The Societal Paradox of Charity

Charities are often viewed as a sort of distant relative that will always be a safe space for you at your "worst". We don't want to see them, but we are ultimately glad that they exist for our benefit. As thankful as I am that charities do exist, I do worry that we, as a society put too much credence on their existence as a whole, as a perpetual charity worker, Charities may be philanthropic and filled with good people, but they are corruptible, and they are being corrupted to their core as we speak.

The number one thing that Charities will teach you the second you walk in the door either as a Volunteer or as a Paid employee is that their goal is "to work until they are no longer needed", a kind of Progressive/Hopeful obsolescence. But after some years, I now believe that many charities have managed to side-wind themselves into a societal staple and a "given" that cannot be gotten rid of.

I've worked in the Non-profit and Third sectors since I was 18, so almost 9 years. I loved working for them until I started to notice some worrying signs that the charities I believed in so much were starting to build some very dangerous habits and were harming those they were set up to help under the guise of "comfort" and "safety".

I've worked as a Support worker for most of the time, mostly working as a Support worker for Autistic people and those with Physical, Cognitive, and Psychological impairments/disorders. There was one charity that stuck out to me as being everything I wanted a non-profit to be, but as nice as most of the staff, my colleagues were. I noticed that the habits being developed were ultimately going to ensure that the clients and families we supported were never, not going to need our help.

Our client was an older (comparatively) man, in his early 30s. He was "severely autistic", non-verbal, and had a usual gait (walking on his tip toes). He had a few health issues, mainly stomach issues but I suspect that was largely due to him repeatedly swallowing his toothpaste after brushing, resulting in diarrhea. But the one habit, is, unfortunately, a common one. We used to sedate him with anti-psychotics on the regular, they will argue it was "necessary" as he could harm himself or those around him, and this is true. But the regularity of the anger, and sedation was also a liability that was and is likely to cause further issues, especially since the drugs in question were Clozapine and Seroquel.

When it came to Clozapine, it did eventually result in a build-up that caused our client to have seizures and be largely bedridden for weeks after getting out of the hospital. The repeated sedation of clients under our care, was the worst habit we had and I did raise my concerns with management and the parents, but I was legit just told that "its for peace of mind" and told to get on with it.

As I said before, good people work in non-profits, and my colleagues from then are still friends to this very day. But some people can become blindsided by their self-preservation, if they help someone, to the point the family no longer needs our support, and they are out of a job. This is what leads to a deadly cycle of self-preservation, and re-legitimization of Support workers.

So what is the goal of Non-profits?

I would say the goal for many "service-providing" charities like the supported living charity I used to work for, is for the Government to step in and provide standardized, in-house regulated care for those people long term. That is what is truly meant by "work until you are no longer needed" because in that case, the government will take care of them.

But what happens is more conservative governments point to charities and say "why not let them do it" and the cycle continues. The Institutionalization of charity work ensures that the problem that charities cater to, will never be solved. A good example in the UK is food banks. The Government doesn't do anything such as raise benefits to a liveable standard or provide proper support because of the Foodbank networks in the UK.

Now you might agree with the Government, but let me put it this way. The Food given at a food bank tends not to last long. Either because of short expiry dates or because the person receiving the food has gone without for so long that the food is gone before the end of the week. Before you know it, the people in receipt of support are in a more irregular level of precarity than they were without the food bank.

At the moment there are more food banks in the UK than Starbucks and Mcdonald's put together. People are spending more time in queues at food banks than at Job interviews that might be able to give them some degree of self-sustainability and independence. And the issue with this isn't the Food Bank's fault, or the donator's fault, it's the government's fault for not providing a liveable existence to those in society and on the fringes of it.

Charities give the people of a country what they need, but Governments continue to not give non-profits what they want. Charities for the foreseeable future, will continue to be stuck with giving services they need to provide, but they don't want to forever. The government is legitimizing the suffering of everyday people by forcing charities to become as big as the government itself. This is largely unsustainable as the cost of living crisis piles on, forcing those with salaries in the third sector to become even more self-preservational in attitude, resulting in a reduction in the quality of life for those they are there for.

The Cost of living crisis is also reducing the sustainability of the current taxes, so low-income tax-exemptions in the UK and many other places will result in lower tax revenues for the state and less government spending on charities resulting in a dystopian future that could have been resolved by giving charities what they wanted in the first place, a state funeral.