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In recent decades a series of high-profile scandals relating to the running of charities have had an impact on how charities are perceived and the public’s trust in them. These have included some very different types of alleged wrongdoing. Some have been cases of blatant fraud, such as that of William Aramony, who as President of the United Way had helped turn it into one of the USA’s largest charities. He was convicted in 1995 of defrauding the organisation of US$ 1 million, which he used to fund lavish extra-marital affairs, among other things. Prior to being jailed for six years he had been lauded as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘genius’.

Other damaging headlines have often related to the salaries of charity chief executives. Sometimes these salaries have been made public during the airing of some other scandal – for example, it was revealed that, when convicted, William Aramony had an annual compensation package of US$ 460,000.

In the UK there has been strong public feeling on this subject for many years, summed up nicely in this opening paragraph of an article published by the Guardian newspaper in January 2019: ‘It says here in this letter you sent that £4 from me could help save a life. So how about your CEO takes £40,000 less salary next year and saves 10,000 lives?’ This was a message received from a monthly donor by one of the UK’s best-loved charities in August 2013, following sustained media coverage about the high pay of chief executives in the UK voluntary sector.

This recurring issue of salaries is often linked to ‘administration costs’ or ‘high overheads’ and sometimes to allegations of extravagant spending by charity bosses. The Wounded Warrior Project, one of the best-known organisations in the USA working with disabled and wounded veterans, hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2016 when the media exposed its ‘lavish spending’. It was reported that in 2014 alone, they spent US$ 26 million on conferences and meetings at luxury hotels – similar to the total amount they were spending on combat stress recovery. While other similar charities were contributing over 90 per cent of their funds to directly supporting veterans, The Wounded Warrior Project was spending only 60 per cent.

Meanwhile, in the UK, a high-profile London charity called Kids Company, a favourite of celebrities and politicians, many of whom seemed in thrall to its charismatic founder Camila Batmanghelidjh, spiralled into a financial meltdown and closed suddenly in August 2015. It left behind a string of empty promises and red faces within the government departments that had provided it with £46 million of public money despite repeated concerns that had been raised about how it was being run.

And then there was the very sad case of Olive Cooke, from Bristol, who took her own life at ninety-two years of age. She was the longest-serving poppy seller in the UK and supported numerous charities. It was revealed that by the time of her death she was receiving 180 letters from charities each month, and was also being plagued by their phone calls. Her family revealed that she had been suffering from depression, and they believed the pressure she felt she was being put under by the charities had contributed to her death. The fact that the charities she had chosen to support had been sharing her details with others provoked a public outcry. It prompted new interest in and criticism of aggressive fundraising techniques and led to reforms of charity fundraising regulation.

But the worst was yet to come. If the charity sector was already feeling a bit battered and bruised by this point, it was about to receive a much more devastating body blow.

Amid the debris of Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the earthquake, we sat down for a meeting led by our Haitian co-workers, most of them victims themselves who had already been helping those around them in whatever way they could.

An early theme of that meeting was ‘humility in action’, a phrase that Father Tom and Doug used often and which resonated with our own approach at Mary’s Meals. This phrase was to become a guide for our discussions and decision-making in those days. We needed to recognise from the outset that, in the face of a gigantic earthquake, we were very small and very insignificant. While we were committed to striving with all our strength to do whatever we could, and while we believed that we might, with God’s help, ease the suffering of many, we also needed to be realistic about our own very obvious limitations as individuals and as a group. We needed to become clear about we should try to do and, perhaps even more importantly, what we should not try to do. Perhaps this sounds blatantly obvious, but not being properly grounded in this attitude – whether we are responding to an earthquake or a homeless person in front of us or making ongoing strategic decisions about our organisation – can be the root of all kinds of later problems.

It is this approach that eventually led the Mary’s Meals mission to concentrate solely on one simple thing: the provision of one meal every day in a place of education. Each day, when serving those meals, we see other needs we would like to address, but we have chosen a focus that leads us back to doing one thing and trying to do it very well. And that requires a certain discipline, to resist the temptation that tells us we can do everything or that we have responsibility for everything. I am not suggesting every organisation should restrict itself to becoming specialists in only one simple activity: each organisation should have its own unique mission, identity and approach. I am only suggesting that a very common problem in this kind of work is the ‘mission drift’ that inevitably occurs if a certain kind of humility is not our starting point, and something we deliberately remind ourselves of on a regular basis. Of course, we can also go to the other extreme. A singular focus can be applied so sternly that we stifle all promptings of the heart, becoming cold even to the suffering person right in front of us as we tick our boxes and talk of targets reached. Or we can miss opportunities to learn or to innovate in ways that could help everyone move forward. These are real risks too, which I will return to, but on this hot January morning, surrounded by death, destruction and desperate need on an epic scale, it felt as if ‘humility in action’ was an essential starting point.

And then we began to gather information from the local co-workers in our midst, asking them for their thoughts on the most immediate needs. Most of them were from Cité Soleil and they explained to us that Cité Soleil was in some ways less dramatically affected than other parts of the city. The people there were certainly in urgent need of help, but ironically their resounding poverty had spared them in certain ways. When your home is constructed of salvaged rusty corrugated tin, it is much less likely to kill or maim you when shaken to the ground by an earthquake. The loss of life in Cité Soleil was relatively low as a result. Other basic human needs, which the people of Port-au-Prince now found themselves deprived of – electricity, water, healthcare – were things already lacking in Cité Soleil. There, every day had been a battle to survive even before the earthquake. Certainly, though, some needs had become more acute, and the insecurity in Cité Soleil meant few aid organisations would find it possible to operate. With Hands Together’s huge experience of Cité Soleil and its deep connection with the community – in the form of relationships built over many years – it seemed obvious that this was where we should concentrate our efforts, especially given it was likely to be eschewed by other organisations more recently arrived. It seemed water, food and medical care were the greatest needs and we began discussing how we could provide these in Cité Soleil. We recognised that the Hands Together school compounds, with their high surrounding walls, could possibly become the secure bases from which we could work and safely distribute emergency aid. We decided to go and assess that possibility ourselves.

As we drove through Cité Soleil, life did not seem dramatically different, although the people crowded around us and told us of their needs and asked us for help even more urgently than normal. But when we got to the first school our hearts sank. The perimeter walls had collapsed, along with some of the classrooms. Huge cracks ran through the walls that were still standing – and through concrete playgrounds too. For the first time I saw our co-workers, very hardened men who had grown up here among the gangs of Cité Soleil, break down and weep. I realised more than ever before that these schools were the most powerful symbols of hope in this community. They were a source of great pride too. Some of the men in tears had worked on their construction and some helped run them. To see them in ruins was too much and the dam that had been holding back their grief collapsed. But soon they had wiped away their tears and resumed the discussion of practicalities – pointing out that the blocks of the toppled perimeter wall could be reused to reconstruct them very quickly, and thus we would have our secure base. They began debating whether the school could be repaired or whether it would need to be pulled down – most were optimistic about repair. We continued on to the next school, and then the next, where children who should have been in class played amid the rubble while we assessed the damage.

Having inspected all the schools, we finally arrived back to find a hive of activity at Father Tom’s little compound. Already a group of men were rebuilding a collapsed wall to make our space secure once again; some ladies were cooking a pot of rice, while nearby the Hands Together water tanker truck was filling up (even in the best of times this vehicle took clean water into Cité Soleil each day on a regular basis for people to fill their buckets and bottles). We sat down for another meeting with teachers and community leaders who, like most here, had been living on the streets since the earthquake. Various teams were formed with immediate tasks. One was to begin making an immediate assessment of each school community. Who had died? Who had lost their house? What was each family’s current situation? Another team was to begin picking out the reusable bricks from the debris around each school.

As we talked further it dawned on us that unless we could secure a supply of fuel, all our other plans would become futile. Doug and I decided to head immediately to the UN compound, where various organisations seemed to be making their base, in order to try to secure some of that vital commodity.

It had already been a long day when we arrived at the UN base. We entered a reception area and explained our urgent request to the man at the counter. We were directed to another office and then another, explaining our situation anew each time and pleading for some fuel. Nobody disputed the legitimacy of our request, or the fact that they had a large supply available for this purpose, but none was willing to take responsibility for giving us what we needed. Eventually, an earnest young man pointed at a large tent and suggested we try it, explaining that there was a meeting of various international NGOs taking place there. We slipped in quietly at the back of a meeting that was already under way. I looked around at a tent full of white people. A wide variety of accented English was being spoken from all over the world, but there was not one black face in the crowded tent. I couldn’t help but make the comparison with the meeting we had just left in Father Tom’s yard. It became clear from the discussion that most had only just arrived in Haiti.

A man stood up and introduced himself as belonging to a well-known global aid organisation. He began to complain at great length about the poor accommodation that he and his colleagues had been provided with. He was indignant about this and some others began to raise their voices in support of him. Doug and I looked at each other. I could see the anger rise in his face and I was concerned about what he might do in his state of exhaustion and post-traumatic stress. I was relieved when he simply walked out of the tent, leaving behind a lively debate about the deficiencies of the sleeping quarters. Without saying a word to each other, we marched straight back past the offices and into the warehouse where we could see an enormous stack of barrels. We told the startled man in the stock room that we needed one barrel immediately, and could he please have it placed in the back of our pick-up straight away as we were in a very big hurry. I think the pent-up fury, borne of our experience in the tent, must have been plainly evident in our faces. He didn’t even ask a question, let alone put up an argument, and a few minutes later we were heading back through the pitiful streets with our precious cargo, passing thousands of hungry, injured people who really would have had a reason to complain about substandard accommodation if there had been anyone to listen.

That experience in the tent with the international NGOs was the first thing I thought of when, eight years later, I began reading about an emerging scandal centred on the behaviour of some staff working for foreign aid organisations in the aftermath of the earthquake. On 9 February 2018 The Times’ front-page headline read: ‘Top Oxfam workers paid Haiti survivors for sex’. The article also alleged that Oxfam covered up the claims that senior staff working in Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake used prostitutes, some of whom may have been under age. Two days later a follow-up article in The Times reported new claims that more than 120 workers from UK charities had been accused of sexual abuse in the last year. A series of revelations and allegations emerged in the following days and weeks. The UK government’s Department for International Development cut all funding to Oxfam – previously one of the biggest recipients – and the government of Haiti later banned the organisation from working in their country ever again. They explained that they took this decision because of the ‘violation of its laws and serious breach of the principle of human dignity’.

The impact of all this was not only felt by Oxfam but sent shudders through every charity working in international development. The media pressed each aid organisation to make public any cases of sexual misconduct and a plethora of other such cases emerged, dragging many others into the scandal. Some experienced significant decreases in support. The reputation of the international aid sector was further tarnished. And charity was in the dock once again.

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