You can tell a man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, but what if he has no feet?
Painting by Vincent van Gogh (1895), as taken from Wikimedia (2012)
Like how the classic colloquialism of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” assumes a set of standards that may not always apply, social interventions are only effective if they match the needs of the people they aim to serve. For instance, if I wanted to help a ward of impoverished patients by donating a dozen pairs of boots, I would get some pretty scornful looks if they were in the hospital for transfemoral amputations. My intentions may have been good, but if I don’t account for the experiences of everyone I hope to help, I may harm them more than help them. Unfortunately, many well-intended people look at the world as though through a mirror, assuming that everyone everywhere would share the same needs, desires, and concerns that they themselves have. While this may at times produce great deeds and moments of human triumph when the needs of donor and recipient coincide, it can at times backfire.
Take the push to send yoga mats to Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake (Kenny, 2011). Or the import of donated clothing that, through overwhelming the local economy, destroyed the textile industries in most African countries by 50 (Frazer, 2008; Brooks, 2013) to 88 percent (Aboagyewaa-Ntiri & Mintah, 2016). Or the food rations packages air-dropped in to Afghanistan that were the same color and size as cluster bombs and which Afghani children often couldn’t tell apart (Stupat, 2012).
If you didn’t speak English, would it be hard to tell which to pick up? (Stupart, 2012)
Interventions like these that do not take the interests and perspectives of the people they purport to help can do far more harm than good. But such top-down approaches are far too common; in fact, they’re the traditional way of providing aid, from neighborhood to neighborhood and from nation to nation. In top-down interventions, researchers, politicians, humanitarian aid workers, and other authorities treat recipients as passive beneficiaries of aid rather than as active participants in the process; they tell people what they need rather than think to ask. By believing that their own culture is the gold standard and the default from which all others should be compared, many individuals who are part of top-down programs practice ethnocentrism, and by assuming that this cultural superiority grants them the authority to know what’s best for others more than those others themselves, top-down practitioners can also be paternalistic as well. By exploring a bit more of what can go wrong when good intentions go bad, perhaps we can see just why the bottom-up participatory action research we learned about this week is such a revolution.
TOMS (2016d) is one of the progenitors of the buy-one, give-one model of profitable giving.
An example of a top-down program that could do with a bit of participatory action research is TOMS, a company that got its start by offering to donate a pair of shoes to an underprivileged person for every pair purchased. The company’s founder, Blake Mycoskie, got the idea while traveling the world after competing on The Amazing Race (2016). Mycoskie was in Argentina to learn how to play polo when he encountered a woman collecting shoes for the poor and, after accompanying her and seeing the impact she had on the lives of others, decided to return home and start an organization of his own (2016). Shoes for Tomorrow, later Tomorrow’s Shoes, which he shortened to TOMS to fit the name on the label (Mycoskie, 2016), has since grown into a remarkable success. The company has helped more than 35 million people in over 70 countries, donating shoes and glasses, increasing access to clean drinking water, promoting the means for safe childbirth, and even working to prevent bullying (TOMS, 2016e). TOMS has achieved this through its “One for One” philosophy–now trademarked–and the sale of everything from vegan shoes to designer eyeglasses to a special band for the Apple Watch (TOMS, 2016e), sales that contribute to the company’s estimated value of $625 million (Rupp & Banerjee, 2014). Clearly, the company aims to do well by doing good. But the question remains: Good for whom?