Move Out Of The Way: Imagining and building liberation beyond the limits of charities.
Adéọlá Naomi Adérèmí (she/her) is a multilingual, multilocal, AfroGreek, and multi-format artist, scholar, curator, filmmaker, and healer. In this article, she shares her experiences in the NGO sector and offers us a vision for liberation in the charity sector and beyond.
“Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail. We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.”
Within a capitalist society framed and shaped by white supremacy (aka white inferiority), charities are not the solutions they claim themselves to be, regardless of the issue they allegedly aim to address or fix.
The Historic of Essence of Charities
The first questions we must ask ourselves regarding charities are: “What is their historic essence?” and “How did they come to be in the first place?” Charities were founded as early as the 12th century by well-meaning noble people, religious groups, and royalties who were charitable to specific communities and interests. Most charities then were schools or orphanages to cater to the workers in their homes or fields to prevent potential revolts. This reminds us that in their initiation, charities were crumbs thrown to the most marginalised and were never invented as a funnel for liberation or alternative realities of possibilities.
In my experience working with feminist and aid development charities in the UK and continental Europe, I have observed that the history of charities persists today. It sometimes shows itself in the most violent iterations towards marginalised communities that the charity is aimed to serve. I would like to expand on how the paternalistic nature of charities has a substantial impact on why and how they fail and, at times, also worsens the alleged issues they are addressing, such as the exploitation of the communities they work in and with, as well as structures of racism within the organisation, mission and how the daily operation of the organisations are carried out.
It is also important to note the role charities played in colonial times and the neo-colonialism of our current day. Development aids are the evolution to imperialism and the exploitation of indigenous people and their resources. Those nations who, for lack of a better word, believe they are well-versed in what is best for “civilisation” had no comprehension of indigenous cultures, norms, and customs, deeming everything outside their narrow scope undeserving, uncivilised, dangerous, and in need of eradication. In the dawn of colonialism, charity was viewed through the lens of missionaries, who were encouraged to spread ideological and religious imposition to colonised people with hopes of “civilising” us with little recognition of their brutality.
In my experience, most charities start with an altruistic goal of solving an issue and supporting a fundamental cause. However, the logistics of working and running a charity quickly become paternalistic. In my work as the communication manager for many “intersectional feminist” organisations whose staff members are constantly subjected to verbal, financial, and emotional abuse by older, more powerful board members.
Many of these board members' goals are parity with the positions men have historically occupied institutions; they are invested in maintaining the status quo as it was. For them, as long as they gain access to the same space and the same power as the oppressive, stale older white men who occupy the space they covet, then that is evidence of liberation. This narrow-minded view of freedom and liberation runs rampant in many feminist organisations.
Frankly speaking, we cannot expect liberation or freedom from institutions that are established as the bedrock of imperialism and classism.
Hierarchies of Injustice
To achieve liberation, we need a system that centres and builds on the experiences of the most marginalised by them and for them. Charities or NGOs (Non-governmental organisations) are not always started by, nor do they have the strategic mission for, the radical change needed to get to the complete liberation of all. Most NGOs/Charities believe they are working toward liberation and often embellish their ethos and mission statements with radically transformative words that do not translate to action, whether to their team or the recipients of the work they aim to do.
Many human rights organisations function with top-down power structures that are run by people who aim to build a profile for themselves in the sector. This creates a culture where it is deemed unrealistic to name the need for the sector to change or be radically transformed. The reality is that much of charity leadership is run by those who are not open to the impact of change in their personal growth.
For instance, there has been a rising number of reports that show that for people who work in humanitarian jobs, NGOs, and charities, there is a working crisis with many suffering from traumatic burnout, endemic abusive behaviours towards most marginalised staff, and pervasive white saviour complex that endangers the lives of the people they claim to “help”. This was the case for workers of Amnesty International in the UK, for young Black women who worked at the European NGOs in Brussels and London, and the case of the “decolonial” organisation “No white saviours” in Uganda. Most of these organisations don’t reflect on the harm caused but instead continue to play dancing chairs by hiring more marginalised people and burning them with various types of violence fueled by tokenistic white supremacist ideology.
As long as NGOs are run by people whose goal continues to be in the maintenance of the status quo with the paternalistic and patronising approach in their operations, NGOs and/or charities cannot be funnels of liberation. As the ancestor Thomas Isidore Sankara eloquently stated:
“You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.”
For true liberation to occur, we cannot continue to uphold the current way of doing things and continue to expect liberation.
Envisioning our Liberation
Liberation will and can only occur when we are open to letting the people who are the receivers of all the services lead the movement and the needed change. Liberation is prioritising the freedom of the most oppressed, following their lead, and using their lived experiences and skills to build alternative systems that will empower and support the individual and collective upliftment of everyone. To believe in true liberation, especially within the NGOs/charity sector, we must also believe in the abundance of available resources in order to tackle the funding that keeps most, if not all, charities chained to the rigid, imperialist origin of the sector.
Liberation looks like decolonising the capitalist and white supremacist culture that allows a few men to hoard wealth and extract the vital resources that create the unequal, poverty-stricken world we live in today. As Bryan Stevenson once said, “ The opposite of poverty is justice.” the world will be a more equal place when we all comprehend that the rich are not charitable for funding NGOs.
We need a systemic structure that prevents them from hoarding wealth in the first place in order to eradicate the poverty that is caused by their greed. The most pertinent thing to remember regarding NGOs and charities is that the work and all aspects of freedom constituting an equal society are inherently political. This begs the question of who is funding the movement, what are the key goals and priorities, who is leading those missions, and who is then the recipient of the work done? The truth we must reckon with is that these essential questions for liberation are not radically answered in the current modus operandi.
If we want to truly and meaningfully do liberation work in NGOs and charities, we must first be willing to address the gatekeeping in the philanthropic sector and dismantle the inequity in the leadership and organisational structures of these organisations, which requires a fundamental shift in power brokering, and transformation of the economic model of the sector. We have to be ready to accept that the work of NGOs is not only charitable but essential to decolonising the classist, racist and heteropatriarchal communities we have built. We must accept the urgent need to move power from a selected few to the collective in non-hierarchical collaborative systems.
We must accept that to create a society built on equity, fairness, and justice, we must first burn down the current sick and vampiric structures of society we have inherited from imperialist over-exploitative systems and collectively dream of a new world that will centre the most marginalised among us, built on restorative justice not only for people but also for the planet, incorporating lessons learned from Indigenous groups who have lived peacefully with others and the earth.
We must regain the collaborative consciousness of dreaming, creating, and building together with full awareness of our interdependence and freedom. We must be ready to accept the lessons of resting, detaching from capitalist norms to dream, resist, and imagine a liberation-focused world that encompasses joy, interdependence, and liberation for all.
White supremacy is the cancer that birthed the most carceral system, capitalism. For all of us to thrive, we must eradicate it in our lifetime, and we must do this all together.
Can NGOs and Charities be part of this new world? Absolutely yes.
NGOs and Charities should ask themselves whether they are ready to rebuild this transformative system with us. Are they prepared to right the wrongs and be part of justice instead of holding on to exploitation? They must be ready to no longer exist in the ways they have existed for so long and step back to step up for all.