"Nothing is whiter than white in this world": Child sponsorship and the geographies of charity (original) (raw)
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Pity and patriotism: UK intra-national charitable giving
2016
This thesis examines the discourse of intra-national charitable giving in the UK. I combine a rhetorical discourse analysis of Children in Need (CiN), a popular charity telethon for ‘disadvantaged’ British children, with that of six focus groups carried out with people who have different relationships with charities (student volunteers, a local Amnesty International group, bereavement counselling volunteers, non-charity related office workers, employees of different charities, and academics). Although the focus group discussions all included some consideration of CiN and its methods, they were primarily concerned with broader issues to do with disadvantage, fairness and, where relevant, charitable giving more generally. Boltanski’s (1999) seminal idea of ‘the politics of pity’ holds that relationships between those who suffer and those who observe their suffering are radically altered by distance. Seeing suffering people face-to-face is not the same as seeing them via the mass media...
Chasing a 'loose and baggy monster': almshouses and the geography of charity
Area, 2002
This paper goes some way towards redressing the lack of geographical literature on charity through exploring the geography of the British domestic charitable sector. The size and geography of the third sector is outlined, followed by an analysis of how almshouses can be understood as inherently geographical and deeply embedded in local social networks of inclusion as well as exclusion.
This paper is a response to Raymond Williams’ seminal work on Keywords (1976) and uses his approach to examine, stimulate and also challenge current debates about charity, philanthropy and voluntarism in the context of Austerity Britain. It also uses theoretical commentary from Habermas on the Lifeworld, the State and the Market and includes a discussion on civil society and associationism. The primary consideration in the paper is to examine and problematize these words, underpinned by a desire to consider their usage – politically and socially - in a period when poverty and inequality in the United Kingdom has reached new heights. Poverty has become a loaded word ideologically, in the Austerity world of the UK, arguably demonising the poor. In the 2015 election campaign it was used only once by the then-Labour leader Ed Miliband and only in the context of benefits by David Cameron, whose rhetoric presupposes a moral failure in those who find themselves living in poverty. Yet it is a major scourge of our times and the renewed emphasis on charity, philanthropy and voluntarism, and the retreat from state provision, is profoundly political in the context of real and widespread poverty and growing inequality. The paper examines historical responses to poverty through charity, philanthropy and voluntarism, reflecting on the uses of these words in the context of the Poor Law, medieval to 19th century, the Charity Organisation Societies, the University Settlement Movement, Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Extension Ladder model, which distinguished different roles for the state and for voluntary action, the evolution of the Welfare State and the fight for rights, not charity. It brings the debate up to date with a discussion about philanthrocapitalism and the Big Society and the renewed interest in charity, voluntarism (particularly as volunteering) and philanthropy encapsulated in current government rhetoric and ideology. It also explores potential ways forward for the voluntary sector.
The Routledge Companion to Philanthropy
Historians increasingly write about philanthropy as a gift relationship. Alan Kidd (1996: 184), for example, describes philanthropy as non-commercial social transfers of wealth, material objects or non-material assistance rendered in forms that are culturally meaningful and that generate moral relationships between individuals or groups such as solidarity, dependence, legitimacy, and reputability. The history of philanthropy, however, is not simply a history of giving, far less one of giving only by the rich; it requires us to examine the various sides of the relationship. This brings it into close engagement with many other branches of history: class, gender, national identity and empire, religion and missions, poor relief and welfare, wealth and taxation, civil society. All these, and others, touch on philanthropy. In this synopsis, I argue that historians of philanthropy need to think like geologists. Stop the clock at any time, say 1850 in Europe, and you will find strata, or layers, of philanthropic giving accumulated on top of each other. The philanthropy of the past leaves its material record, its buildings, its legal documents, its charitable gifts, its assumptions and practices, in layer after layer. The present adds a topsoil of the latest projects, but the lower layers continue to exercise their influence, sometimes in the form of outcrops from earlier ages of giving.
The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, 2023
Geographies of philanthropy matter. Not just because of the geographically uneven economic distributions of wealth and poverty dictating where philanthropic funds flow from and to, but also because of how these flows of funding across space are tied to diverse historical, developmental, legal, political, cultural, and digital geographies of philanthropy that we will review here as a set of overlapping ‘philanthro-scapes’. Abstract and universalistic in appeal, philanthropy ostensibly involves an inclusive impulse to care for others in general. But philanthropic practice has always come down to earth in distinctly localized practices of gift-giving, territorial outreach and targeted intervention. For the same reasons, the problems with philanthropy have always been geographical problems to do with who gets to envision the appropriate arenas of beneficence, what people and places merit concern, and where else is excluded. As this entry examines, the economic geographies of philanthropy provide us with at least the broad outlines of these divided philanthropic spaces. After first looking at these macro-economic spatial patterns, we next zoom in to more micro analysis of the complex component philanthro-scapes that further fragment the geographies of philanthropy in ways that both deterritorialize and reterritorialize contemporary arenas of philanthropic care.
CHARITIES: THE RECURRING QUESTIONS
Financial Accountability & Management, 2009
This special issue of FAM is based on a selection of papers from the EIASM research workshop on the Challenges of Managing the Third Sector which was held at the International University of Venice on San Servolo island on March 12-14, 2007. In previous research workshops in this series, there has been debate on the positioning of different disciplines which are deployed in the investigation of the challenges facing charitable organisations. These considerations have shown the debt owed to both economic and sociological thinking in past studies and the emergence of a more managerial perspective in understanding these distinctive organisations . Previous research workshops have also discussed the vitality of the Third Sector, as evidenced by the emergence of charitable organisations in new areas of activity such as credit unions, certain persistent challenges such as the forms of information necessary for monitoring charities and for prospective donors, the use of resources by charities, and the adoption of more professional management techniques . Underlying the distinctive nature of charities and charitable giving are fundamental challenges of the quantum of funds available to increasing numbers of charities and the dangers this poses for their continued existence , as further evidenced by a longitudinal study of Irish voluntary hospitals .
The relational geographies of the voluntary sector: Disentangling the ballast of strangers
Progress in Human Geography, 2019
We propose that voluntary sector geographies are best understood using a systematic relational approach, drawing upon neo-Marxist and symbiotic perspectives. We focus on relations between the voluntary sector and the (shadow) state, internal spaces of client interaction, and external urban spaces. Our relational approach advances alternative understandings of the voluntary sector: ones that are partly but not fully in the orbit of the shadow state; more mediator than conduit for neoliberal policies; partly punitive, yet firmly in relation with other ambivalent measures for clients; and both spatially uneven and fixed, but always unbounded in its practices.
Volunteering is a long-standing phenomenon of immense socio-economic value and, currently, significant political purchase. This study departs from the recent proliferation of debates concerning its national political deployment, in order to consider how and with what consequences landscapes of volunteering are shaped by locally lived volunteer lives. Drawing on geographical work on morality, care and giving, it focuses on the often neglected spaces of individual lived experience, exploring how these help constitute and come to be constituted by the practices, performances and experiences of volunteering. In order to achieve this the study centralises volunteers empirically, through a case study of Operation Christmas Child, a children's charity which enables volunteers to send wrapped shoeboxes of gifts to disadvantaged children overseas. Utilising several innovative participation-based methods, including participation in knitting circles and volunteering in an Operation Christmas Child warehouse, the research explores how practices of volunteering are inseparable from individual ethics and imaginaries. This leads to a consideration of the situation of both volunteering and volunteers with regard to the (re)production and negotiation of various social power structures. The study highlights the particular affective significance of embodied connection and banal, quotidian performances to the production of ethical meanings through volunteering. It demonstrates how these interconnect enabling investments in individual identities and practices of care for the self, such as catharsis, feelingful reflection and meaningful relationships. As a result, the multifaceted, dialogic relationship between volunteering and ordinary, personal lives is stressed, which suggests that a redefinition of volunteering would be beneficial which considered more equally its capacity to 'touch' volunteers as well as recipients. It is recommended that current work on voluntarism would benefit if greater attention were paid to the complex spatialities of such touching. To consider the cartographies of voluntarism and everyday life separately would deprive understandings of both.