Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion
Allison Schnable
262 pages, University of California Press, 2021
Activism and charity have been transformed in the digital era. As Black Lives Matter protests across the US and globe coordinated over social media, mutual aid groups organized online to deliver neighborhood-level assistance for the COVID-19 pandemic. My own hometown in the rural American Midwest borrowed organizing techniques from mutual aid groups in Brooklyn, who in turn had adopted them from London.
These are only the most recent instances of new, global forms of organizing. Over the last 20 years, more than 10,000 new NGOs have been established in the US to do relief and development work overseas. These are voluntary efforts that operate on slim budgets and fly beneath the radar of USAID and big-budget INGOs. The individuals who start these groups typically have a tie to a less-developed country through tourism, work travel, immigration, or adoption. Thanks to cheap flights, money transfer apps, and mobile phones, they no longer need to “wait for World Vision to get there,” as one grassroots INGO leader told me, but can work directly with partners abroad.
Their small-scale, privately funded organizations replace formal development expertise with personal action. But doing development as a personal charity has consequences for the communities that receive aid and the Americans who give it. Grassroots INGOs are insulated from the pressures that professionalized INGOs face to demonstrate their results and to create projects that can be replicated. And “thinking small” does not avoid all of the problems of private aid. Grassroots INGOs struggle to raise funds, to be accountable to clients, and to integrate themselves into the communities they serve. While they rouse the compassion of Americans, these groups tend to depict development as a problem of individual mobility, which allows supporters to ignore structural challenges like trade, climate change, and political institutions.
Amateurs without Borders shows the aspirations and limits of personal compassion on a global scale.—Allison Schnable
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The only ice-cream shop in Butare, Rwanda, is the off spring of a chance encounter at the Sundance Institute. The leader of a women's drumming group from East Africa fell into conversation with two restaurateurs from Brooklyn who had recently opened an ice cream shop that was winning the hearts of New York's foodies. In the space of a few months, the plan emerged for Inzozi Nziza: an ice-cream parlor in a Rwandan university neighborhood, funded by the Brooklyn restaurateurs and staffed by the young women who played in the drumming group. The young women would receive training in English and business management, while the appeal of ice cream on hot East African afternoons would eventually make the project self-sustaining. The three partners hired a former Peace Corps volunteer to oversee the training and launch of the shop in Butare, and in January 2011 the new organization was registered with the IRS as Blue Marble Dreams. Suddenly the Brooklyn foodies were the heads of a nongovernmental organization (NGO).
Blue Marble Dreams is one of more than 10,000 new international aid organizations founded by Americans since 1990. Thanks to the world-shrinking power of globalization, Americans find themselves connected to distant communities in the poor regions of the world. Beneath the global exchanges of trade and the movements of a cosmopolitan elite, American citizens are more quietly forging global ties through immigration, tourism, volunteering, study, work, and adoption.
These ties have made possible a new wave of grassroots development aid. In 1990, there were just over 1,000 international aid organizations registered with the US Internal Revenue Service. Over the years the numbers have grown, such that more than 1,300 new organizations were established in 2010 alone. By the end of 2015, a total of 13,030 aid organizations were active. They are now based in one out of every three US counties. These groups signal a transformation in the way Americans engage in global activism and charity.
To make sense of this organizational expansion, we have to understand that most of the ten thousand new organizations resemble Blue Marble Dreams more than well-known international NGOs like CARE or World Vision. These new groups rely largely on volunteer labor and individual donations rather than contract revenue or foundation grants. IRS records show that the median organization has an annual budget of $25,000 or less, and three-quarters operate on $134,000 or less annually. Only the top 8 percent of US-registered international aid organizations draw annual revenue of $1 million or more.
These groups are typically personal projects launched by Americans with a college degree but no professional experience in international development. Adoptive parents want to provide extra help to their child's native town; MBA students want to try out an idea for improving small-scale farming; an immigrant wants to set up a school in his home country; a pastor wants to dig wells in arid African villages. The people who initiate these projects are rarely development experts or seasoned activists. They are more likely teachers, accountants, or IT specialists who cut their teeth on church work or volunteer service. Work and leisure travel takes them to developing countries, where they forge relationships that inspire aid projects.
But these American volunteers cultivate the projects while they remain embedded in their careers and communities in the United States, unlike full-time, trained aid workers whose orientation is to the professional field of development. Because they are largely self-financed and separated from the professional development field, and because they emerge from personal relationships, these organizations reject expert prescriptions in favor of aid approaches that are more expressive and personal. I refer to these new organizations as grassroots international nongovernmental organizations.
Fifty years ago, a few of these groups' intrepid founders would have set off as Peace Corps volunteers or missionaries, but most of them would have just sent checks to large NGOs. Why so many groups like Blue Marble Dreams now? The emergence of grassroots INGOs is part of the broader story of "the rise and rise" of NGOs as actors in international affairs. But NGOs' rise had been accompanied—inextricably, it seemed—by their professionalization. Like other nonprofit organizations, NGOs have increasingly become guided by manager-experts, making them look more like government agencies and corporations than fluid expressions of civic energy. NGO scholar-practitioners Shepard Forman and Abby Stoddard wrote of NGO work in 2002 that "the era of well-meaning amateurs has given way to an epistemic community of well-trained professionals." So how do we get ice-cream shop owners starting an NGO with Rwandan musicians? How do we find a self-described Baptist "cowboy-pastor" at the head of an NGO that operates schools and clinics, and volunteers from Texas who describe their work in Bosnia as a "transatlantic barn-raising?" In short, globalization has transformed the way people can organize, and has put NGO work back in the hands of amateurs.
For Americans starting aid organizations, globalization’s most significant enabling change is the increasing number of ties to developing countries via migration and short-term travel. Thanks to the end of the Cold War and various civil wars, whole swaths of Africa, Central America, and Asia opened up to tourists by the 1990s. This was also at the moment when the price of airline tickets was declining in real dollars and the income of white-collar Americans was increasing. The 1965 immigration reform had swelled the population of highly educated Chinese and Indian immigrants, who by the turn of the millennium had the means to travel back and forth to their countries of origin. Immigrants and tourists alike could communicate with acquaintances abroad as the reach of the internet and mobile phones extended first to cities and then to rural provinces. Cheap container shipping now allows small-budget organizations to move goods around the world, while they can send money online through wire services and apps.
The NGO Becomes Personal
Blue Marble Dreams and the ten thousand organizations like it show that the NGO form is being reinvented as a vehicle for expressive personal charity. Expressive, personal, and charity are not words that most observers would use to describe the NGO field at large, but grassroots INGOs are personal in several senses of the term. First, individuals can be untethered from the traditional channels that might have supported them in their aid work: large INGOs, national aid agencies, denominational religious missions. Journalists writing about the emergence of volunteer-driven aid projects have recognized this personal dimension by dubbing them "DIY foreign aid" or "My Own NGO." But the distinction between "personal" and "solo" is important. The energy of the individuals who start grassroots INGOs is a crucial part of their story, but to portray them as working alone is misleading. They draw on resources from their personal networks to support their work. Friends and family form the core of financial support and volunteer labor. Grassroots INGO founders turn to these people when they need to learn how to incorporate their organization, build a website, or run a fundraiser. They find support among coworkers and fellow members of religious congregations and other civic organizations. Grassroots INGO volunteers' work is shaped by repertoires of action from their personal lives. They draw not on discourse or skills learned from professional aid work, but from other domains. They use the language of "barn-raising" or draw on religious metaphors and raise money through the yard sales, golf outings, and silent auctions they have attended for other causes.
Second, the organizations are structured and aid is given in ways that emphasize personal relationships between aid givers and aid receivers. Grassroots INGOs give amateurs an opportunity that is unmatched elsewhere: to do hands-on work on projects of their own design. Grassroots INGOs can form around the tastes and talents of their leaders. Often leaders draw on ideas of what has made them--or their forebears--successful: education, vocational skills, or religious practices. They usually structure the organization to allow direct contact with aid recipients. This shapes not just the types of projects the leaders choose, but also the relationship between the organization and the community it aims to serve. Grassroots INGOs tend to rely on relationships with the same local partners for executing projects, enjoying emotional intimacy, and providing accountability. This provides grassroots INGOs with a great deal of flexibility, but the contradictions of these multiple roles also create hazards.
Grassroots INGOs' emphasis on personal relationships leads most of them to do work that is ultimately charity—that aims to improve individual lives but does little to change broader contexts. I show that while some grassroots INGOs provide goods and services and others focus on changing recipients' skills and dispositions, these approaches have in common an idea of "development" as individual transformation. Some grassroots INGOs strive to build organizations that have robust local governance (e.g., cooperatives) or that are integrated into existing institutions (for example, medical training overseen by the Ministry of Health). But because of the limited time many grassroots INGO leaders spend overseas, their lack of language skills and cultural competence, and their preference for emotionally satisfying encounters, many grassroots INGOs struggle to be integrated into local institutions of government and civic life. Nearly all avoid politics. Building NGOs around personal relationships and expressive rationales frees them from many of the pressures of the professionalized NGO field. But it also generates weak accountability to the people the groups aim to help and risks, as one grassroots INGO leader admitted, "reinventing the wheel."
Possibilities and Perils of Amateur Aid
Sometimes "reinventing the wheel" works. We should not negate the possibility that the old-fashioned goods or services offered by some grassroots INGOs are quite welcome. The structure of grassroots INGOs insulates them from the lessons learned by development experts, but also their notorious fads. If the organization simply wants to provide scholarships, it does not have to sell its projects to donors as post-conflict reconstruction or HIV prevention, for example. Ethnographic work shows that beneficiaries of aid projects often contort themselves into the projects' demands in search of cash and basic goods like bicycles, stationery, and food. When grassroots INGOs offer such goods without pretense, at least they may be satisfying their beneficiaries' wishes. If we are to critique these projects, it is basically an opportunity-cost criticism: they are handouts, and not real "development" that might change conditions instead of perpetuating a cycle of aid.
One of the texts that recurred many times on websites to rationalize the work of grassroots INGOs was a story of a girl walking on a beach where thousands of starfish had washed up and would presumably die out of the water. The girl was picking up starfish and throwing them back in the water when a man approached her. Let it go, he told her; she could not possibly make a difference when there were so many. The girl tossed another starfish into the water and said, "I made a difference to that one."
This allegory makes a convincing case for particularistic but limited charity. It is churlish not to recognize that many of the goods provided by grassroots INGOs--more schools, more medical care, more clean water--are of themselves good things. But the poor are not starfish, and global inequality is not the sea. Human beings have access, however complicated and politically difficult, to the forces that raise the fortunes of some nations while drowning the fortunes of others. However useful they might be to individual starfish, the Americans that support grassroots INGOs' should not forget about the tides.