The Kids aren’t alright: the collapse of Kids Company

This chapter details the 2015 collapse of Kids Company, a leading charity for disadvantaged children in London. It examines the role of charisma within symbolic power, applying Max Weber's notion of charismatic authority both to charities as organisations and to charitable leaders. The collapse of Kids Company revealed its over-reliance on its closeness to people at the top of government, symbolic power, and the charismatic authority of its founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh, rather than good governance and strategic planning. Kids Company challenged those who would talk it down, and used its access to prime ministers in order get special treatment. The chapter then explores the notions of passion and professionalism within the charity sector; how these two concepts are often thrown into opposition; how charity leaders reflect on bridging this divide; and what the collapse of Kids Company has meant for their work.

#humblebrags and the good giving self on social media

This chapter examines young people's perception and experiences of charity and voluntary action online, and what the implications of these practices might be. Findings show that despite the supposedly globalised nature of social media connections, friends and family still drive young people's giving online. Young participants report awkwardness about asking for donations and feeling that they may be ‘guilt tripping’ others into giving by requesting donations from friends. They also worry that talking about charity online could be perceived as ‘showing off’ how good they were or ‘humblebragging’ in a faux presentation of goodness, and, in the wake of several scandals in the non-profit sector, were concerned about authenticity in the charitable acts and good deeds of their peers. Contextualised within the sociology of youth on social media, such findings indicate difficulties for non-profits online, as wider social media behaviour shapes the reception of charity.

Charities, expertise and policy

This chapter investigates charities as organisations, often experts in their field or bestowed with the image of expertise. It studies how and why the UK government has sought to involve the charity sector in the delivery of social policy. The chapter then outlines new challenges to charity trust that have emerged, and how the public–voluntary sector relationship has become more complicated as a result. It also discusses recent attempts to ‘gag’ charities in receipt of public income from criticising officials, because charities are holders of automatic symbolic prestige, as well as several cases in which charities may have misused the automatic assumption of goodness and expertise they have received from the public and policy practitioners. Interviewee data presents a story from sector leaders that the environment for charities has become significantly tougher in recent years, partly because of funding, but also because charities are no longer seen as special by default.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of charity. Charity is a subject largely untouched by modern sociologists, often left instead to the policy analysts who seek to understand the logic of charities, their management, their delivery of services, and their resourcing. In focusing mainly on charity and not on charities, this book re-examines that more ephemeral notion, and brings a new theoretical lens to how charity operates and works in modern society. This includes a desire to focus on the social reaction to acts of charity, and how that reaction plays out in the internal monologue of the charitable individual. The book shows what it is that makes charity ‘good’, and how this awareness of charity's goodness drives more charity, in a way that can be rewarding for the demonstrably charitable, but also how this goodness creates huge silences and violences about how charity is both practised and operationalised. The ‘good glow’ of charity is inherently powerful and sociologically problematic in terms of policy and everyday practice.

Poppy fascism

This chapter focuses on the poppy, the fundraising symbol of remembrance for the contribution of the armed services, and more specifically, the yearly controversy that surrounds it. Known as ‘poppy fascism’, the demand that all public figures must wear the poppy prominently and respectfully during the autumn in the lead-up to Remembrance Sunday, this phenomenon illustrates how the essential goodness of charity symbols can be weaponised and used competitively and judgementally. Examining the yearly poppy outcry through the lens of postcolonial theory, one sees how the poppy is forced to bear a lot of cultural and symbolic weight, partly because it is held up as an unalloyed ‘good thing’. The chapter then outlines the problems created by ‘poppy fascism’ for sector leaders. It also shows what this simple charitable fundraising and remembrance tool says about modern Britain today.

Giving and getting: using charity’s symbolic power

This chapter discusses Paul Longmore's dogged and personal exploration of that most fluffy of charity spectacles, the charity telethon, as a way to start understanding the issues surrounding charitable giving, whether that be in the form of individual donations, corporate social responsibility programmes, or volunteering. Looking at these concepts through a symbolic lens, it asks those undeniably suspicious questions of ‘are people only doing this for something in return, and if so, what?’ Such explorations in ‘the other side’ of gifts and charity are contextualised through an overview of Marcel Mauss' study of gift giving, and how that doing good may always be part of a wider embedded relationship of exchange. The role of someone's charity adding to one's impression of them, and how, as such, it results in various strategic decisions, is viewed from the perspective of business, individuals, and charity fundraising and fundraisers themselves. While giving is practically always something to be celebrated, the chapter shows how charity is complicated and can be simultaneously positive and problematic.

Conclusions: the good glow

This concluding chapter reflects on the lessons from the examination of how charity works, about what it means for charity and what it means for people. The first thing to note is that the idea that charity, gift giving, and kindness are imbued with a certain symbolic goodness that improves the actor's image is not a new observation. The fact that doing charity provides an aura of goodness exists, and so one's choice is to recognise it or not, think about it or not, and analyse it or not. What is interesting is how the presence of such a symbolic plane affects individuals' interpretation of others' actions. Ultimately, symbolic power exists in all charitable behaviour. Such power is not necessarily negative, but is generally understood as such.

Effective altruism and ignoring charity’s symbolic power

This chapter presents an alternative way of thinking about charity: the effective altruism movement. It explores how the movement's proponents deal with the concept of the symbolic power of doing good, when that movement's central desire is for one to see past the symbolic power of charity, to be able to ignore it, so one can throw off the shackles of clumsy emotion and really focus on putting charity to work, for as much good as it can muster. One needs to remove the ‘thrill’ from charity because ‘relying on good intentions alone to inform your decisions can be potentially disastrous’. This feeds into a critique of the consequences of ‘moral licensing’, where people who perform good or charitable actions ‘often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future’, showing that ‘people are often more concerned about looking good or feeling good rather than actually doing good’. By applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavour, one does not rob the act of virtue but instead do the more virtuous thing, which is to act on more than virtue. Ultimately, there is a need to basically bypass the social norms and symbolic rewards offered by charity and doing good.