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I have begun to think that a lot of my disagreements within the "good works" industry are down to my political temperament. Here's an example. https://hbr.org/2017/09/audacious-philanthropy
I absolutely agree that the world needs more long-term funding, not just in "philanthropy" but for literally every single human endeavour. So do I agree with the headline of the article? Yes.
But then I read the article and, while it makes some good points, it starts to get stuck in my throat. It's partly the word choices; it's my belief that the invasion by management-speak is a symptom of how late capitalism seeks to colonise good works, first by co-opting language.
But then:
This is a section of the article entitled "Build a Shared Understanding of the Problem and Its Ecosystem", and it doesn't talk about what "Big Tobacco" actually did, which was to corrupt public discourse, first in the US and then globally, in defense of big business.
(Read Merchants of Doubt by @NaomiOreskes and ErikMConway for the historical details, and be prepared to get very angry indeed.)
That seems like a pretty big omission in an article that is nominally about "system change", because in the grand scheme of things, it was the promoters of agnōsis who really won; it's the template for why we're now having bullshit discussions about whether Covid-19 is real.
They go on to talk about Aravind Eye Hospitals, which is an amazing initiative which has helped so many people. It doesn't seem to have changed "the system" of Indian health care, though, which remains a problematic patchwork of good and bad (Aravind being one of the good).
That's relevant because it appears in the section entitled "Design Approaches That Will Work at Massive Scale", and India is certainly context of massive scale - the most massive, in fact. Yet does Aravind Eye Hospitals work at a massive scale, in that context?
And finally: Sesame Street, which appears in the section "Drive (Rather than Assume) Demand". I have serious questions about what the phrase "system change" even means when you apply it to Sesame Street, but did it "drive demand"?
It seems more likely that there was a generation of under-served children and a cohort of harassed adults, who together generated a high level of demand. Thankfully it was Sesame Street that met that demand, rather than some ne'er-do-well TV executive with a line of toys to sell.
All of this to say: I don't necessarily disagree with the points raised in this article! But it seems like it's loaded up with a lot of assumptions, and there's some serious gaps in their analysis which makes me wonder if the details of that analysis are really useful or accurate
