Written by: LI Yuqiu, Rachel On September 19th, 2019, Ant Forest, an application on Alipay, won Champions of the Earth award, the United Nation’s highest environmental honor. Since the launch of this green project by Ant Financial Services Group, an Alibaba affiliate, Ant Forest group …
Written by: CHENG Yi Nam Elim People must have imagined being an animal and living a simpler life. But have you ever thought of being a pig whose life is all about growing up, getting cut up, and ending up being swallowed down into humans’ …
Written by: KWOK Nga Ching, Christy
As an internationally renowned NGO with branches in over 50 countries, Amnesty International aims to let every person enjoy all human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, in 2018, Amnesty International Netherlands faced criticism after they produced a magazine that was designed to highlight the refugee crisis on the Greek Islands.
In 2018, a 36-page magazine called Glamoria was published. to shed light on the plight of refugees living in camps on the Greek Islands. On the cover, Dutch actress Jouman Fattal was wearing a couple of strategically placed orange lifejackets, which refugees used when traveling by boat. The actress was also wearing makeup and her midriff was exposed.
The organization soon received plentiful of criticism on how they promote the refugee crisis. Netizens, socialists and even ex-refugees criticized Amnesty International Netherlands to be disrespectful to both females and the refugees. It soon became a PR crisis as the issue was widely discussed on social media and people were really upset about it. The organization had to make an official apology to settle the incident.
One of the reasons leading to people’s anger was the disrespectful message towards the refugees. The refugee crisis was one of the biggest challenges Greece had faced. Refugees came from the Middle East and Africa to seek asylum in the European Union. It was a very serious issue to talk about since people were forcibly displaced, and barely surviving. When talking about serious humanitarian issue, people prefer to treat it earnestly, instead of sexualizing it or making it sounds fun. The magazine cover triggered people because life jackets, which were used by the refugees to survive in the seas, was used as a tool to showcase the sexiness of the model. Which most people consider it disrespectful.
Another problem is the objectification of women. The cover model was showing her beauty with her exposed midriff, exquisite makeup and a suggestive pose. With the rise of feminism, gender portrayal and equality has become a global issue. They think the magazine cover is objectifying women to raise awareness. In the cover photo, the woman’s only function is to look like a passive sexualized object and exists only to please all those who gaze at her. Moreover, the plight women refugees were facing was even more severe, since they have to face sexual assault while fighting for their survival. This explains why the organization triggered people that much when they put a sexy actress on their magazine’s cover.
When dealing with sensitive issue such as refugee crisis or other humanitarian crises, organizations have to be really careful not to trigger people. We can see that usually people are uncomfortable with sexualized content or humor in promotions when talking about these serious issues. On a similar note, the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders was also criticized in 2018 for posting celebrities wearing exaggerated makeups to mimic Ebola Symptoms. It led to another PR crisis due to their disrespect towards Ebola patients. We can say that it is better to be more careful when dealing with these issues, as we can’t anticipate how serious people may take them.
Reference
Amnesty Glamoria’s Half-Naked Model Cover of ‘Sexualising’ Refugees Was in Bad Taste, Taken Down. (2018, December 23). Retrieved from https://www.albawaba.com/loop/amnesty-glamorias-half-naked-model-cover-sexualising-refugees-was-bad-taste-taken-down-1229814
Cohen, R. D. (2018, December 21). Uproar Over Sexy Picture On Magazine From Amnesty International’s Dutch Arm. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/12/21/678626058/uproar-over-sexy-picture-on-magazine-from-amnesty-internationals-dutch-arm
Higginbottom, J. (2020, March 1). ‘It’s a powder keg ready to explode’: In Greek village, tensions simmer between refugees and locals. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/01/refugee-crisis-in-greece-tensions-soar-between-migrants-and-locals.html
Ratcliffe, R. (2018, December 20). Charity censured for use of semi-clad woman in refugee crisis campaign. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/dec/20/dutch-charity-censured-for-use-of-semi-clad-woman-in-refugee-crisis-campaign-amnesty-international-medecins-sans-frontieres
Who We Are. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/
Written by: CHAN Yim Ting, June World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is a worldwide leading organization working in the field of wildlife conservation and endangered species (WWF, 2020). It has always been a pioneer in implementing novel campaigns to draw public attention to different environmental issues. …
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Written by: CHAN Hei Ting, Lilian
What are your concerns when you are considering if you should donate to a charity group? Would it be based on their reputation, or the recommendations from friends? According to a survey done by the Better Business Bureau’s Give.org in 2018, it is found that among Americans, only 19 percent of them develop strong trust in charities. This shows that many of them are probably wearied of the scandals of the nonprofits or they doubt that whether their kind donations could reach the hands of the underprivileged ones. In light of this, blockchain sounds like a perfect solution to ease all these concerns. In this essay, we will look into how BitGive mobilized the blockchain system to facilitate the donation work.
In the past, people only rely on one legal entity to manage the record of transactions. Now, with the use of blockchain, everyone can get access to the ledger to track where the donations are from and where will they go. Blockchain eliminates the use of middlemen, hence the decentralization allows thousands of computers to monitor transactions made by the charities. Once the transaction is made, it is recorded in a block with a unique code to distinguish it from other blocks. The next block in the chain will contain the hash of the previous block, making it difficult for hackers to edit the transaction record because if they change a single block, they need to change every block afterwards. This requires enormous computing power and is nearly impossible to achieve. When a new block is added, everyone in the public domain can witness it. Other than the high transparency of data, the numbers are also shown in a real-time basis, meaning that you don’t have to wait until the annual report is released to check if your money has been used wisely.
The BitGive foundation promotes bitcoin donations and any charitable organization can reach them to initiate a fundraising project. For donors, you can visit the website of BitGive to trace your donations at any time. For the beneficiaries, you can save administration cost for checking the bills. Moreover, payments made could be transmitted to the wallets of nonprofits in short time. In this way, BitGive can enable its partner organization to take action to delivery resources more promptly since they save time in transferring the currency or verifying with the payment institutions by fully adopting the use of Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is perceived to be the more secure and trustworthy one among all the cryptocurrencies.) Under all these circumstances, blockchain helps charities to rebuild their goodwill and credibility, addressing all the concerns aforementioned, motivating more potential donors to take action.
You may wonder if blockchain sounds so perfect, why don’t every organizations just simply join the scheme? Indeed, there are some hidden problems as well. Firstly, the technology and operating cost is extremely high. To verify the transaction in order to include it into the block, a process called “mining” is required. In the case of Bitcoin, there is a “proof of work” system which requires all the computers in the blockchain network to solve a complex computational math problem if they want to add a block to the blockchain. Therefore, the time for adding a new block in the chain costs up to ten minutes, since computers must run certain programs. As organizations have to adopt the use of chips and processors in the algorithmic work, the operating cost is high due to the high-end equipment required. It is even said that the total electricity used for cryptocurrency mining could provide 300 million families’ usage for a year. In light of this, such large energy consumption and the associated cost become an adoption barrier for lots of global nonprofits to join the blockchain network.
Although the marketability of blockchain in philanthropy is often being doubt due to its operating complexity, the bright sides of the technology sounds persuasive enough to attract new donors. Technology takes time to improve, even though the blockchain system now appears to be costly and complicated, the ultimate goal is sacred, and it indeed aims to solve the problems rooted in the charitable industry. For instance, a new simpler system named “proof of stake” is already evolving to address the current problems aroused by the “proof of work” system. Computing professionals are always working hard to better the blockchain operation. Moreover, the idea of blockchain can actually integrate with other technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to bring novel solutions to the social sector. For example, turning things such as buildings, vehicles, and appliances into smart objects could enable us to track their status and capacity so as to see whether there are any idle items that could reach the hands of the underprivileged. The power of technology is far beyond our imagination, I believe that blockchains’ unique capabilities can help revitalize the field in the near future.
References:
Written by: SU Yeqi, Erica Miss America Organization (MAO) is a beauty pageant in America which started as a bathing suit contest to attract tourists in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1921. It has become a tradition that contestants in beauty pageants have to wear …
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Written by: LAI Cheuk Yan
Voluntourism, which means to volunteer abroad has become a new trend in recent years. Many teenagers, most of them university students, would like to take a short trip to different developing countries to spend their gap year or vacation and contribute to the local community in some ways. Advertisements on voluntourism always emphasize how bad the condition of a region is and how participants could help them start a new life through a 2-week short volunteer trip. Moreover, organizations love to put ‘safe, trusted, affordable’ as the advertisement tagline to attract participants. These websites mark down their prices and provide 5 stars comments as if they were an Airbnb.
Undeniably, voluntourism has its own benefits. For example, it is a good learning experience for volunteers who choose to spend their time exploring a new culture, helping others as well as helping themselves by changing their attitude and perspective on the world. However, not all organizations are good and are helpful towards the volunteers (Sullivan, 2018). Indeed, voluntourism has created a lot of concerns: For the operators, do those projects that last for 2 weeks have sustainable benefits? Are those volunteers well-trained and capable of making “changes”? And most importantly, is the booming business of ‘voluntourism’ ethical?
For instance, in the ‘Love Volunteers’ advertisement, a young lady was surrounded by 4 African children with their cheery faces on. The captions were not describing how the life quality of the children has been improved, but ‘Lowest Fees… the REAL deal!’. The price for ‘Projects Abroad’, a volunteering programme in Vietnam provided by an NGO is indeed staggering, with a cost of HKD 20,400 for 2 weeks. It stated that the fee paid would be used to make sure the project is sustainable and successful. But if you look into the numbers, only 29% is the direct cost of the volunteer experience, the remaining 70% goes to indirect costs (such as rent and utilities), organizational costs, recruitment costs, taxes and revenue. Many researchers and sociologists argued that voluntourism seems to be a profit-oriented project instead of a charitable one (Loh , 2019). Rather than building a better community, it consolidates the wealth gap between the locals and wealthy nations.
Taking volunteers’ interests as the priority, advertisements that emphasizes the price leads volunteers to consider themselves more as tourists. Research shows that short-term voluntourism benefits the organizations and the volunteers more than the locals (Green et al, 2009). A volunteer mentioned that they were not trained in basic construction work and the locals had to rebuild the structure at night so that the volunteers were not aware of their failure (Biddle, 2014). Nicole Berry found that volunteers may prioritize their own interests over those of the communities they are helping (Berry, 2014). Expecting the locals to be thankful, it in turns reinforce paternalism. In fact, volunteers often fail to solve long-term infrastructure problems, resulting in duplication of existing resources, and ultimately fail to bring real changes to the community they serve.
To be an ethical and responsible organization, voluntourism organizers should re-examine what is the ultimate goal of running such business and how they should advertise their services. Financial interest should not outweigh charity work for a volunteer organization.
Reference:
Berry NS. (2014) Did we do good? NGOs, conflicts of interest and the evaluation of short-term medical missions in Sololá, Guatemala. Social Science & Medicine. Nov; 120:344-351. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.05.006.
Green, T., Green, H., Scandlyn, (2009) J. et al. Perceptions of short-term medical volunteer work: a qualitative study in Guatemala. Global Health 5, 4. , retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-5-4
Lawrence C. Loh (2019) Opinion: Volunteering Abroad Is Popular And Problematic. Let’s Fix It, retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/09/12/754347433/volunteering-abroad-is-popular-and-problematic-lets-fix-it
Noelle S. (2018) When Volunteering Abroad Does More Harm Than Good， retrieved from
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-sullivan-volunteering-abroad_n_5a7de894e4b044b3821d1627
Pippa Biddle (2014). The Problem With Little White Girls, Boys and Voluntourism , retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/little-white-girls-voluntourism_b_4834574
Written by: CHONG Hoi Lam, Kelly Decentralizing organization of social campaigns refers to campaigns that are not “owned” by a specific organization and relies on participants to spread the movement. Such campaigns are usually ignited by a call for social change. Participants are usually connected …