Paid vs Aid: What Would You Do?
The Beatles sang a song about money …
Money don’t get everything, it’s true
What it don’t get, I can’t use
Now give me money (that’s what I want)
That’s what I want (that’s what I want)
Few people would actually take such a calloused approach to money. We’ve experienced enough to realize that money alone isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. But when we are faced with difficult moral decisions involving money, how can we balance our own desires against those of others?
A contest for university students called “Paid vs Aid” seeks to highlight the difficult choices we need to make daily, but rarely take the time to think about:
Starving for life and loveliness: Overcoming Anorexia
Struggling to feel beautiful?: Talk to a mentor
Each and every day, we make choices. We make choices about our base needs: what to eat, what to wear, how many cups of coffee we want to drink. We make choices about relationships: Who we want to befriend, who we love, how we want to be loved.
The winner of the $1,000 prize in the Paid vs Aid contest must make a choice: Do they want to use the money towards their university tuition bill, or to help others by building clean water wells, housing in Haiti, or support for orphans in Tanzania? (All funds donated would be managed and followed-up by the Global Aid Network, a registered charity with ongoing ministries in all of these locations.)
The choice is offered to the winner: What do you choose to do with the money?
But why even bother to offer a choice? Why not just give the winner the money and tell them to do whatever they want with it? The reason is to make us think a little deeper about the choices we make, and the cravings that we all have that drive those choices.
What would you choose if you won, and why? Can you recognize how your own cravings, like for intimacy, destiny, and meaning, could impact your decision?
For information on how to enter, visit this page to see a list of campuses in Canada where the contest is being offered, and look for the booth at your school this September. One prize will be awarded per campus.
Tags: college, give, Haiti, help, humanitarian, Money, Paid vs. Aid, prize, tution, university, water wells
8 Responses to “Paid vs Aid: What Would You Do?”
Leave a Reply
Start a conversation
Media
Crave: The Documentary
What role do our deepest human cravings for intimacy, destiny, and meaning play in our search for God?
>Watch
Do you crave destiny? (Part 2)
Destiny? Is this really me? Was I really born for great things?
>Watch
This contest is very frustrating to me. The goal is noble: improve the lives of those in need. The means seem simple: $1000 towards a project that will improve those lives. But having spent time working overseas on International Development, I am left with a suite of questions about the impact from this.
To drill a proper borehole, which is considered a proper safe water point in Africa, costs $10 000, not $1000. So how does the money contribute? If 10 people all pledge their money to the ‘well’, does a village get a borehole? Is the reason that the village doesn’t have access to a borehole because there isn’t one nearby, or is it because theirs broke? If this one is built, how will fix it when it breaks? With what spare parts? If nobody owns the borehole, who maintains it?
I have so many questions about all of the ‘choices’ that this contest presents, and they all lead towards the answer that this contest is borne of good intentions, but fails to know the ramifications of its actions. At the orphanage, which children will receive the benefits of the donation? How is it decided? What happens to those who don’t get selected? I know of villages that received similar donations via their local primary school. Half the students received supplies, half didn’t. The entire community was torn apart because some children received arbitrary hand-outs, while others didn’t.
Donations like this come from well intentioned western people, who want to improve the lives of the less fortunate. We donate our money, and it goes into projects that, at best, don’t make any difference. More often, they cause repercussions that actually prevent proper development. The free well takes away the job from the local business, the free food and school supplies divide a community in two, but the western donor goes to bed happy, thinking s/he has made a difference in the world.
If you truly care about improving the world, and want to know how your choices and actions affect the rest of the world, I encourage you to question how these projects are implemented, and know that even the best intentioned projects can leave things worse than they started.
I have seen first hand that projects like Paid vs. Aid are destructive, poorly understood/executed interventions, and that is why I am boycotting the contest, and encouraging my friends to ask the same questions. If you are comfortable ‘choosing’ a project that could distort local economies, or split apart villages, than by all means join the contest. If you want to really know how your choices affect the world, I encourage you to educate yourself, ask questions of those who are implementing projects, and understand the impacts from what you are doing.
If you insist on entering the draw, please use the money for tuition, and spend the time you would otherwise have spent working at a job to get involved in student groups and other international development organizations, and learn how you can actually make a difference in the world.
This is ridiculous, what an exercise of white privilege. rather than actually advocating for real redistribution of wealth and power you merely put it in the hands of those least qualified to make decisions which will impact (or not impact, considering 1000$ is a hugely arbitrary sum, SOMEONE is cashing out somewhere, and it isn’t the Canadian student and it most certainly isn’t those poor folks in “Africa”)
How can you justify treating the very real plight of the poor and oppressed in a reality-tv-show style competition to gauge the morality of Canadian university students?
Wow! Thank you so much for pointing this out. I agree that aid can be handed out with high intentions but unfortunate implications. It seems we’ve overlooked provided you with all the information needed.
We are so pleased to be partnering with Global Aid Network for the distribution of the ‘AID’ portion of this contest. Thanks to your concerns I’ll make sure a more detailed report of our partnership and the administration of the ‘winnings’ are posted on our website mycravings.ca.
In the meantime, please visit GAiN directly to learn more about the projects we will be participating in. I’m interested in your thoughts.
Who is GAiN?: http://www.globalaid.net/about/
Water for Life Benin: http://www.globalaid.net/project-pages/water-benin/
Rebuilding Haiti: http://www.globalaid.net/project-pages/be-part-of-rebuilding-haiti/
Upendo Orphanage, Tanzania: http://www.globalaid.net/project-pages/upendo-orphanage/
Thank you for posting such a well thought out response. It is obvious that you really care and your experiences have left you with many concerns and questions.
PFB & Watstan, thank you for your comments!
PFB, it’s clear that you’ve spent time thinking about these issues. Thank you for the measured and balanced way that you’ve expressed your opinions. Part of the point of this contest is to encourage people to think through their decision-making processes, and you seem to have already done so. I wonder if your classmates have done likewise? If not, this contest may be a valuable exercise for them.
I do think you’ve made some unfounded assumptions, mainly that the money from this contest (if not used for tuition and given to one of the charitable causes) will as you say “at best, won’t make any difference.” I’m concerned with stability as well, so that’s why I am not interested in programs that merely hand out food or “sponsor a child” type programs. While good intentioned, they are not sustainable; they just encourage dependence. This is why, as Meredith pointed out above, Global Aid Network will be handling the disbursement of funds for each of the charity options. They already have permanent projects at work in those countries, so they will not just be dumping the funds into a community and leaving. I believe that $1,000 can make a real lasting difference for these communities. Even if that $1,000 only pays for 10% of a well, isn’t that still worthwhile? Are all donations less than $10,000 really useless?
Even if we accepted your appraisal of the contest as being true, that the funds given to these communities would make no difference (which I don’t think is the case, but let’s accept that premise for the sake of argument) then it should not prevent anyone from entering the contest; rather, it should make you want to enter it more! At least then you would have a chance to win and ensure that the money would be used for tuition and not given to these so-called “destructive” causes.
Watsan, this contest was not intended as a “morality test”; sorry that you see it that way. Recently I watched the movie Inception (it’s excellent, you guys might want to watch it if you haven’t already) and one of the questions asked in the movie is: What is the most resilient parasite? They suggest that it is an idea. Although you’ve obviously thought about the ramifications of how we use our money, many of your classmates likely have not, and we hope that encouraging them to think about the idea of choices will lead to great things. Change minds and hearts first and I think we will see real change in the world follow … do you agree?
I have seen inception, I saw it in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia while taking a few days off working on a cholera prevention project in rural Malawi for 4 months. The irony is palpable.
Concerning the 1000$ for a well, I was living in a village with 2 boreholes, (or hand pump wells. Afridev model) installed by action aid in 1999. Both have not been functioning since 2006. The total cost to fix both of these wells was around 28,000 Malawian Kwatcha, or just under $200 USD. Say, for instance, that this village was chosen to be the village that this money will be supporting. Will the village leaders and people have any say as to what the cash is spent on? Probably not. Will a new well be dug right next to the other, broken well? Most likely yes.
This is a typical situation. Many of the villages in my area of Malawi HAD boreholes or a water point of some kind which was non-functioning. This is a direct result of the big AID push in the 90s and 80s, where diggin’ wells and feedin’ the poor was the priority. A big, bottomless money hole where accountability and follow up were sacrificed for the warm-fuzzy feeling of satisfying our guilt.
You are absolutely right, change needs to happen in the mind and in the heart before we can expect to see any sort of slow, delicate shift towards actually treating the people of “Africa” with the respect they deserve. So lets can this project and use the funds to create a free lecture series with speakers and experts on aid and development, lets find a way to generate discourse and dialogue about how we can assess and perhaps meet the actual needs of our fellow humans rather than assume we know what the priority is.
I disagree with your assertions Watstan. Who said that this is advocating a re-distribution of wealth? From what I can tell, it isn’t. It is a contest designed to make students think about a choice they can make. It is designed to begin a conversation that will hopefully lead to what you suggested in your second post, real change.
A question to think about – will the publicity and dialogue this contest will generate be the same if there were no contest and instead free lectures on how to meet the needs of fellow humans? Maybe, but we won’t know until it has been tried.
Anyone can invite experts to discuss and dialogue and should. However, I haven’t seen something like this on campus yet. I say lets do both and let see if we can make real change happen.
Watstan, Who will go to this course you speak of? The few? But who will try for 1000$ of tuition money? The many, most likely. A little seed of an idea in each person may grow large. As the ideas flourish they will build each other up. On the other side, many ideas with stronger background in the few may also grow strong, but to spread those ideas to the general populus is not easy. Unfortunately in this world, incentives are a very good way to grab someones attention. Though I am not definitively saying the many is better than the few, I do believe it has better potential energy.
I guess it matter where you put your priorities, allowing university students to exercise their privilege, or creating “real change”. Although the two are not mutually exclusive, this contest hardly puts the emphasis on actual impact. There are a million ways to create the residual, conversational and unsustainable changes you talk about. What kind of follow up will the contest have to make sure uni kids are still chatting about development issues in the developing world? I didn’t read anything about that.
If the main purpose of this contest is to get university folks to think more critically about their actions, don’t put the outcome of real live people on the chopping block. Its disrespectful and kind of unethical.
And everyone has potential, everything has -potential-. Potential doesn’t mean jack squat if you don’t use it or if it is used in a disruptive or lateral way. Saying something “has potential” is like saying someone “has legs”, doesn’t mean they will go anywhere.
I doubt very much that any discourse created by this contest, save perhaps this one, will create the kind of dialogue needed to enact real change. Any any functional conversation will need to be facilitated by those critical enough to breakdown the good intentioned but poorly thought out projects and contests and i don`t think this particular contest does that. I doubt the student who chooses to build a well will hear that their well broke, or that the money was stolen or instead the people in the village where is was to be build used the money to cement a bridge or something. I doubt that very much. There won`t be any sort of “Whoops! maybe I should demand more accountability” moments, just that warm, fuzzy glow of temporarily satiated white guilt.
why don’t you recognize the ambiguity behind the choices rather than purely focusing on “charity or me.”
It ain’t that simple, and all the wishing in the white western world won’t wash away the complexity.