Why we risk losing all hope in our charities

YOU know you’re getting old when you can remember quite clearly the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Not by virtue of having been there, you understand, but because of collecting money for Cambodia on the streets of a west of Ireland town in 1979.

You know you’re getting old, too, when the memory brings with it a recollection of widespread, sincere trust in charity fundraising. People were unequivocally, heart-gladdeningly generous. They gave without misgivings. One man gave a £20 note at a time when the average industrial wage was about £100 a week.

It was simple really. Youthful, idealistic volunteers gathered money on the streets on behalf of the less fortunate somewhere. Passers-by gave what they could spare at that moment. There was no flogging of direct debits, no chugging. All the money went where it was needed, all of it. There was no skulduggery.

That, at least, was the perception. Whether it was any more true then than it is now is open to debate, but it was what people believed about charities. Now it seems likely no one will believe that ever again.

Clearly the scandal that has engulfed Oxfam is going to affect more than just Oxfam. No one suspects that the behaviour of its senior workers in Haiti or in Chad, where they’re said to have paid prostitutes who were possibly underage, is an isolated case.

There is iniquity everywhere, and in circumstances where there’s a grave power imbalance and a lot of public money, iniquity flourishes.

The worst aspect of the Oxfam scandal is arguably not even the exploitation of vulnerable girls by influential middle-aged men who were supposed to be there to help. It’s the fact that Oxfam covered it up. The agency investigated complaints about Haiti and in 2011 issued a press statement admitting almost nothing. ‘A small number of staff’, it said, had been found in breach of Oxfam’s code of conduct and had brought Oxfam’s name into disrepute with ‘abuse of power and bullying’.

Sexual misconduct was not mentioned at all, but the charity was careful to point out that it was nothing to do with money. That’s all right then. The brand is safe then. Fundraisers are go.

This narrative of predatory men getting recycled through the system and the whole thing being hushed up to protect the institution, it sounds familiar doesn’t it? It sounds like the Catholic Church all over again. And like the Church, this is corruption in the very place we’ve been led to believe we’d least expect it, which makes it worse.

Here in Ireland we’ve had our share of charity scandals of a financial nature, with the top brass in Rehab and Console, for instance, using donations to feather their own nests. And even where there is not ostensible corruption, there is profound public unease at how much charity bosses earn.

In order to run a charity, it seems, you have to be a corporate type who doesn’t get out of bed for less than a hundred grand a year, that being the going rate for organising jewellery-rattling fundraisers and courting the media.

If you’re a field worker though, and actually getting your hands dirty, you should expect only 16 grand.

And those are just the ones that we know about. Many charities don’t feel it necessary to disclose their executive pay and in fact don’t want Joe Public poking around their affairs at all if you don’t mind.

The invaluable website Benefacts was established in 2014 to keep tabs on the non-profit sector. It stated recently that it is ‘disappointed’ at the number of charities publishing abridged accounts instead of revealing all. ‘How can you expect people to trust you more when you tell them less?’ it asks.

AND public trust in charities is at an alltime low. An Amárach survey last year found that more people distrust charities than trust them, and the number of people who ‘completely trust’ them has hovered around 1% for years. Regaining public trust, the report concluded, has to be addressed in several ways, ‘but hoping that nothing bad will happen is not one of them’.

And what are charities doing? Hoping nothing bad will happen, and thinking ‘reputational damage management’ when it does. Ask yourself: Do you now sincerely think of charities as a blameless enterprise, doing good and good alone? Can you give without misgivings? If the answer is no, then charity has been ruined, in principle and in practice, and charities themselves are answerable for that.

A lot of needy people in the world will suffer more if this keeps up, because a lot of crisp, hard-earned £20 notes will no longer find their way to them.

It sounds like the Catholic Church all over again