Hickey: Not all charities are worth supporting

Before Invisible Children founder Jason Russell was detained for alleged drunken disorderly… Before Invisible Children founder Jason Russell was detained for alleged drunken disorderly conduct and public masturbation, his organization was already the subject of some bad press.

The organization’s Kony 2012 video, which was meant to raise awareness about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s humanitarian crimes, garnered over 86 million views on YouTube. But those familiar with the political climate in the region were wary.

Invisible Children supports American intervention and increased funding for the Ugandan military, whose human rights record is far from spotless. According to Al-Jazeera, “Young adults [in Uganda] recall the time from the mid-1990s when most rural residents of the three Acholi districts were forcibly interned in camps. The Ugandan government claimed it was to ‘protect’ them from [Joseph Kony’s] Lord’s Resistance Army. But there were allegations of murder, bombings and the burning of entire villages. The excess mortality rate in these camps was approximately 1,000 persons per week — inviting comparisons to the numbers killed by the LRA at their peak.”

Ugandans were so offended by Invisible Children’s uncritical support of their military and so upset by what they considered an outdated and misleading depiction of their country that when the Kony 2012 video screened in Lira, Uganda, audience members reportedly shouted and threw rocks.

All this underscores an important point about charity, and the necessity of remaining critical while you’re trying to improve the world.

I am not one to argue that volunteering, philanthropy and human rights advocacy aren’t important, or that you shouldn’t be engaged in them. The problem is that most college students don’t think to scrutinize the easiest and most accessible forms of activism, which are often conducted by large nonprofits like Invisible Children. Most of the organizations we see recruiting and fundraising on campus are well-known, work on behalf of great causes (who doesn’t want to stop Ugandan children from being made into child soldiers?) and have large PR budgets to bring in cash and energy from concerned citizens like you.

Most of these charities are perfectly legit, and it seems horribly cynical to question the motives of someone working to help the homeless or cure breast cancer. But investing blind faith in nonprofits can lead to heartache if they betray your trust. When the Salvation Army came under fire for lobbying against measures like decriminalizing consensual gay sex and requiring charities conducting business with city governments to abide by the cities’ LGBT-inclusive laws, many who had donated clothes to their thrift stores and pocket change to their holiday bell-ringers were horrified.

Whether you’re an individual do-gooder or part of a philanthropic student organization, it’s important to know exactly where your money’s going.

For example, during April, Autism Awareness Month, you’re bound to see local businesses fundraising for Autism Speaks, an organization the Better Business Bureau has criticized in the past.

Although it’s raised its accountability standards since September and is now BBB-accredited, Autism Speaks is still not held in high regard by many disability resource organizations, including the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. ASAN, which strives to enable individuals actually living with autism to fight for what they need. ASAN,  in a 2009 press release, charged that “Autism Speaks uses damaging and offensive portrayals of Autistic people as fundraising tactics, does not include any Autistic people on its board or leadership and spends very little of the millions of dollars that it raises for things that help Autistic people or families,” instead prioritizing finding a “cure” for the little-understood condition. (At press time, Autism Speaks didn’t return my requests for comment.)

If you compare this with the Ugandan peoples’ unenthusiastic response to Kony 2012, a lesson emerges: When evaluating whether a charity is worth your hard-earned fundraising money, it helps to learn and prioritize the opinions of the people you’re trying to help.

You wouldn’t throw your support behind a gay rights organization that was entirely run by straight people and constantly ignored public callouts from gay Americans saying, “You’re not really helping.” It can be easier to miss these criticisms when the “beneficiaries” of your charity efforts are an ocean away, or seemingly incapable of speaking for themselves (in fact, many autistic people are quite capable of making their voices heard, especially in adulthood), but a simple Internet search of “[insert charity] criticisms,” both to see if many emerge and from where they’re coming, can save you a lot of heartache.

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu