The hidden costs of 'Consumption Philanthropy'

 

An amazing article from the Stanford Center for Social Innovation.  Small excerpt:

 

"I do my main charity work once a week—at the grocery store. Like some of you, this week I bought organic yogurt that not only is healthier for my family and the Earth, but also supports nonprofit environmental and educational organizations. I also picked up snack bars that promote peace (no kidding!) and salad dressing that funds various (unnamed) charities across the country. For all of this hard work, I rewarded myself with some Endangered Species Chocolate, which helps “support species, habitat, and humanity,” according to the company’s Web site. Delicious.

...

Consuming more will not solve today’s social and environmental problems. Indeed, consumption may very well create more of the kinds of problems that we had hoped philanthropy would fix. Relying on individual consumer choices, consumption philanthropy is unsuited to the scale or complexity of the problems it seeks to fix. Couched in market transactions, it neither acknowledges the voice of the transactions’ beneficiaries nor gives philanthropists the satisfaction of mindful virtuous action. And caught in the mechanisms of the market, it obscures the fact that the market caused many of the problems that philanthropy seeks to redress."

 

To some extent, this is why I love the idea of going to Central Park and handing out cookies / lemonade.  The point is not to actually give people anything material, but to enhance the feeling of connection and build a space in which to cultivate mindful selfless action.  We are all just random people, yet we are all clearly not.

I meditated with my team at work today

A Chinese parable: an old man set out to change the world. He found that he wasn’t making much progress, so he tried to change his country. This was also too difficult, so he tried to change his neighborhood. When he didn’t have success there, he tried to change his family. Even that was easier said than done, so he tried to change himself. Then an interesting thing happened. When he had changed himself, his family changed. And when his family changed, his neighborhood changed. When his neighborhood changed, his country changed. And when his country changed, the world changed.

CharityFocus retreat

 

Last weekend was our yearly CharityFocus coordinators retreat.  The people you see in the picture above are amazing teachers, I am blessed to be able to learn from them.

 

Wanted to share one element of the weekend that really resonated with me.  We started the weekend going around in a circle sharing a moment of gratitude for the service of others in our lives.  Everyone went around and gave beautiful anecdotes of how kind people had been to them in their life.  If only all our weeks could start in such a way...

Listening to the Dalai Lama

Today, Shephali and I were treated to an impromptu audience with the Dalai Lama (along with about 50 other folks) thanks to our wonderful friend Tashi.

His talk seemed totally extemporaneous and was about his gratitude to India for being such a wonderful host to his people over the past 50 years. A few of the interesting tidbits below.

He considers his mission in life two-fold: 1) espouse the values of compassionate, non-violent existence, and 2) advocate religious harmony through mutual respect. In both regards, he feels heavily influenced by values from Indian traditions (specifically, the concept of ahimsa, which he spoke on at length). In fact, he repeated referred to India as his 'guru' and and himself as a 'messenger.'

Towards the end he implored the group to actively engage in service work as a major key to help him on his mission. He ended with an interesting anecdote about the religious reciprocity between India and Tibet. Just as Buddha was from India, Lord Shiva (from the Hindu tradition) makes his home in Mount Kailash, which is located in Tibet. The two religions are quite interlinked.

The whole meeting was less than an hour long and seemed to fly by. It was awesome to hear him speak so lovingly of India.

My Favorite Karmatube videos

Karmatube is my favorite inspirational video website (on an unrelated note, I help run it lol).  It started as a wish to create a repository for inspirational video on the web, along with providing actions that a person could do right now if they were motivated by what they saw.

 

Over the course of the last couple years, the video list has ballooned to well over 300, and I thought I'd share my top 10 all-time favorites:

 

10) The one that started the website: The Free Hugs of Juan Mann.  A guy starts hugging people in a town and makes the world smile.

 

9) Ever eaten at a restaurant with no bill?  Seva Cafe does just that, with the twist being that your meal was paid for by someone before you, and you can pay this act of kindness forward however you wish.

 

8) What about me?  This monk makes a compelling statement about a shift in internal perspective being a major cause of happiness - 'when you're happy, i'm happy'

 

7) How can investing in the monetarily poor be a better way to reduce poverty than donating?  Watch Jacqueline Novogratz explain

 

6) The True Devotee is a favorite song of Gandhi and describes an example of a selfless individual (click link to view video)

 

5) I'm a total sap for heart-warming videos, and this one definitely qualifies.  A young girl starts singing the national anthem... then freezes.  Watch her experience what a 20,000 person safety net feels like

 

4) You've seen Jacqueline Novogratz change poverty through capitalism, now watch how Carrotmob uses similar principles to make it rain

 

3) One of the classics - Story of Stuff is a visual masterpiece taking the audience through the life cycle of consumables

2) Its all in your mind, watch the inside and watch the outside

 

And finally, my all-time favorite Karmatube video

1) Team Hoyt is quite possibly the biggest reminder of caring for your family that I've ever seen

 

So while that's it for now, here's hoping there's many more years of wonderful videos to add to the repository.  On that note, how's about one for the road? ;)

 

Why individual change is our only hope

I just watched this super interesting talk on TED about the future of war.  The gentleman ended his talk by saying 'is it our machines that are are wired for war, or is it us?'  Being who I am, I started reflecting on how this is related to service work :)

 

We already know that the pace of our collective existence is quickening.  Computing power is doubling every year, and is slated to be 1 BILLION times more powerful than now in only 25 years.  Even the pace of our biological evolution is speeding up to 100 times historical levels!

 

What does this all mean???  I've heard everything from the end of aging to virtual reality existence to space colonization.  Here's the implicit meaning I take from it: leverage.  Each human being on average is continually able to do more, of anything, as time goes on.  Not only that, but the amount of the increase is constantly increasing.  We're getting faster at a faster rate.

 

Well, this is great for building bridges, connecting people, and acquiring knowledge, but what happens when the motive is destruction?  There will be a time, in the not so distant future, that a regular person will have in their power the ability to annihilate millions - for the cost of a big screen.  Everyone will have their own personal 'little red button,' for lack of a better term.  Regulation can step in to some extent, but look around - we have a hard enough time regulating NOW, much less when it will be ONE BILLION times harder.

 

If regulation won't work than what will?  To me, the answer is individual change.  I have to change.  That anger that wells up inside when someone cuts me off on the road?  That's gotta go.  That visceral reaction that occurs when my ego is bruised?  Need to ditch it.  Time to replace that with a  stronger connection to all the people that come into my life and a deeper understanding of why those feelings arise in the first place.  This grassroots shift is our only hope, this so-called 'shift of consciousness', to slowly lead to the conditions required to keep US from killing OURSELVES.  I can't force anyone else to do it, I can't regulate it.  I can only start on the path myself and see what happens...

Defining 'Service'

I don't know why i'm pontificating so much more recently, but was thinking about the concept of service recently.  I got the feeling that there isn't a common definition for what it is, so using this space as away to define what it means to me.

 

Two years ago George Bush told us that the best way to serve our country was to 'go shopping more.'  In fact, our entire economy is built upon the idea that acting in our own best interest is the easiest and best way to act for the good of all.  After all, buying trinkets helps the person selling it to you to maintain a livelihood.  I'm starting to understand why I have such a viscerally negative reaction upon hearing this.

I feel that the intention to provide value to another as primary driver of action is a prerequisite of service.  Greed, contrary to what Gordon Gekko may say, is not good.  This is so partially because of the cultural shift that occurs when a person stops thinking about everything in terms of narrow self-interest (although economists would inevitably disagree and reframe the very desire to be altruistic as masked self-interest).  I've been taught that this way of looking at things is called 'other-orientation' or 'enlightened self-interest' (instead of 'self-orientation').  In addition, behavioral economics says that our self-interest tends to be short-sighted (and non-rational in general) and so acting in that manner tends to create huge problems over the long haul (e.g. financial crisis, air/water/food quality, drug scares, etc).

 

The world is filled with people who will say that self-interest is the only way to keep people from being lazy.  I urge them to meet the folks tirelessly and anonymously working all over the world to bring better lives to people left behind by this system.  Other-orientation is a more powerful motivator than greed could ever be.

 

In this sense, going shopping can be an act of service to your nation, but it also may not.  Did my purchase help some dude buy a bigger yacht?  Perhaps it helped an oil baron continue to finance his pet projects?  Or maybe my purchase helped children get more access to books?  Intention counts.  Consumption in a vacuum is not service.

 

And this brings me to my point:  I feel that service is the mixture of the intention to be other-oriented combined with the desire to understand how best to be other-oriented.  It is a mindset, and it can exist at any time.  While buying food at the grocery store, while selling your services at the workplace, or while having a conversation at Starbucks. 

 

I am of course ridiculously far from this ideal, but having the intention when i wake up every day is something that I think is valuable in itself.