Charity creates an "unequal relationship" between beneficiaries and donors, and society must redefine its relationship with the sector to prevent this, the executive chair of the Big Issue Group, Nigel Kershaw, has said.
Kershaw was speaking on Tuesday at the Good Deals conference in Birmingham. He was in conversation with Iqbal Wahhab, a restauranteur and author of the book Charity Sucks, which says that business is a better solution to social problems than charity.
Kershaw said that to solve social problems it was necessary to have "interdependency and a more equal relationship between giver and taker".
He said that the problem with charity was that all the power rested with the donor, and the beneficiary had no say in the solutions created for them. He said that charity was a model for redistributing “excess” from business. But he suggested a better model was to try and solve the problem in the process of doing business in the first place.
He said that social enterprises such as the Big Issue and those set up by Wahhab were an attempt to do this.
Charity 'built on excess'
“If you can look back, 19th century American philanthropy was built on the excesses of the civil war, or robber barons,” he said. “If you look at 19th century philanthropy in the UK, it was built on the exploitation of the empire.
"If you look at the charity and philanthropy that developed in the late 20th century, it was built from the excesses of the com market. If you look at the 21st century - build on the excesses of hedge fund, private venture capital. And in ten years’ time it will be built on the excesses – unless we stop it – of nano, or whatever it happens to be.”
But Kershaw warned against the excess model, instead, calling for the “reconstruction of capitalism”.
“We’ve done excess,” he said. “Business hasn’t solved the problems and charity hasn’t solved the problems.”
Charity Sucks
Wahhab said there was “something inherently wrong in charity processes” and predicted a “rapidly growing movement of social enterprises” to replace traditional charities.
Wahhab’s comments echo those he made previously in his book Charity Sucks, in which he said he used social enterprise rather than charity as a model to do good because he wanted to avoid “Victorian-style noblesse oblige where the rich bestow money on the poor out of a sense of civic duty and feeling of pity”.
Wahhab has previously said he wanted to “bust open” a “cosy world of failure inhabited by well-meaning charities and well-meaning philanthropists” and that rather than giving money to charity, wealthy individuals should invest money in business in deprived areas.
