Selling a mission

I’m currently in the market for a mission trip. Do you have any suggestions? Our youth have gone to South Dakota to help the Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation. They’ve helped renovate damaged homes in Katrina.

I heard on the radio recently that the number of volunteers in Oklahoma after the tornados hit are so plentiful that it’s getting hard for construction companies to get contracts.

When I was a teenager, I took several trips to Juarez, Mexico to build homes for the homeless there. It was one of those experiences that defines a person. Nothing makes you appreciate what you have like experiencing life without it. I strongly believe it’s the kind of thing everyone needs to do at least once. I used to argue it was because if you have the opportunity to do good, you have to seize it. Now, I’m not so sure. I think it may be much more self serving.

After the earthquake in Haiti, lots of groups went down to help rebuild. I know the exact sort of experience. A group comes in for a week, builds up a basic house, or perhaps a larger structure like a three room school or meeting house, working crazy hours and goes home feeling completely exhausted, but riding a high of having done tremendous good.

The truth is more complicated.

You can argue that giving a free home or school certainly doesn’t hurt the situation, but it begs the question: what does this group really need? Construction projects are popular because it’s hard work and you have something to show for your actions at the end of the week. In New Orleans, because a renovation takes more than one week, they stage the projects so that at least one home is getting finished each week, and cart the current teams to see a finished product, to visualize what the home they are working on will eventually be. It is important for people to feel like what they are doing is making a difference.

Every single one of these trips that I participate in, I toy with the idea of giving up what I have and making this particular mission my cause. I’ve got the skills and the will to throw myself at a cause until positive change occurs. But I don’t do it, and deep down I know that even if I offered, I would get turned away by the organizers. That’s not what they want, nor should it be.

The Susan G Komen foundation is arguably one of the most successful non-profits in recent history in terms of getting awareness of their brand and their cause into the public eye. Others have been around for longer, but it’s hard to turn around and not spot a pink ribbon somewhere, or see a commercial about one of their three day walks. For a long time I was puzzled by the walks. The Walk for Hunger, the Relay for Life, all have people walking for a cause. But walking doesn’t actually stride toward finding a cure for cancer. You can walk the entirety of your life, around the planet, and not a single step will advance the scientific pursuits behind the machinations of cancer. What they really need is your money.

But they can’t just ask for your money. That doesn’t work. What works is organizing the massive walks where volunteers ask their friends for money. It’s inefficient, because lots of the money donated ends up going into the cost of organizing the walk itself. T-shirts, drinks, zoning off an area with police protection for three straight days. But, because people finish the walk feeling exhausted and having a t shirt for having walked so far and so hard.

This is not a knock against the methods employed by these non-profits. They are simply employing methods that are effective. The knock is against our need to be sold an artificial involvement to better engage us, and make us open our wallets wider. They sell an opportunity for someone to exert themselves really hard, and feel good doing it because, their efforts are furthering a cause that, for at least that day, or three days, or week, is really important to them. A lot of the money goes to the cause you are supporting, but not as much as it could because you need to get something back for your efforts. You need a memory, a t-shirt, maybe a photo with a celebrity.

Admittedly, the alternate approach has its own pitfalls. There are plenty of examples of an individual or community receiving a cash windfall in response to a particular disaster, and that money is poorly managed and ultimately wasted. Planet Money had interesting coverage of the efforts to build a school for a small town that had lost theirs in the Haitian Earthquake. Both approaches were tried, and in the end it is questionable if either one really made a positive difference for the community.

I am still an advocate of mission trips. I think they’re very important learning experiences. Ignorance breeds over-simplification at its least and apathy at its worst. There’s no such thing as a big problem that’s simple. I believe in working hard to find your own limits can help you grow as an individual as well as a team. I believe it will change your decision making process, as well as improve your problem solving skills by making learn to do more with less.

I still believe in building something, but I want to find trips that have as much education as they do hard labor. That’s the only way we can fix the real problems.