Food banks made their first appearances hereabouts circa 1980 with the idea that they would be a short term stop gap measure to deal with a sharp downturn in the economy resulting in a decline in employment and in many families having to rely on help while they looked for new work and adjusted to more straitened circumstances. This support was supposed to just fade to a memory as the economy picked up, as people found the next wave of well-paid work and life returned to normal.

We are now thirty years into this process, and food banks have more patrons than ever, and not likely because people want to be leaning on the institutions to feed themselves: the jobs never came back in their previous relative numbers, and few of them as well-paid, while the price of food, energy, housing and clothing has continued to rise at a pace that outstrips what were already pretty meagre social supports.

I also remember pretty clearly the end of the Terry Fox run and the subsequent agony of keeping a public vigil as Terry wound down to the inevitable death in the summer of 1981, just as I remember being astounded at the outpouring of sympathy that accompanied millions of dollars in donations to support Terry’s cause of research into a cure for cancer. I have been party to Fox runs for three decades and have watched the total funds raised in his name balloon toward the half-billion dollar mark. Despite his efforts and those of so many since, cancer seems more prevalent than ever with each passing year, where it is easy for organizer of events benefitting the cancer research establishment to speculate that it’s a rare person who hasn’t been touched by the disease, either personally, or through close friends and family members who have had to deal with the disease.

When the National Film Board of Canada released the film Pink Ribbons, Inc. in the fall of 2011, it helped to crystallize a series of observations that had come unbidden about charity and the role it plays in our society.  As I move into advanced years, I have developed the perspective that allows me to look back and assess the effectiveness of the generosity of some and the efforts expended on behalf of all of us in a wide variety of domains. Do we find it frustrating that huge sums of money can disappear into the maw of the charitable machine in all its incarnations and be assured that we still have abject poverty all over the world, including in some of the most prosperous nations, that cancer hasn’t been beaten, that AIDS is still a threat, that clean drinking water and decent housing cannot be counted as a bottom-line facet of life, sometimes even in wealthy jurisdictions.

There is a chilling little sequence in Pink Ribbons, Inc., a short shot of Ronald Reagan in the early years of his presidency, outlining the expanded role of private industry and the charitable sector in the business of providing for the less fortunate in society, essentially affirming without stating so that the American Federal government was on the cusp of abdicating much of the responsibility for the health and welfare of a good part of its population to the tender mercies of those who might have either the business acumen to wring a profit out of the endeavour or the generosity of those well enough endowed to give back at their discretion. This declaration essentially meant that people couldn’t choose to act in concert through the government to ameliorate health or social conditions, that citizens would have to work through for-profit organizations, meaning that shareholders and executives got paid before clients received benefits, or through charitable organizations who would have to cast around for funding through appeals to the generous or through grant applications. In this, we see the rise of the grant writer and the charitable executive as well as the advent of a new type of organization that raises funds for any organization in return for a piece of the action. This situation implies that concerned citizens are blocked from seeing a health or social emergency and acting together to resolve the crisis, hopefully with minimum fuss and interference from bureaucracy and the delays caused by wrangling necessary funding and other resources.

Charity has also typically dealt with symptoms rather than with root causes, something made abundantly clear in the Pink Ribbons, Inc. film which makes mention of the millions dedicated to the structures searching for a cure, and highlights the lack of funding to study the causes and the suspected links to the 80 000 to 100 000 unregulated chemicals that permeate our living space, our food, our cosmetics, our building materials and the air we breathe. As well, when we participate in charitable events, or even just write a cheque, we generate that warm and fuzzy feeling that we are, at heart, good people who are concerned about the welfare of our fellow human beings. This allows us to block out the general mess in which we are all forced participants, to address crises in a piecemeal fashion and to suppress the sense of outrage that we ought perhaps to feel over letting a significant portion of humanity suffer hunger, cold, poor housing, lack of education and a sense of being able to participate fully in the affairs of society. When we peel away the rescue aspect of charity, we’re left with a power imbalance that is degrading and alienating to the recipient and falsely exculpatory to the donor. We are made to feel good as we roll out the best of our intentions, but fail to engage in the kind of long-term thinking that might produce real progress toward eliminating the circumstances that produce poverty, hunger, inequity, disease and a toxic, degraded environment.