The Philanthropy Handbook by Tej Kohli (Chapter Nine - Can It All Go Wrong?)
A Serialisation Of 'Rebuilding You: The Philanthropy Handbook' by Tej Kohli
I hope that throughout this handbook I have already made clear that there are many reasons that you might refrain from philanthropy. I don’t wish to encourage you to retreat into a life of easy privacy when you could be using your time and wealth to make an impact on the world. I promote caution simply to ensure that your eyes are open to the fact that in becoming a philanthropist, you will be laying yourself open to new forms of scrutiny and critique despite your good intentions.
My experience has been that there are three distinct ways that it can all go wrong to such an extent that you may question the merits of your philanthropic endeavours. These broadly fall into three categories:
One:
External factors pertaining to reputation.
Two:
Interacting with those that you seek to help.
Three:
Internal factors that lead to sub-optimal outcomes.
Reputation
Let’s start with reputation. In my experience the media is dominated by individuals from the comfortable middle classes of the Western world, who manifest an unconscious bias in their understanding and interpretation of the developing world. So if you start to operate as a philanthropist within developing nations, where you must adjust and adapt your approach to accommodate local cultural factors and practical challenges, do not expect that the Western media will immediately follow suit and also do the same. You will need to educate them too, and it will be a real struggle.
I have proselytised extensively in this handbook about the benefits of sharing stories in order to surface new opportunities for collaborations and partnerships. But you should also be prepared for a Western media which distrusts those who do not look exactly like them, who will be very cynical about things which they cannot reconcile against their own experiences of the world.
If you are engaging in global philanthropy, then you are going to be operating in world with values far outside the experiences of the dominant mainstream media. You can of course go to great lengths to interpret these things for Western media, with graphics and flashy websites, but this media will never really ‘get it’, and if they don’t get it, they could be eminently suspicious.
My own experience of this was particularly damaging and hurtful. My philanthropy caught the attention of a media outlet that published a ‘hit piece’ about me which gave a false, inaccurate and misleading impression of who I am. Following publication of this outlier of an article, I had to withdraw funding of approximately $14 million from projects in some of the world’s poorest communities, where local partners got ‘spooked’ and retrenched. And tens of thousands of people in those communities who were destined to have their blindness cured lost out.
I share this here with you not in complaint – the media is the media and they actually have played a vital role in exposing a lack of safeguarding of vulnerable people by some large NGOs. But you should be aware that there are many in the Western media who are constantly seeking to invoke salacious condemnation as way to get clicks, and they won’t hesitate to use your philanthropy as a stick to beat you with - especially if you do not look like them and did not enjoy a Western upbringing.
Interactions
The second way that things can go wrong is in your interactions with those who you seek to help. Just because the beneficiaries and recipients of your philanthropic efforts are not ‘paying customers’, do not believe for a second that they cannot turn against you.
You will need to make sure that you have solid processes and systems in place so that you are providing these recipients with a very high level of care and attention, whilst simultaneously walking the tightrope of not creating an unhealthy and detrimental dependency.
Often the beneficiaries of grassroots philanthropy are desperate people, and this can modulate their behaviour away from what you might reasonably expect.
As an example, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom my foundation placed advertisements on social media calling for any family with children who were struggling to pay for food, to contact the Tej Kohli Foundation to receive a large box containing enough food and ingredients to feed a small family for an entire week, which we despatched by courier.
The response to these advertisements was large, and as a consequence the program fell a few days behind in expediting the delivery of the emergency food packages. Within just 24 hours, some intended recipients began to fret that their help had not yet arrived.
Whilst in that instance our Tej Kohli Foundation team were able to speed up and expedite delivery of the emergency food packages, the consequences of further delays in fulfilling promises of help that had been made to individuals in severe need could have been severe. When people are desperate there is simply no excuse for failing them just because it is ‘for free’. You will need to hold yourself and your team to a very high standards indeed, whilst also being extremely contentious not to foster dependency amongst those that you seek to help, which will be of no benefit to them over the longer term.
Decisions
The third way that things can go wrong is in the seemingly simple daily operations and decisions that you will make as a philanthropist. I had high hopes when a few years ago my Tej Kohli Foundation commissioned scientists to synthesise affordable synthetic cornea from yeast and then later from peptides, but in reality, the exercise proved costly and time consuming, and the solution that we had theorised simply did not work in clinical practice.
Some of your philanthropic projects will fail or will not achieve the outcome that you had hoped and planned for. On some occasions you may need to retrench from projects entirely for myriad reasons.
You must learn to accept that when you are dealing with emotive ‘hot button’ issues, especially within communities that are deprived or desperate, then it is inevitable that you will also have to endure failures.
The fact that things can go wrong is not a reason to refrain from philanthropy. My real message for you is that you should not assume that just because you are doing good all things will automatically ‘go good’.
Because if anything, within philanthropy there are more emotions, more human-critical decisions and more partners and collaborations, all of which could fail.
I urge you to persist with your eyes wide open regardless.