisation of voluntary giving as primarily a tool for social change.” It also marks, according to Beer, a shift from a theological to a secular framework for giving, bringing with it all the baggage that secularisation entails – blind faith in the technological mastery of the social world, centralisation, and the bureaucratization of personal relations.”

And today we have ‘philanthrocapitalism’. The term gained currency after The Economist carried a report in 2006 on ‘The birth of philanthrocapitalism’. Noting that “the need for philanthropy to become more like the for-profit capital markets is a common theme among the new philanthropists,” the article explains why philanthropists “need to behave more like investors.”

Two years later came the book that today’s biggest philanthropists swear by: Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich can Save the World by Matthew Bishop (a senior business editor from The Economist) and Michael Green. The title is not intended to be ironic. It is an earnest argument: in a world of rich men and poor states, who better to save the poor than the rich themselves?

The advent of philanthrocapitalism may have finally brought to the fore what is tacitly understood but rarely made explicit -- the symbiotic relationship between capitalist excess and philanthropic redress.



When philanthropy was shunned



It is no accident that the first great philanthropists were also the greatest capitalists of their age. Nor is it a coincidence that many of these men, remembered today by their philanthropic legacies – John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Leland Stanford, James Buchanan Duke – also figure in Wikipedia’s list of “businessmen who were labelled robber barons”.

If one is to make sense of the recent surge in the quantum of philanthropic funds sloshing around looking for worthy causes – the Bain & Co. Indian Philanthropy Report 2015 notes that foreign philanthropic funding in India more than doubled from 2004 to 2009, jumping from $0.8 billion in FY‘04 to $1.9 billion in FY’09 – then one needs to go beyond the numbers and look at the economic underpinnings of corporate philanthropic initiatives. This is precisely what sociologist Linsey McGoey sets out to do in No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, which released last month.

No Such Thing… kicks off with a quick reminder of the shady origins of philanthropy. How many of us know, for instance, that not too long ago public opinion (and government opinion) was against philanthropy in general, and corporate philanthropy in particular?

In the early 20th century, philanthropic foundations were “viewed as mere outposts of profit-seeking empires, only cosmetically different from the corporations that had spawned them, a convenient way for business magnates to extend their reach over domestic and foreign populaces.” McGoey quotes US Attorney General George Wickersham, who had observed that they were “a scheme for perpetuating vast wealth” and “entirely inconsistent with the public interest.”

Yet what was common sense in 1910 would sound blasphemous in 2015. While no self-respecting economist today can deny the obscene economic inequality that characterises our age, not many would willingly acknowledge the connection between concentration of wealth and philanthropy. That is to say, an equitable society would suffer neither a club of the super-rich that seeks self-expression through philanthropy, nor a class of the super-poor that is dependant on philanthropic charity for survival. McGoey makes this point simply with a quote from the economic historian RH Tawney: “What thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice the problem of riches.”

If philanthropy is thriving in this age of extreme inequality, it is because it serves a dual purpose: one, to make inequality more acceptable ideologically and morally; and two, to define poverty as a problem of scarcity rather than of inequality. Hence the ultimate argument in favour of philanthropy, deployed when all else fails, is the one based on scarcity: ‘something (from a foundation) is better than nothing (from the government)’.

Philanthropy is the palliative that makes the pain of capitalism bearable for those fated to endure it. Philanthrocapitalism, on the other hand, is about transcending this palliative function to represent capitalism itself as a philanthropic enterprise.

In Bishop and Green’s formulation, such a philanthropic capitalism – also known as ‘venture philanthropy’, ‘social entrepreneurship’, ‘impact investing’ – would drive innovation in a way that “tends to benefit everyone, sooner or later, through new products, higher quality and lower prices.”

As McGoey reveals in her book (and Bishop and Green attest in theirs), no one does philanthrocapitalism better, or bigger, than Bill Gates, who helms the world’s largest philanthropic foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (henceforth Gates Foundation), with an endowment of $42.3 billion. For this very reason, the Gates Foundation is an ideal case study for understanding the social impact of philanthropic foundations.



Problems with philanthrocapitalism



McGoey enumerates three obvious problems with philanthrocapitalism, illustrating each with reference to the Gates Foundation.

First is the lack of accountability and transparency. McGoey points out that the Gates Foundation is the single largest donor to the World Health Organisation (WHO), donating more than even the US government. While the WHO is accountable to the member governments, the Gates Foundation is accountable only to its three trustees – Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffet. It is not unreasonable to wonder if the WHO’s independence would not be compromised when 10% of its funding comes from a single private entity “with the power to stipulate exactly where and how the UN institution spends its money.”

Secondly, “philanthropy, by channelling private funds towards public services, erodes support for governmental spending on health and education.” With governments everywhere slashing their budgets for public goods such as education and healthcare, the resultant funding gap is sought to be filled by philanthropic money channelled through NGOs. But with one crucial difference: while the citizen has a rights-based claim on government-funded social security, she can do nothing if a philanthropic donor decides to stop funding a given welfare project – as has happened time and again in many parts of the world.

At the same time, even as it facilitates government withdrawal from provision of social goods, philanthropy paves the way for entry of private players into the same space. McGoey details how the Gates Foundation orchestrated this brilliantly in the American education sector, where it helped create a whole new market for private investment: secondary and primary schools run on a for-profit basis.

Third, the same businessmen who made their money through unhealthy practices that worsened economic inequalities are now, in their philanthropic avatar, purporting to remedy the very inequalities they helped create. In the case of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft’s illegal business practices are well documented in the US Department of Justice anti-trust case against the company. As McGoey puts it, the fortune now being administered through the Gates Foundation “was accumulated in some measure through ill-gotten means.”

Of course, none of this should detract from the undeniably good work that philanthropic bodies have done. The Gates Foundation has saved countless lives, especially in Africa, through its funding of immunisation programmes and outreach projects. Its several achievements, therefore, have been deservedly celebrated. Nonetheless, critical scrutiny lags far behind the lavish accolades.

Even the three issues discussed above barely scratch the surface. McGoey goes on to raise several more.

She asks, for instance, asks how the Gates Foundation’s interventions in global health tally with Bill Gates’ violent opposition to any dilution of the patent regime. The Gates Foundation was the largest private donor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. At the same time, it “has continually lobbied against price reductions of HIV drugs and other medicines”, infuriating activists who “want a more equitable global patent regime” and “do not want charity handouts.”

She examines the Gates Foundation’s partnerships with Coca-Cola, not exactly popular among those who value public health. In the context of the Foundation’s work to help combat global hunger, she reveals how its financial ties with Monsanto and investments in Goldman Sachs “may be compounding food insecurity rather than mitigating it”.

She interrogates its skewed research portfolio. Of the 659 grants made by the Gates Foundation in the field of global health, 560 went to organisations in high-income countries, even though the problems being targeted were in low-income countries. How does excluding local scientists and programme managers who are best placed to understand the problems help the cause, asks McGoey.

While it is generally taken for granted that a philanthropic foundation would make grants only to non-profits, McGoey draws attention to the Gates Foundation’s non-repayable grant of $4.8 million to Vodacom, a subsidiary of Vodafone. In 2014, the Gates Foundation also announced a grant of $11 million to Mastercard for a “financial inclusion” project in Nairobi. Interesting how philanthropy has evolved to such an extent that in a world wracked by hunger, disease, war, and malnutrition, two entities found to be most in need include a multinational credit card network and a multinational mobile service provider.
Finally, not to be forgotten are the tax breaks that philanthropic foundations enjoy. Critics have pointed out that nearly half of the billions of dollars in funds that philanthropic foundations hold actually belong to the public, as it is money foregone by the state through tax exemptions. History has shown that progressive taxation is the most efficacious route to redistribution. But a strong case for philanthropy is another way of making a strong case for lower taxation of the rich – after all, it’ll leave them with more money to spend on uplifting the poor. Small wonder then that philanthropy’s biggest enthusiasts are political conservatives.

The Economist report on philanthrocapitalism cited above also quotes a young Indian philanthropist, Uday Khemka, who predicts that “philanthropy will increasingly come to resemble the capitalist economy.” That was in 2006. Nine years later, the publication of McGoey’s No Such Thing As a Free Gift marks the first systematic attempt to document this phenomenon.







sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody

Frankie Boyle in The Guardian

The anti-immigration election rhetoric is perverse – we fear the arrival of people that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them



‘Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents’


I sometimes wonder if satire has reached a nadir in Britain because British society has itself become a parody of itself. The Chipping Norton Set: the prime minister, a tabloid editor and a Roger Mellie-ish TV icon all conveniently living in the same little town and taking turns at being the centre of scandal, feels like a novel Martin Amis bashed out because his conservatory was leaking. Likewise there has been an element of tragic irony this week as the growing drumbeat of anti-immigration election rhetoric has been punctuated by the mass drowning of migrants.

The SNP’s growing popularity has prompted a little low-level press racism of the kilts-and-porridge variety, as an English electorate struggles with the idea that there will be Scottish people holding the reins of power for the first time since the last government. Nicola Sturgeon has been called “the most dangerous woman in Britain”, by someone who hasn’t met any other Scottish women. Of course, it’s difficult to explain to English people that we have always had their best interests at heart – if we hadn’t invented penicillin they would have all died in a Greek airport departure lounge. There have already been a couple of amusing moments in the campaign when leaders standing in front of union jacks expounding on the need for a £100bn missile system have taken time out to warn us about the dangers of nationalism. Personally, I think it might be invigorating to have a hung parliament where, before any law was passed, the government had to have an argument with a Scottish person.

“Gosh, you seem awfully good at this. Have you had some practice?”

“I’m not actually part of the Scottish negotiating team, I’m just here to take your drinks order …”

“Ah, right, could I have a cup of tea?”

“NO.”

Ed Miliband’s anti-immigration stance is odd: it’s hard to vote for a man who doesn’t have the confidence to defend his own existence. It seems that his main argument against immigrants is that his dad raised a befuddled fuckwit. Could you hand Labour’s “controls on immigration” mug to a guest? There’s nothing like jollying up a Macmillan Cancer Support coffee morning by making your neighbours feel like the pakoras were a little unwelcome. Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents. Unless you drink hot Tizer from a coffee cup, the drink inside that mug will be an immigrant. The logic of a receptacle for hot beverages provided by slavery and colonisation being anti-immigrant bears no more examination than a pair of homophobic Speedos.

Then there’s Ukip, like someone made a heavy-handed version of The Thick of It for ITV. They don’t want Britain to be ruled by foreigners – with the notable exception of the royal family. They want an Australian-style points system for immigration. Who knows what this will look like, but my suspicion is “being white” will be like catching the snitch in Quidditch. If we have become a self-satirising society, Ukip are just the broader end, the easy slapstick laughs. They even have a porn-star candidate. Of course, he isn’t the first MP to have filmed himself having sex. But he is the first to do so with an adult, whom he allowed to live.

Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.

In a further nod to satire, Comic Relief this year focused on Malawi and Uganda. I didn’t see any acknowledgement that Britain had been the colonial power in those countries. “Thanks for the gold, lads, thanks for the diamonds. We had a whip-round and got you a fishing rod.”

A lot of racism comes from projection. White Americans have a stereotype of black people being criminals purely because they can’t acknowledge that it was actually white people that stole them from Africa in the first place. Today, you have the spectacle of black men being gunned down by cops who, by way of mitigation, release footage to show that the victims were running away. This is what happens when you don’t understand or even acknowledge history. You end up in a situation where, when slavery is the elephant in the room in your relationship with African Americans, you think it’s OK to say that you killed one of them because he was trying to escape.

Britain is in a similar place with colonialism. We have streets named after slave owners. We profited from a vile crime and feel no shame. We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don’t understand. It is British people that don’t learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.

DWP orders man to work without pay for company that made him redundant

John McArthur is sanctioned by jobcentre after refusing ‘forced labour’ at firm where he was previously paid minimum wage

• Shiv Malik
• The Guardian, Monday 3 November 2014 17.27 GMT

John McArthur makes his one-man protest outside LAMH in Motherwell after having his jobseeker’s allowance cut. Photograph: Alan Watson/HE Media/South West News

A  man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.

Electronics specialist John McArthur, now unemployed, says he is living off 16p tins of spaghetti and without heating after being sanctioned by a jobcentre for refusing to work unpaid for LAMH Recycle in Motherwell, a Scottish social enterprise.

He says he was happy to work for LAMH under the now-defunct future jobs fund for the minimum wage in 2010-2011, but refuses on principle to do the same job unpaid.

McArthur, 59, says he is surviving on a monthly pension of £149 after the DWP stopped his unemployment benefit until January as punishment for his refusal to go on the 26-week community work placement (CWP).

For almost three months, McArthur has spent two hours each weekday morning parading outside the plant wearing a placard reading: “Say no to slave labour”.

“It was simply a case of: ‘Go here, work for nothing and if you don’t we’ll stop your subsistence level benefit,’” he said.

McArthur, who says he has been applying for 50 jobs a week without joy, said the CWP programme was “entirely exploitative” and came at the “expense of poor people who’ve got absolutely no choice”. He added: “They [the government] deny it’s forced labour, that you can say no, but forced doesn’t always mean physical, it can be psychological or economic.

“The person who is trying to survive already on subsistence level welfare has absolutely no choice in the matter … especially if they’ve got young children to look after.”

LAMH confirmed it has 16 people working for six months without pay under CWP but added that since the end of June, six had progressed into paid employment.

The social enterprise, which repairs computers and recycles tin and cardboard, says it helps dozens of people each year who are long-term unemployed, many of whom have health issues.

Joe Fulton, the operations and development manager, said he believed the scheme “worked for people who want to make it work for them”. He added that out of the organisation’s paid workforce of 39, 25 had previously been unemployed.

McArthur said there were no jobs for someone his age in the Lanarkshire area. He said support for his placard demonstration had been overwhelming and just one person had objected.

Following conversations with local councillors, North Lanarkshire council passed a motion in October strongly objecting to forced employment schemes saying it would not get involved itself. “This council will not provide jobs or placements without pay as a condition of receiving benefits unless it is truly voluntary,” the motion read.

“We do not support any mandation of unemployed people to work without pay that puts their benefits at risk.”

The motion added such measures were ineffective and could “further stigmatise and demotivate” the unemployed in their search for work.

Last Wednesday, the DWP continued to battle the information commissioner and hostile court judgments ordering it to reveal where possibly hundreds of thousands of people are being sent to work without pay, sometimes for months at a time.

At the tribunal, the DWP argued that if the public knew exactly where people were being sent on placements political protests would increase, which was likely to lead to the collapse of several employment schemes and undermine the government’s economic interests.

The DWP confirmed some of the UK’s biggest charities, including the British Heart Foundation, Scope, Banardo’s, Sue Ryder, and Marie Curie had withdrawn from the CWP scheme, causing a significant loss of placements.

Giving evidence, senior civil servant Jennifer Bradley confirmed that numerous charities and businesses were receiving cash payments as an incentive to take on the unemployed.

She said several DWP schemes used mandatory unpaid work as a tool to help people but stressed that it was written into the terms that charities and businesses could not use people out of work to replace their paid workforce.

The DWP said it could not comment on individual cases but added that community work placements “help long-term unemployed people to gain work experience which increases their confidence, helps them to gain vital skills and crucially, improves their chances of getting a job.

“We are not naming the charities and community groups involved in the scheme in order to protect them from those who seem intent on stopping us helping people into work.”

'Greedy' charity shops under fire for prices beyond means of poor

Bargains are becoming a thing of the past as stores attract label hunters with deep pockets

• Tess Reidy
• The Observer, Sunday 29 December 2013

A happy shopper with her Victoria Beckham charity-shop bargain. Photograph: Rex Features/London News Pictures

June Houghton, 83, from Rhyl in north Wales, pointed to a necklace in the window of an Oxfam shop in the Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield. "That's £150!" she said in disbelief. "I don't care if it's real gold, you don't sell that in a charity shop for £150! This may be a very affluent area, but there are pensioners and young people here too. I'm against charity shops now. I don't shop in them any more."

Her husband, Roy Turner, 86, agreed. "The prices here are double to three times those of any charity shop in north Wales."

In some cities and more affluent towns, scenes such as this are becoming increasingly common, as charity wardrobe chic pushes prices up and moves charity shops out of the reach of poorer people, a reversal of the original goal of creating a win-win situation. Traditionally, charity shops make money from stuff people don't want, the money goes to a good cause and buyers get a bargain for something they need – or value.

Sarah Raphael, deputy editor of i-D magazine, said: "The whole fun of charity-shop shopping is that it's a hunt; when you find that Yves Saint Laurent jacket from the 1970s beneath a jigsaw, it's that much more satisfying."

Now, however, the rules are changing – and the charity-shop industry, in parts, is beginning to look greedy. More than 10,000 charity shops now vie for business on our high streets. In the past six months their number has risen by more than 10%.

The shops, which have long enjoyed 80% mandatory relief on business rates, received a high-profile boost recently when a number of celebrities donated designer items. Donors on the A-list include Victoria and David Beckham, who gave boxes of their clothes and shoes to the British Red Cross in Chelsea, raising thousands of pounds for the charity. In spite of this, after earlier bumper profits, some charities are now experiencing a downturn.

Giants such as Oxfam have seen their profits plunge. In the past year, Oxfam's income fell by £17.6m. The charity, which has a network of nearly 700 shops, puts this down to the high street facing another year of economic downturn. But in spite of that, prices in shops in affluent areas can be surprisingly high.

Ian Matthews, Oxfam's head of retail, said: "The public kindly donates stock to Oxfam and we believe the best way to thank our donors is to get the best price we can, which in turn raises as much money as possible for Oxfam's work. All our shop managers have the flexibility to set their own prices, using their judgment and some guidance, to decide what prices and products will best suit customers in their location."

In the fashionable seaside town of Deal, Kent, there are now eight charity shops on the high street. Locals say they are packed, but people are not necessarily spending. Retired teacher Jane Neal, 63, said: "It used to be you could pick up amazing things, but now I think the people who work in the shops check on the computer and see an item's value immediately. The culture has changed."

Even in London, where vintage obsessives have long been prepared to rifle through the racks to find a fairly priced gem, customers complain that they are being priced out – and not just for designer labels. Modupe Tijani, 59, a carer from London, said she often sees clothing from Primark being sold at higher prices than it cost brand new. "It's not supposed to be like this," she said.

Mustafa Sami, 61, from London, who lost his job 18 months ago, agreed: "If you want a nice jacket, it costs a lot now."

One explanation for the rise in prices is that there is an increase in the number of dealers making excessive profits out of charity shops. One manager of a charity shop said: "We are trying to do what is best for everyone. We don't get it right every time, but we get it far more right than wrong. It has to be fair for the customer, for the donor and for the charity."

They might be living in caves, but it's not the homeless who are hiding

Our urban skins get ever thicker to the soaring numbers of people living on the streets. My solution? Keep building up that sense of comfortable numbness

Grace Dent in The Independent

Homeless men and women close to Stockport, Greater Manchester have been found living in a cave system, huddled in sandstone hideyholes amongst rubbish and food scraps, close to whatever they use as a toilet. Imagine an otherwordly scene from Lord of The Rings, but instead of Hobbits and  quests to overcome the dark lord Sauron, actual human beings like you and me and the simple quest to stay alive.

Wellspring, a local homeless charity, say that compared to rough sleeping in the town, the cave-dwellers at least find their new home safe and dry. Britain’s homeless problem burgeons, becoming more complex year on year. Plain facts: the financial crisis of recent years has driven up unemployment to 7.8 per cent. Meanwhile, the cost of living has risen along with house prices, and numbers of homeless people have rocketed. In London homelessness rose by 16 per cent in 2012-13, meanwhile parts of Greater Manchester saw rises of as much as 40 per cent.

When I saw pictures of the cave people in the greater Manchester area, my immediate gut-reaction was to write about them – because no one in modern Britain should live in a cave –  but within minutes I questioned whether it was really a story at all. Deep down, who would actually care? Perhaps it’s not the ever-plummeting level of squalor in which we permit human beings in Britain to live that’s of most interest here. What’s interesting is the ever-effective numbness of “the haves” – myself included when faced with “the have-nothings”.

In truth, I often spend a few moments – for the sake of my sanity – trying not to care remotely about the homeless. That girl who sits on the pavement near my house, staring at the floor, day after day, holding a paper cup for change, she’s not homeless really is she? No, most probably she’s part of a begging gang. I can ignore her. I’m very busy. And the skeletal man on crutches who sits in the Tube doorway, sometimes weeping, well I’ve seen him get on the number 158 bus so he must be going somewhere. That’s it, not homeless. Guilt absolved. And that crowd of men and women drinking themselves to death publicly, like a ghoulish piece of performance art, erecting their cardboard bedroom in the doorway of my local library, well, what can actually be done for them? Nothing, I think. In fact part of me is irate at them for messing up the aesthetic splendour of a newly stonewashed building. And will no one think of my house price?

At one point such fetid thoughts would never have crossed my mind, but the downturn has been long, the homeless keep multiplying, and our urban skins become ever thicker. So like most bleeding-heart liberals I am pained by the cave people of Stockport, but am yet to go into full St Francis of Assisi mode, and fling open my own front door.

Instead, I sit patiently waiting for “something to be done”, such as the industrious hammering up of the “affordable homes” that several Governments in my lifetime have promised. Obviously, in truth, builders and councils have no true interest in building dirt-cheap accommodation. That’s why flyers for luxury two-bedroom executive apartments, for £250,000, flood my letterbox daily. Neither do I envisage a full-throated “Golly, we were wrong” return to public housing by the Conservatives – or Labour having any muscle to do anything, especially as these days socialists love owning homes too.

Broadly speaking, I would say the Government has no real concern or plans for the rising numbers of rough sleepers, as the impoverished don’t fit in with ideals of enterprise or self-interest. Obviously, several ears may have pricked up when an advertising agency experimented with making homeless people  into 4G hotspots, in Texas, last March, but attention dwindled soon after. Furthermore I hold no hope of the homeless wangling their way onto half-buy schemes, of which the paperwork is more flummoxing and the cost more expensive than a regular mortgage. Do I have any solutions? One-bedroom stackable pods, built by charities (aka The Nimby armageddon)? Wide-scale homelessness “boot camps” where thousands of jobless graduates, trained in social care, help people in a life quandary? OK, that’s a bit kumbayah isn’t it? And, now I’ve written it down, perhaps a tiny bit Third Reich too. So, indeed, my current approach to homelessness is to build on my ongoing, ever-comfortable numbness, possibly leading one day to my simply stepping over a corpse on the way to ASDA mumbling “Oh, what a shame! Something must really be done.” If anything, Stockport’s cave people might be making a point. They’re isolated from help, but at least they’re avoiding our hand-wringing and ultimate hypocrisy.