After seeing photos of Syrian refugees seemingly struggling to carry their children as they walked, a California mom created a charity in September 2015 to provide them with baby carriers. The media ate it up — this Today article about the woman doling out carriers at a refugee camp in Greece even includes an awkward scene of her coaxing a 10-year-old boy to use a carrier for the baby he’s holding. She is quoted multiple times as saying how grateful they all seem.
But are donations like this actually helpful?
Individuals making an impact outside of the traditional international aid industry are always wildly popular with the press and public. They make for compelling tales; empowering reminders that anyone can make a difference.
They also give “Westerners” a chance to feel better about their conspicuous consumption by repurposing their stuff.
Journalist Leah McLaren seemed to be one of the only skeptics of these baby carrier donation efforts. “As a grassroots movement, it all seems so darn sweet. But … NGOs don’t need your used stuff,” she declared in Canada’s Globe & Mail. She contacted an aid worker on the ground at the Serbian-Hungarian border, who implored: “Please, please, don’t send us your slings.” McLaren hinted at how such campaigns perfectly embody the problematic mindset of West-knows-best: “They’ve got lots of used baby slings in France, Greece, Hungary and Serbia. They even have Baby Gap.”
Alyoscia D’Onofrio, a senior director at the International Rescue Committee believes item donations like baby carriers are often misguided because they “don’t take into account the desires, wishes, preferences, needs, situation, capacity, or resources of the recipient.”
Worse than that, he said, “They are wasteful of resources. It costs a lot of money to ship stuff around the globe that people might not actually want.”
The urge to help is especially acute when disasters strike, but this is actually the worst time to send household items. Some notable ill-conceived donation campaigns include weight-loss drinks and chandeliers sent to Rwanda, prom gowns sent to Honduras, and pork labeled as beef sent to Afghanistan.
After an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, PRI’s GlobalPost reported that “amid the trauma, hunger and devastation, care packages piled up containing everything from pajamas and teddy bears to birth control pills and Bibles — a hodgepodge impossible to sort through.”
The USAID Center for International Disaster Relief Information explains that unsolicited donations can clog supply chains and take up space needed to stage life-saving supplies for distribution. Managing unsolicited items creates more work, so can in fact add to costs.
And in some cases, item donations can even ruin local economies; for instance, local textile makers could be put out of work with an influx of donated clothing.
WWhy do so many well-intentioned donors gravitate towards item donations in the first place? The answer can be found, in part, in psychology.
D’Onofrio thinks in-kind donation campaigns are popular because they feel tangible. “It joins the giver in an imagined journey of the object to a recipient. It engenders empathy: I need this object, other people must too. It plays on guilt: I feel less bad about buying this thing for myself as I’ve bought one for someone in need. It seems like an act of solidarity.”
Instead of giving stuff, money is often much more useful — especially in a disaster scenario. But it’s easier for people to make a big to-do out of donating something meaningful and expensive like their baby carrier; it can be more difficult to make a performance out of giving money. And people often conflate how altruistic something looks, like volunteering, with its actual impact. What’s more, money conjures complicated feelings.
“When people think about money, they automatically become less altruistic. Money brings issues like success and competition to the fore of people’s minds, concepts that aren’t very compatible with being helpful,” said Hanna Zagefka, chief editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and a professor at Royal Holloway University of London. “This might be why you are more likely to get a positive response if you ask for donations of items rather than money.”
In other words: Giving money to a faceless aid organization isn’t as satisfying as, say, imagining a tired refugee being relieved of a backache by the baby carrier you once used to shuttle your kids around the farmer’s market.
“Unfortunately, monetary donations do not cater well to the psychological needs of the donors, who want to be able to picture what good their donation will achieve. And this is…even harder if your donation is not tied to a specific cause or recipient,” said Zagefka, who recently published a paper on the psychology of charitable donations.
In addition, people may use in-kind donations as “an opportunity to get rid of unwanted stuff,” she said, so the real beneficiary is the donor.
“The most important issue for me is how people who donate or who start these kind of projects present themselves — if they expect the receiver to be thankful or if they do it more silently in order to help and not to gain personal status benefits,” said Benjamin Haas, a research associate at the University of Cologne’s Institute for Social Policy and Qualitative Social Research Methods. “The question about the motivations of the giver is crucial.”
In the case of baby carriers campaign, media coverage centered on the clever, selfless California mom, not the refugees (also known as “hero worship” journalism). For example, the Today story didn’t quote a single refugee, but did inform us that she has a 2-year-old son.
The feedback loop of donating items and then patting ourselves on the back for it merely fuels our “Western white savior complex.” These campaigns further sour when viewed through a neocolonial lens.
“The mere transfer of charity from North to South runs the risk of replicating colonial patterns of perception and depoliticizing global social injustice and evils,” Haas wrote in Meaning Well. Doing Good?. He said in-kind donations “bear the danger of being presumptuous, because it implies that the giver has the knowledge of what the receiver needs.”
It’s a problem when anyone — even people within the international aid community — decides they know what a recipient needs, according to D’Onofrio. His recent Medium post decried the lack of client voices in aid agency data and decision-making.
“We don’t know what it is to feel like every individual aid recipient,” he said. “We don’t know their priorities. Instead of giving people objects, which they often sell to buy things they really need, why not give them cash in the first place? Give people a choice on how to spend precious resources.”
SSo if you really want to help, instead of shipping off your baby carrier, maybe sell it on Craigslist and donate the proceeds to a well-rated charity. And if you prefer donating items, keep it local. Maybe there’s a homeless shelter or teen mom home in your community that could use a baby carrier.
But also consider how you can improve your consumer behaviors — such as curbing your appetite for leather, oil, and electronics — and how you can press your government for more supportive international policies.
“We have to ask, who messed the whole situation up?” said Haas. “And who claims now to have the ability to solve the problems?”
