but what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game

[Michael totally stole the title of this post right out from under me. It’s a great post that totally deserved to be named after one of the best Rolling Stones songs in existence. You should read it, if you haven’t already.]

Something’s been bothering me over the years that for some odd reason I haven’t been able to articulate very well. At least until now. It’s the whole thing about large corporations supporting international relief and development work. The conversation about the need to tap into those corporate grants and how best to do it has been in at least the background and occasionally in the foreground in every job I’ve had in every NGO that I’ve worked for. And in my experience, from the perspective of roles which have been primarily technical or program management, that conversation has always been fraught. The alliance between the corporate for-profit world and the humanitarian NGO world is ever an uneasy one.

On one hand, it seems obvious that there is benefit – perhaps not only financial – to be had from corporate “partnerships” with INGOs. Jargon and phrases like “mutually beneficial”, “socially conscious”, and “shared interests” get used a lot in vision and strategy documents and even project proposals. And what could be all that wrong with large (or small) corporations and businesses using discretionary funds to support our work in the field?

I don’t object to corporate support for relief and development work in principle. In some ways my thinking here is very similar to my (apparently controversial) thinking on development tourism and volunteering (see here, here, and here, if you missed the conversation earlier). Which is to say that while there is probably some good in there, overall I see it as a blunt instrument. Either that or a very specialized instrument, in different ways very costly, and with very limited use: the number of instances where it can and does work very well, being very small in comparison to the number of instances in which it is totally inappropriate.

Part of the challenge, to be sure, is to discern those instances where corporate support to relief and development is appropriate.

But I think the deeper issue is simply that we cannot allow ourselves to forget, even for a minute, this very basic fact:

For all of the potential good to be accomplished via cash grants from large corporations, we must face and must not be naïve to the fact that NGOs and for-profit corporations have very different motivations for entering into the relationship, have very different ideas about what the ultimate goals should be, and as a result have different views about what to do and how to do it. In short:

Humanitarian NGOs and for-profit corporations want very different things.

It sounds basic almost the point of being cliché, but we seem to very often forget that NGOs and for-profit businesses simply have fundamentally different reasons for existing. And we want different things out of the relationship, despite the “common goals” or “synergy” jargon.

* * *

In recent years it has become common for INGOs to employ people or perhaps whole teams whose job it is to build relationships and leverage funding from these large for-profits. These colleagues tend to be very entrepreneurial, go-get-‘em, assertive-bordering-on-aggressive, bottom-line driven types. In my current job as well as in every job I’ve had thus far, they come to me with all kinds of corporation “partnership” “opportunity.”

Some are okay. I have no problem with Schwinn (for example) wanting to financially support typhoon response in Taiwan and also make available the staff at their facilities in Taiwan as emergency response volunteers. Proctor & Gamble’s PUR water purification sachets are near-miraculous in their ability to transform thick sludge into water that can be used to mix ORS – and P&G gives these out in large quantities to NGOs, sometimes with shipping and handling at no charge, on a regular basis. Those sachets, so long as they are used as a short-term intervention in dire relief situations, can save lives. All good and well.

But I can say without exaggeration that the vast majority of those “opportunities” that come across my desk are not as clearly appropriate. Some make me cringe flat-out. But most are just very fuzzy.

They’re often around products of questionable worth in a development context. Or they’re opportunities for funding for very defined interventions and/or very defined target groups. We’re under pressure to find ways to “make this work” or – this is my favorite – “think outside the box.” Because for-profits have different beliefs and assumptions about how social change happens and, even more importantly, how quickly it happens, there’s implied time pressure as well. “How hard can this really be?”, we’re asked. The thing this company wants to fund (or donate) will do some good. Sure, it’s not really what our organization is about, but it will help the poor. Or so it seems. It’s all good, right? Why is the programs unit dragging it’s feet?

And that leave us – the programs people – with some difficult thought questions as well. How far do we bend? How do we discern what is appropriate “innovation”? How do we determine when an idea from a for-profit has merit, even though it runs contrary to traditional relief and development thinking? The core assumption of our work is that we should and can be agents of change in the communities where we work. We can come in and see what is wrong, and then suggest changes that in some cases seem and perhaps also are outrageous in the local context. Yet we can be equally resistant to ideas coming from outside of our little community of practice.

* * *

I don’t mean to sound endlessly jaded or cynical. I don’t think that every for-profit company is evil (although some definitely are, in my opinion), and I don’t think that every social fund manager secretly doesn’t give a rip about poor people in Nigeria and cares only about his or her employer’s bottom line.

But I think that we as practitioners humanitarian aid, as individual and collective representatives on INGOs need to stop acting like the shy girl at the prom who thinks she needs to let the jocks get to third base in order to be accepted. I think we need to be less collectively naïve about the extent to which for-profits want the same thing that we want in the communities where we work. I think that we need to say “no” with a little more regularity, be less susceptible to the logic of “we’ll go along with this lame idea now in order to keep the relationship good, and then do ‘donor education…” In my entire career I have never seen “donor education” work on a for-profit. Heck, I’ve hardly ever seen it work on a wealthy individual. We need to stop thinking that we can change them. We might get lucky, but shouldn’t count on it.

Instead, I think that we need to frame the conversations from the beginning. We need to say what we will do and not be swayed from that.

I know it’s hard, especially in this economic climate. But we need to just say “no” to corporate giving opportunities that do not support good development.