Thinking while Giving
Article no 1: Should we , should we not
This is a first article in a series with the above title “Thinking while Giving” that I plan to write one every week for the next 5 weeks.
The context for me is relief work that my organization INREM Foundation has been doing following the COVID-19 situation in rural India. During this period, myself and we in our organization have gone through several stages of thinking and action, and I felt to put some thoughts together here in this series. My hunch is that some of these thoughts would also resonate with some others in a similar situation.
The topic of this first article is “Should we, should we not”.
It starts from self-identity and who we see ourselves or our organizations as. In some sense, it is about what you should be doing in a situation as follows from a humanitarian crisis. Am I a right person to act here? Are we the right group to act here? Are we going to duplicate what others are doing?
We had these questions when we started out. Ours is an organization which does work on humanitarian causes but of a more longer term nature. We do work on health issues, and those related to water, but never gotten into short term relief work of any sort. So for us, a first thing in our mind were questions like , Can we really pull this off? Should we just help and support others, and wait and watch, or do we get into the action ourselves.
One of our field persons, Sachin, in fact got us out of this dilemma by getting knee deep into supporting people. We started off from there, and then as a group of people, got into a form of relief ourselves.
The next level of question is about ‘relief’ itself. Here there are different schools of thought. What the government is responsible for, why should you get into at all? Or say, work on helping the government out and making it responsible instead of doing it yourself. The other way of looking at this is that, if you don’t do it, no one else will. So better get going.
We went for the latter thought here.
Estimates are that of INR thousands of crores invested and number of NGOs working on relief efforts in COVID-19. What you end up doing as a small NGO in all of this is just a small drop in the ocean.
However, we also realized later that in some districts where we are active in relief efforts, we happen to be the single largest one, and these are extremely needy places like Jhabua which have received 1.5 lakh migrants from cities. In that sense, we answered to ourselves the significance of our insignificance.
One repeated question that comes over in relief efforts is a philosophical one, ie Are we making beneficiaries dependent, when they rather fend off by themselves? This is a question worth looking at, but my answer to it is that one can draw a boundary to it. What we are presented here is unprecedented and everyone was taken by surprise at a large scale. In that sense the capacity to take care of oneself is very less, justifying relief efforts upto a certain period.
This question of ‘should we, should we not’ also comes into play when we support a cause during this period with money or otherwise. One of the first things is certainly how my money is going to be used. But then many of the above questions also play around ie is it really worth, what is the government doing, do people need this support, how does this help in the larger picture, and other such.
After 3 months of our current experience in relief work, I feel we have answered all these questions to ourselves, which is, yes it is worth it, and for all the small stories of change that emerge, we remind ourselves that we were lucky to be present there and help out.
Some upcoming articles I plan to write are as below:
Go deep or spread thin
High nutrition or staple
Short term, Long term
Please share back with your comments, and if these thoughts are those you have also gone through, and any more that you may think
