People often don't give charity, they buy it

We're all busy at this time of year, getting our papers together for our annual tax returns. Did you locate all your charitable receipts?

If you're an average Canadian, you gave about $450 to charities last year. That's from StatsCan, which looks at real numbers.

The Association of Fundraising Professionals does a study every two years, looking at trends and attitudes regarding charities, via the Ipsos polling group. Their latest report contains a significant fudge factor, probably representative of what Canadians would tell a pollster versus what they're telling Revenue Canada.

Their report, titled What Canadian Donors Want, tells us the average annual donation is $924. Hmmm. Seems one thing Canadian donors want is more credit than they're entitled to.

But let's ignore that anomaly for now. More at issue for the fundraisers are the factors that bring people to be charitable.

That topic obviously interests the fundraisers, but it also impacts government policy and our whole Western capitalist culture. Because as it turns out, charity isn't everything we think it is.

Last fall, Canadian sociologist Linsey McGoey published a critique of modern big-money philanthropy titled No Such Thing as a Free Gift. Her book focusses on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and reveals some parallels found by the fundraising association, into what motivates people to give to charity.

The main parallel I found between the book and the report is that donors want results from their giving. Measurable results. Whether we are billionaires or 90-per-centers with chequebook in hand, we all want to know that our gift is accomplishing something.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, McGoey says there can be. Saying there's no such thing as a free gift, means we expect something back from our donations.

For individuals, supporting a religious institution is the top reason we donate money. Curing diseases is next on the list, supporting children and youth are next, with food sufficiency and environmental causes coming after that. The big foundations are quite secular, so those other motivations are bumped up the list.

Big — we're talking huge — money changes a lot of things, but it doesn't change basic human nature. Speaking of philanthropy, we want to help others, but the more our donations help us, the more likely we are to give.

Here's one example McGoey points to: charitable funding of charter schools. In the 1980s Bill Gates declared public high schools to be 'obsolete.' So he put $2 billion into new schools for 800,000 pupils, in a whole new program of learning.

The result? Students from these schools graduated not much better than average, with no statistical advantage in entering college. So Gates admitted he was wrong — and pulled his funding.

But in many neighbourhoods, the new charter schools had drained and killed local public high schools. When they closed, thousands of students suddenly found they had no local school to go to. Graduation rates plummeted, as did college entry rates.

In short, Gates tried to play God with the education system. There was too much emphasis on results, and when he didn't get the results he wanted, he walked away. And he wasn't in it to stay, in the same way taxpayers are in the education game with funding for public schools.

Locally, I was a board member of a non-profit that helped people with severe disabilities. There's not a lot of room for improvement for this group — we weren't going to help them get jobs or anything like that. But they still need supports.

Unable to get hard statistical numbers from us — results — a local funding agency stopped funding us. Their contributors want success stories, not hold-the-line stories. But what if success means just living with your disability?

McGoey mentions in detail how large industrial foundations fund projects that enable people to buy their products — often insisting recipients buy only their products. That ain't charity.

Wanting to create a society where every social agency has to prove numerically how they improve the lot of the people they serve — that ain't charity, either.

Governments like to fund non-profits with tax dollars to provide community supports. It's can be about half the cost having government employees do it.

But funders can be onerous bean-counters. Reporting and transparency costs can be more than a funding grant is worth.

But while we expect non-profits to report how much ink they use in their printers, we still allow giant foundations to act as they please. The Gates Foundation is larger than the United Nations World Health Organization, for instance, and really only answers to two people: Bill and Melinda Gates. It's their money, and they can spend it how they want.

But if you want some kind of payback for your generosity, is it really charity?