Taking the Toxic out of Charity

Should New Story Charity try harder not to be one?

Source: TechStartups.

Thanks to the Franklin Fellowship Tech x Social Impact program, I had the pleasure of hearing from Morgan Lopes, current CTO of New Story Charity, a 501c3 nonprofit. Morgan was friendly, open, insightful, and clearly passionate about doing good for others.

Yet one phrase that Morgan mentioned to us stuck in the back of my mind: toxic charity. It’s actually the title of a book by Robert D. Lupton, whose main message is that charity creates dependence and is therefore not the right solution to truly help communities in the long-term — in fact, it may do more harm than good. In Toxic Charity, Lupton emphasizes that, severe situations aside, an organization trying to do good for an individual or a community should make self-sufficiency its goal. Charity, which tends to focus on short-term aid, often ends up acting as a crutch rather than actually solving the root problem.

So after our discussion with Morgan, I began to wonder:

Is New Story guilty of toxic charity?

New Story’s mission is to end global homelessness. Working alongside local organizations and families, New Story develops innovative homebuilding solutions, and implements them in impoverished communities like those of Titanyen, Haiti and Ahuachapàn, El Salvador. Since 2015, New Story has built over 2300 homes for 25 communities in 4 countries.

Three things in particular stood out to me about how New Story operates:

1. Inclusive design. To ensure the needs of local communities are understood instead of just assumed, New Story developed a process called lean participatory design. By placing voices from the local community at the center of their design process, New Story ensures that members of the community are rightly valued and that the homes they build together actually serve the people they were meant for.
2. Partnerships. Part of New Story’s success lies in its function as a hub. It does this by 1) bringing in tech companies like ICON to help pioneer more efficient and affordable homebuilding technologies, including 3D printing, and 2) reaching out to “field partners,” local nonprofits and governmental organizations, who help roll out solutions to communities in need.
3. 100% promise. New Story maintains an entirely separate fund for donors to give money towards building homes. This way, donors can be certain that 100% of the money they donate goes towards the families they hope to help, instead of wondering how much of their donation gets eaten up by operational costs within the nonprofit.

These elements combine to make New Story one of the most innovative and fast-moving nonprofits I’ve seen. It is strongly connected to the communities it serves and is pushing the frontiers of sustainable homebuilding.

However, ending global homelessness doesn’t stop once everybody has a house. (Even if it’s a super cool 3D printed one.) Without an action plan for ensuring that the homes they build support a long-lasting and self-sufficient community, New Story might end up contributing to toxic charity. In other words, New Story would be creating a serious dependency problem for the very people it tries to help.

Ensuring self-sufficiency, not just sustainability

Lupton describes long-term development over short-term betterment as the solution to the toxic charity problem. This kind of work is inherently slower and more challenging, but if done right its results are far more sustainable.

After digging deeper into New Story, I believe the organization is genuinely working hard towards sustainable, long-term solutions for the communities it serves. Here are some things New Story is already doing in the right direction:

1. Using lean participatory design. Members of the local communities know their homeland best, so they would have some of the most important insight towards how to design homes that last. By centering local voices, New Story can be more confident that housing community created is one that local families actually want and would be excited to make home.
2. Impact surveys at 6 and 12 months post-construction. I imagine these surveys would alert New Story to any unexpected flaws in construction and enable them to design fixes if necessary. New Story hasn’t published much detail on their impact surveys, but I would hope the data collected is compared to the initial family feedback survey to judge how well the homes are fulfilling the communities’ needs.
3. Sharing solutions and continuing work through field partners. New Story emphasizes sharing solutions (hardware, software, and process) as the last step in its approach to building better homes. This indicates that New Story is empowering others with the knowledge and tools to proceed on their own, rather than creating a dependency only one organization can fulfill.

Morgan talked a lot about sustainability of solutions during our discussion, also pointing out that New Story’s building process employs local workers and sources building materials locally. The success of New Story communities so far seem to indicate that the process is sustainable, at least on the order of a few years.

However, I wasn’t convinced that New Story is thinking enough about the self-sufficiency of these communities. Who keeps up the maintenance of these homes? Does donor money go towards maintenance or do communities need to find other sources of funding? What happens if the community needs to expand? How does the renovation of one community affect neighboring areas? The answers to these questions measure not just sustainability but self-sufficiency of the new community. Towards this end, here are some things I believe New Story could work on:

1. Plan a full hand-off to locals. Members of newly built communities need detailed information and action plans so they can maintain their new homes and construct additions safely. A particularly important piece is future funding sources. Currently, families pay the cost of their new homes back into a community fund that serves their area. Families use this money alongside their own expertise to make home modifications such as adding rain gutters or building perimeter fences. However, what happens if/when this fund dries up? Bigger changes like repairing homes in case of damage or expanding to accommodate new residents may leave locals once again struggling. New Story should ensure that local field partners maintain a lasting relationship with newly built communities beyond the initial years when they are monitored more closely. Communities won’t be left fully on their own in times of need but can still continue to function independently of New Story.
2. Don’t let impact analysis drop off. New Story publishes impact surveys at 6 and 12 months, and follows families in most communities for up to 36 months. This is a strong commitment, but tracking impact shouldn’t stop there. New Story should continue collecting and publishing more detailed impact data (of course, respecting privacy of residents) well past the 3 year mark, since a truly sustainable housing community needs to last for generations. This data would show New Story and its partners how local families have managed longer-term situations that arose in the community on their own. For instance, how does the community sustain itself beyond its initial community fund? With time, it would also be interesting to see communities develop their own unique set of metrics to gauge community wellbeing. This makes measuring impact a bottom-up process, driven by the families who understand their community inside out, rather than top-down, based on data that New Story and/or its field partners think is best to collect.
3. Aim not to return to the same area. New Story’s field partners are the key to building self-sufficiency over time. By appointing “village champions,” New Story also places emphasis on community leadership. Although most local communities aren’t even aware of New Story itself — the organization works through its field partners over the entire building process — field partners still depend on New Story’s behind-the-scenes work to drive the transformation of existing communities. Impoverished communities should definitely not be expected to transform on their own. However, New Story should approach working with its first community in a given area as a chance to pass the torch to the local field partners working in that same area. How? By sharing enough details about design and technology solutions that another community within reach of the same field partners could be built without New Story’s step-by-step guidance. This would help empower local groups to be more independent in leading the housing transformation of their communities.

This last point hints at another idea in Toxic Charity, that a nonprofit should aim to be so successful that they put themselves out of business. In other words, if those you help grow to become self-sufficient, then your help isn’t needed anymore. While I agree that nonprofits should work to build self-sufficiency of those they help, a nonprofit never has to go out of business so long as the world is imperfect.

If a company finds the market doesn’t want or need it’s product, it should pivot. Similarly, if a nonprofit finds that its services are no longer needed, it should pivot. For a nonprofit like New Story, there are many ways for it to pivot even if some day global homelessness were eradicated. For instance, improving climate resiliency of housing in threatened areas. Or designing living spaces that boost mental health.

New Story needs a double agenda

Making sure that every member of a community has a safe and comfortable place to call home is the first step towards a thriving community. And it’s a seriously challenging one. The New Story team has their work cut out for them just in providing short-term relief: a newly built home. Yet after considering the dangers of toxic charity, I believe that New Story needs to maintain a double agenda.

Building the homes themselves is short-term betterment. Ensuring multi-generational success of the residential community is long-term development. Obviously, the former must be New Story’s priority since there are so many people in dire need of stable homes. However, as a nonprofit, it must beware of providing short-term aid without simultaneously laying down enough steps towards long-term self-sufficiency. I believe New Story can and should work upwards on both ladders at once.

The difference between self-sufficiency and long-term self-sufficiency is crucial. No one expects an impoverished community to transform its housing situation by itself — to do so would be immoral. But once lifted up and given a running start, we should expect such a community to gradually take future transformations into its own hands. I argue that this should be New Story’s ultimate goal: to empower once homeless communities to the extent that they can make large and lasting community improvements without outside aid. Without purposeful planning to induce this transition, New Story Charity may be building in dependency alongside new homes.

New Story is the opposite of toxic, but at least for now it remains charity.