Ambitious Good
The #trashtag selfies, the Youtube videos of students that give presents to poor classmates, the Facebook charity donation pages: we are in the midst of an era where our acts of charity give us as much social benefit as the people we help.
I am not saying to stop doing charity entirely. But I believe this kind of giving lulls us into a belief that we are making the world better when we are really making it easier to perpetuate systems that make these bad things ok.
When a few good people clean up a park, it is easier to forget the mark our plastic consumption has on the world. When we volunteer in soup kitchens, it is easier to forget about rampant income inequality. When we feel good funding a Kickstarter campaign for a person’s chemo treatment, we feel exuberant, forgetting that there are tens of thousands of other Americans that cannot afford healthcare.
I believe we need to recognize that what we currently do as charity is one of the lower rungs on the ladder of “good acts” that are possible, and it is high time to add another rung to the charitable ladder: ambitious good. Ambitious good means to create systems in the world that empower people to be good, do good, and be ultimately independent from charity.
This is not just teaching one person how to fish. It means setting up educational programs to teach entire villages to fish. If the idea of ambitious good is successful, it means that charity will be a thing of the past. Every system, from housing to education to agriculture will empower and provide for people without the need for charity.
We are immersed in systems every day that we can begin with. We can build ways for people to have food without plastic wrappings to generate less trash. We can promote adequate parental leave policies and pay in the companies we work at and create. We can support legislation that would provide Americans greater access to affordable healthcare.
Technology’s increase has made charity ever more rewarding as it creates strong social rewards, but now more than ever we need to push past the perception of charity as a long term solution. Ambitiously embedding justice and equity into a system of ethical capitalism can be.
