The Philanthropy Myth

In a properly functioning society, charity would not need to exist. Food banks, medical foundations, historical societies, and so many other groups and organisations we take for granted as normal charitable organisations are universally a symbol of the failure of our social imagination, a logical conclusion of the common view of government as a negative rather than the institution whose principle role is to manage shared costs and needs.

That hospitals need to fundraise to buy essential medical equipment is completely absurd, yet we treat this as normal. There are numerous examples of this; a google search for, say, “hospital foundation MRI” will, depending where you are, show no end of local stories about life saving equipment being purchased as a result of community fundraising.

Foodbanks are a relatively new phenomenon. In Canada, the first one appeared in Edmonton in 1981 as a temporary measure to help during the period’s oil crash. They now feed nearly a million Canadians every month.

Across the country, thousands of museums, preservation groups, and historical societies survive on meagre donations, teaching us about our own history and preserving artefacts from our past as if such information is only as important as the whims of its patrons.

Much of the charity we have come to depend on has only had to rise over my lifetime as the impact of massive tax cuts on the wealthy and the neoliberal defunding of government has taken its toll on our public services and common interests. With the defunding of government comes the defunding of society, of social and physical infrastructure, of our collective well-being.

The federal government spent the 80s defunding affordable housing and closing mental institutions, leading to a housing and homelessness crisis without precedent. They spent that period cutting taxes on the wealthiest and on corporations, leading to huge budget cuts for social services as part of the artificial deficit crisis that this caused, and a highly disproportionate tax burden on the working class.

Social and physical infrastructure were sold off to the highest bidders as governments got out of the business of government.

In order to mask the impact, the corporate world puts on a show of giving to charity. We have all passed the food bank bins in the grocery stores after being asked to add $1 to our receipts to give to a random charity, or bought products at the local coffee shops where a portion of the net profits on that one item will be shared with another, while those chains rake in untold billions in profits, the taxes on which would have mooted the need for those charitable contributions in the first place.

We celebrate Bell Canada for their annual Bell Let’s Talk campaign to provide nominal amounts to mental health when the company itself has been accused of being a major driver of work-related mental health challenges. We shouldn’t be relying on corporations to solve our mental health and we shouldn’t be allowing them to drive their people to the increasingly endemic burnout in a “do more with less” world. Bell is only one example of an economy-wide problem, and is only singled out here for the sheer cynicism of their annual marketing campaign disguised as philanthropy.

This wealthy charity-washing does not serve the public good. It lets both government and business off of the social responsibility hook. Neoliberal governments, which to some degree encompass nearly all political parties in the west today, don’t feel the pressure to restore social infrastructure because the people have come to believe that collective needs truly are individual responsibility, that the government is there for only the most fundamental core services and everything else is elective, whose existence need only exist through '“charity.”

There is no excuse for a society that has the wealth we have, yet asks the working poor to buy products from fantastically wealthy chains to donate to food banks at the door, where hospitals have to solicit donations from their patients for essential equipment, where communities must have a donation box to preserve their history.

Philanthropy is not success or a win; it is not up to wealthy individuals to decide where we need to direct our common resources. We have a government whose very purpose is to figure out and fund our collective needs. If after all those collective needs are met, without collective debt, without homelessness, without poverty, without core inequality and environmental destruction, only then can someone’s generosity above their obligation be considered philanthropic.

The unpalatable solution, of course, is higher asset and wealth taxes and the closing of the endless loopholes in our overly complicated tax code that only benefit those who can afford to manipulate them, and the strong social support structures that come with the well-funded government that would result. Everything we need is achievable; all it takes is understanding that we’re all in this together.

Charities are not the issue; those groups that provide services are important. Having to spend their time and resources begging for money and in-kind donations rather than fulfilling their mandate is the problem. If their services are needed, they should be funded.

Charity as we live it today is the rich asking the poor to give to the poorer. It functions because the poorest are the most generous. Relying on individual charity for what should be core functions of a collectively governed society is not a sign of a successful relatively egalitarian country; it is abject social failure.