Charity Sucks

One London Restaurateur Thinks So Anyway

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

There’s a scene in my novel ‘The Last Summer of the Water Strider’ when the guru-figure in the novel, Uncle Henry, takes his young charge, Adam, to a New Age fair in Bristol. Adam is both suspicious and admiring of Henry, who is a rogue Zen practitioner and all-purpose hippy/mystic ( this is set in the 1970s, a high water mark for that kind of thing).

As they approach the fair, Henry steps indifferently over a homeless person blocking his way to the entrance. Adam looks at Henry in disgust and remonstrates with him. Henry, unfazed, takes a ten-pound note out of his pocket, screws it in a ball and tosses it at the homeless man ( who looks at it with disinterest).

“Am I good person now?’ he asks Adam. Adam is bewildered, uncertain of the answer.

Henry’s point, I think ( I suppose, I should know, since I invented him) is that it’s the motivation for the act rather than the act itself that counts. I feel that to be more or less true, although others would say it doesn’t matter to the homeless man - he’s got the £10 all the same.

My attitude to charity has always felt conflicted. I can’t ever remember anyone in my family when I was growing up giving to ‘good causes’. I might have stuffed a few coins in the head of the painted plaster blind girl outside the newsagents, but on the whole, money was scarce and we disapproved of charity anyway. It was considered a disgrace to receive it and it took an exceptional circumstance to offer it.  

Not only was that part of a working-class ethic but part of our principles as a Labour voting family in the 1960’s and 70’s.  We paid our taxes – willingly - for the state to look after those who were most needy, and it was the recipient’s right to receive this help. It wasn’t a matter of charity.

My parents weren’t ungenerous – far from it, particularly when it came to someone needing help in the community or the family. When I became ill in the 1980s, they were prepared to sell their tiny terraced house – all that they owned - in order to pay for treatment.  But they didn’t worry too much about the suffering that – they were vaguely aware - plagued the larger world. They had enough problems of their own.   

Things have changed. Appeals for charity are everywhere – calling to you from your TV, on leaflets pushed into your letterbox, through posts on the Internet and ads on tubes, buses and billboards. People knock on your door and flag you down in the street.  Perhaps this expansion of charitable demand is a sign of the growth of our collective conscience, or the drawing back from the state from their duty of care, or simply the development of an application of sophisticated marketing techniques to organized charities. Whatever the case one cannot escape the demand to give – and give and give.

  

I am not a particularly passionate donor to charity.   Part of me still believes that it is the state’s responsibility and that taxes should be raised in order to facilitate this responsibility.   I am fully aware of how this might sound – stingy.  This is not entirely fair.  I often and regularly give money to those who busk or sell the Big Issue.  I also without any logic or predictability, make donations to single-issue charities, whether it’s for whatever the disaster of the week is, or a political imperative (usually, in my case via 38 Degrees, which, I have noticed, only today has started to try and sell me electricity via email). And I have given a fair amount of time to local good causes.

But the subject of charity makes me feel both uncomfortable and morally inadequate. Constant appeals to my conscience, while understandable, can feel counterproductive.  The problem is so large and intractable I don’t want to think about it and if I do think about it, I don’t want to have to choose. It’s not a matter of money - it’s a mixture of guilt, denial and choice paralysis.

It seems no longer enough just to live an ordinary life at an ordinary level without agonizing daily about wider, more distant suffering - suffering which has always been part of much of the world, but which is now inescapably visible and visibly inescapable.    Furthermore, whatever one does – rationally or not - one wants to feel connected to the result, to feel it is directly producing a positive outcome (which is why I tend to concentrate on The Big Issue, buskers and local causes)

So I was intrigued by a book, published in 2016, ‘Charity Sucks’, by restaurateur and social enterprise activist, Iqbal Wahhab.  Wahhab’s thesis is simple – organized charity has failed and will continue to fail.  Trust in such charities has dropped.   Business is the means by which we can restore that trust.

I met Wahhab at his restaurant, ‘Roast’ in Borough Market, London, from where he runs a number of social enterprise initiatives, most of them local.  The difference between social enterprise and charity is clear – social enterprise makes loans, carves out business opportunities, enables people to go into work, encourages profit and takes very seriously the process of measuring ‘impact’ You don’t just hand over money and hope for the best – you make an investment, and measure the outcome. And then, ideally, plough back the profit into the original investment.

Most charitable organisations, says Wahhab, are lazy, complacent and too wedded to an outdated model –and no one is overseeing them. ‘The Charity Commission is useless’ says Wahhab. “And no one else has any interest in scrutiny. It’s a cosy world of failure.

“If you make a donation and ask where your money has gone, the question itself is seen to be in bad faith. People just expect you to be shocked and appalled at the suffering and then assume they have the God given right to know how to spend it better than you do.

“We are meant to trust the charity itself. This noblesse oblige model no longer works. People don’t believe in politicians, or businessmen. Charities aren’t far behind. “

Wahhab – a self-made man of Bangladeshi heritage who grew up in a rough part of South London  - is not simply proselytising, but putting his money where his mouth is.  The book details some of his own attempts at social enterprise. 

These include ‘Mum’s the Chef’, an initiative in Croydon which empowers struggling mothers, many of them victims of domestic violence, to start their own catering businesses, and a project in Togo, where he facilitated loans – not donations - to a group of ambitious young women so that they could go on a business studies course and return to trigger economic growth in their area.   

His own social enterprises include an initiative where local ex offenders come to work in his restaurant and an ‘Impact’ table where all the money spent goes to local social initiatives.   These initiatives, made public, attract customers. And 80 per cent of their employees say that the reason they came to work there in the first place was because of their social policies.

So is he seriously suggesting that a hard-nosed businessman has an interest in employing  - for instance - a heroin addict rather than someone from the local catering college?

”It’s a long term procedure. I want to see people rehabilitated when I take them on as apprentices and my customers and employees will appreciate it when I do. Then it becomes an investment rather than a cost”

Wahhab advocates having commercial experts – businessmen in other words - sitting on the board of charities, not to simply sell their ‘product’ better, but to make sure that money is invested and produces a measurable outcome rather than just being blindly donated and then spent by well meaning but often insufficiently unaccountable administrators.

Charities themselves have, unsurprisingly, been highly critical of Wahhab’s message. Kirstley Weakley from the ’Civil Society’ website says the book is  ‘poorly researched…and is too simplistic in its core argument to be taken too seriously’. One sector leader describes it as ‘ranting about a model that no longer exists”

But Wahhab is adamant.

“We live in post trust society.  It is waning in the political system, in the economic system and it is failing in the charity system – particular since the cases of Kids Company and Olive Cooke, (the poppy seller who took her own life after being hounded by charities).

‘Social enterprise is the way forward, not only because it works – but because its in line with the spirit of the age.”

A version of this article was originally published in The Guardian in 2016.

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