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This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.
Should trusts be the stars of the show?
There are a lot of arguments in terms of rhetoric and good fundraising practice that, if you want someone to give to you, you should make them the hero of the story:
- There are problems in people’s lives
- The trust’s money comes into the situation
- It funds a change
- Ideally, the change would never have happened without them
Edgar Villanueva argues that it’s immoral to be doing this:
1. Trusts live in their own world with a theory of change that can be part of the problem as much as part of the solution.
Maybe that’s true in the States. In the UK, where grantmakers are smaller, I’m not sure many of them actually have such a thoroughly developed and rigid theory of change. Most grant making is reactive, with trusts seeing the kinds of projects that come in and choosing from that range, based on criteria that are often not that clear to the applicants. I don’t think the trust is often driving the situation that much in the UK, their choices just shape it to an extent.
Beyond that, I’ve never seen a funded project that actually damaged the situation. (Occasionally I’ve heard of the better work being “driven out of business”, but this has happened with tenders not grants. The biggest UK grant funder, the Lottery, actually has strong structures to avoid this happening.) Having read plenty of books on international development I’m well aware it can happen and I know that in mental health some can be controversial/less effective in therapeutic terms. However, charities rarely submit projects that are that out of touch with the real world. So, it’s hard to see how trusts COULD make things worse. The worst they can normally manage is: to do less good with the money than they otherwise might.
2. Trusts see themselves as saviours and the “saviour mentality” is destructive
This seems to be applying a psychological model to a non-psychological situation. Villanueva’s argument is: where there’s a saviour, there’s a victim and a perpetrator. So, he seems to imply, acting as a saviour in some way perpetuates victims and presumably perpetrators. However:
- That’s not logically true. If I crash out and get injured miles from anywhere, a philanthropist who pays for an air ambulance hasn’t created a perpetrator. To say that they’ve somehow continued my victimhood seems odd and possibly demeaning to me.
- Even if this “saviour mentality” is true of an individual, it’s hard to see what that is to do with institutions.
- The “victim” usually doesn’t even know that the “saviour” trust exists and the work may have taken place without the trust being involved. So, how does the trust perpetuate the victimhood? The only thing that could perpetuate the victimhood is the funded charity – and if they do that, I don’t see it.