When Charity GO!es Wrong
Though GO! has altruistic intentions, it is ultimately more of a voluntourism organization than a charity service. (Courtesy of Facebook)
By Sean Franklin
Global Outreach (GO!) fundraising season is in full swing. Everywhere I turn, there are pleas for me to buy something to support someone’s GO! trip. Posters in the hallways of my dorm tell me to go to Chipotle. Emails from my RD alert me to an upcoming bake sale. Instagram stories implore me to buy donuts, and texts from my friends eagerly dish out order forms for customized Fordham gear. It’s inescapable.
This is troubling, because GO! is not a charity. It is a voluntourism organization, sending Fordham students on cultural enrichment trips that involve some service.
Its members act as though they are members of a charitable organization, holding on-campus fundraisers and soliciting donations much in the same way that legitimate charities such as FDM and UNICEF do. But they aren’t.
The things that GO! does are not charity. At best, they are misguided attempts at service. At worst, they are nothing more than glorified tourism.
I want to be clear that I don’t think GO! is a malevolent organization. It provides Fordham students with unique opportunities to immerse themselves in other cultures and learn about unfamiliar ways of life. It builds community among the people who participate in its projects. It provides opportunities for reflection and spiritual growth.
However, GO! is not a service organization. The service it provides to the communities it visits is nominal at best. There’s only so much you can accomplish with 15 undergrads and a week’s time. Even if GO! trips were 100% service — which they are not — they would still be a waste of resources.
A GO! trip usually runs between $1,000 and $2,000 a person. If your typical GO! trip is 10 to 15 people, then you’re easily looking at a total cost of over $20,000 – just for 15 people to spend a week in a foreign country cooking meals and gardening.
$20,000 donated to UNICEF could vaccinate over 100,000 vulnerable children against polio. $20,000 donated to Oxfam could plant 40,000 trees in the developing world.
When compared to the impact of real charities, the impact of that $20,000 spent on a GO! project is vanishingly small.
Therefore, for GO! to pose as a charitable organization and solicit donations in the same way is indefensible. It’s impossible to justify GO! as anything but an enrichment program – an opportunity for students to go abroad and learn about different ways of life. Many GO! members, when asked, will readily admit to this. Yet this is not the way they are marketed. Their own promotional material lists them as a “service and immersion program.”
A picture of students participating in GO! Mexico put out by Campus Ministry (which administers GO!) with the caption “Feed the hungry. Comfort the afflicted.” has appeared all over campus (including, strangely, on the napkin dispensers in the cafeteria).
You could be forgiven for thinking that they’re an organization primarily engaged in service. However, they aren’t.
Students looking to make a genuine impact should look elsewhere. The fact there is an appetite for GO! trips shows Fordham students have a genuine interest in service and charity, which is laudable.
Students who are interested in serving others. They could volunteer with homegrown organizations like FDM or venture out further into the Bronx with organizations like the Bronx Volunteer Coalition. There are plenty of opportunities right here at home that will do far more good than a GO! trip ever will.
Campus Ministry, for their part, should either fully finance GO! trips or leave the cost up to the students alone.
Encouraging GO! members to engage in this kind of disingenuous fundraising is unacceptable. Unless GO! becomes more transparent about the nature of its projects, it should not be soliciting donations.
Earlier this week, a friend of mine asked me to buy a Fordham hat for $20 to support her GO! trip to New Orleans. I didn’t, but in her honor I took that $20 and donated it to UNICEF.
The next time someone asks you to donate to their GO! trip, I would urge you to do something similar. Don’t let their good intentions go to waste.
Sean Franklin, FCRH ’21, in an urban studies and economics major from Alexandria, Virginia.
Emma Nelson • Apr 10, 2019 at 5:25 pm
Sean-
While I respect your thoughts as a journalist writing an opinion piece for the paper, I think what you’ve written is very ignorant, especially considering you yourself have never been on a trip, unless you did not mention that in the article. To call out people who are trying to get a better view of the world through experience is absurd, and as a journalist I wish you had sought out more opinions on how these trips operate. While yes, the money we pay for the trips could go to something else, GO is not about coming back and saying “I helped spoon feed a homeless person so now I feel good about myself”. GO! is about opening your eyes to the huge world around us to attempt to get out of the guarded mindset that we easily become enveloped in. GO! never claims to be a charity. It outright states it is a service based immersion project. I participated in the 2018 trip to Kolkata, India in which a team of 12 and I prepared for 3 months for the trip. Going into GO! India, I was not looking to be apart of this team so I could make myself feel good through service. My team leader informed us all that the trip would be very immersive and less service based so that we could all come to an understanding of how different the culture and society is there. We fundraised for the chance to ask others to contribute to our experience in widening our world view. My favorite part of the trip, and the part I value and think back to most, is by far the friendships I created along the journey. It took going around the world for me to meet 12 people who go to my school and each relationship is special and different to me because we were able to experience something nobody else will ever be able to experience the exact same way we did. Not just my teammates, but also the children and elderly people I spent time with at Mother Teresa’s shelter homes, have a memory with people different from them that they will recall later in life when challenged with ideas of diversity and cultural difference. My $1500 tuition fee for the trip could’ve gone to feed the orphans or buy clothes for the elderly, but I instead got to meet and hold these children and elderly people, which brought tears to me eyes to see, up close and in person, all they lacked when I have so much. The impact that trip has had on my life is truly priceless. I will never again look at the streets of New York the same after seeing the streets of Kolkata. I won’t ever pass a homeless person without feeling guilt for all I have that they do not. I feel empowered to one day be able to donate my own money, not fundraised by my fellow students and friends, to help people in similar situations to the ones I had the chance to meet on my GO! trip. My trip enabled me to let go of ignorance when it comes to the world’s problem, and allows me everyday to think of how I impact the world in every step I take and every action I set forth in. Your ignorance in this article is something that, ironically, participating on a GO! Trip could help immensely. I am disappointed to think a fellow classmate of mine could go so far as to criticize a community of people that work hard to ignite change in our own and the community around us’s perspectives on the world. I urge you to seek out opinions that differ from yours before criticizing a school club that seeks to broaden the perspectives of students with the goal of service-based immersion, NOT charity.
Hannah • Apr 10, 2019 at 1:54 pm
As a former GO!er, this is a conversation the university/program totally needs to be having! That being said, this topic is often thoroughly discussed in the team setting, and the ethics of the program are often talked about among students and staff. The conversation between intent versus impact is discussed with great detail in the project setting, and a good leader, in my opinion, stresses the ethical debate that is happening around the projects, as well as the traps of voluntourism. I would agree that most of GO! is an immersion program, but thats a live question and still up for debate.
Also some fact checks: GO! is not a Campus Ministry run program, it is a program under the Center for Community Engaged Learning, which is a center in the Mission Integration and Planning. So funding could not come from CM, but from CCEL and MIP if possible.
Another note! As someone who has worked for a few nonprofits, I would encourage you to look into the ethical questions that UNICEF/OXFAM are facing. I support these organizations fully, but like we are skeptical of programs like GO!, we must bring our same skepticism to NGOs and nonprofits, as a way to hold them accountable and keep working for greater justice in our institutions that often fall short of their promises.
Rosie McCormack • Apr 10, 2019 at 12:58 pm
Wanted to share one correction: GO! is run under the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), not Campus Ministry! Campus Ministry & CCEL are separate entities, both overseen by the VP of Mission Integration and Planning. See links below:
https://www.fordham.edu/info/20097/global_outreach
https://www.fordham.edu/info/20096/the_dorothy_day_center_for_service_and_justice
Emily Sullivan • Apr 10, 2019 at 12:16 pm
I’m a Fordham alumni who participated in GO Mexico 2015 and led GO Guatemala 2017. I also served on the GO board my junior and senior year. And I agree with many of the points made in this op-ed.
I will say, being so entrenched in GO during my time at Fordham, that GO is very different from the majority of college service projects. For example, my Guatemala team and I met weekly and I assigned “homework” for each meeting that included different histories of Guatemala’s civil war, different essays about how service projects are wasteful (Mr. Franklin, and anyone who’s reading the comment section, I 100% recommend you read “To Hell with Good Intentions ” by Ivan Illich — I’ll link at the bottom.) I made my team discuss charity (donations, providing clothing etc) versus justice (actually enacting social change through policy, protests, education etc). By the time we left for our project I think I made a few people on my team very uncomfortable. From what I understand, most other colleges don’t prep or educate students as much for projects.
I also know that the cost of *most* projects includes a large donation to whatever service organization you’re partnering with. For example, the project I led worked with a great organization called Via (which is ran by Guatemalans, not white saviors from the U.S.) and a few hundred bucks per participant went to that org. Like Via, all of the orgs that GO partners with (as of my time at Fordham, I graduated in spring 2017) are ran by members of the communities GO visits, rather than, say, More Than Me, a “charity” in Liberia ran by an American who had no idea what she was doing. (ProPublica had a great story abt this — https://features.propublica.org/liberia/unprotected-more-than-me-katie-meyler-liberia-sexual-exploitation/)
I think that for most students, GO *can* be a really good gateway in community service in their own communities, *if and only if* they are encouraged by their leaders/GO staffers to a) be uncomfortable with the fact that they are paying money to go on a service trip, b) learn/reflect enough to realize that their basic charity efforts won’t make a real difference if they’re not fighting the actual causes of injustice rather than putting a bandaid on the symptoms of those injustices, and c) realize they are not special or altruistic for doing a GO project.
In my opinion, students who do not leave the project without those realizations have failed and left with probably a worse worldview than they had before. I would say that the average GO participant probably naively signs up thinking they’re going to “change the world.” Most learn that that’s the furthest thing from what their doing. Those who don’t — it’s a shame.
I always notice when people go on a project, take photos with brown children, and then come back to New York, never to volunteer in the Bronx or care about injustices in their own communities. (As if most students at Fordham even care about the Bronx community that hosts them… but that’s a comment for another time.)
…ALL THIS TO SAY…
Tone-deaf marketing efforts from GO participants and pleas to help fund their projects are, simply, bad. If someone is preaching about how Venmo’ing them some money will “help” a poor community in Latin America, then they have completely failed the basic exercise of examining their privilege as a (probably white) student going abroad to a place that’s HOSTING them and, IMO, should not be on a project. (But then again, maybe that hypothetical student will be confronted with their own white savior-ness on their project, and hopefully correct their ego-centric worldview.) I agree with Mr. Franklin’s assertion that at GO’s worst, the org is “nothing more than glorified tourism.” But at it’s best, I do think it permanently changes students’ worldviews by making them uncomfortable and challenging them to do better in their OWN communities.
I’d also like to point out that fundraising is how many non-wealthy kids get to participate in this sometimes bad, sometimes good org that lets them have a space to truly think about social justice.
I really appreciated this op-ed by Mr. Franklin, and I hope that current GO leaders/those involved in GO/GO alumni appreciate the very valid criticisms here.
To Hell with Good Intentions: http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm
A.H. • Apr 10, 2019 at 11:26 am
Slow clap for this, I’ve been saying this for four years and continue to be told I’m wrong. If students would like to visit a city or place, for the sake of exploring the culture, they should pay for it themselves because it’s just a vacation with guilt. Furthermore, I am from a local where GO! visits, and while they are feeling ~immersed~, residents of the local just feel like fish in a tank being observed by privileged college students.
If you want to go on vacation, do it. If you want to help a community with problems they face, do it. But don’t ask your fellow students to donate to you “bearing witness.”
Julia Sese • Apr 10, 2019 at 11:07 am
As someone who was initially skeptical of GO! and has went on a GO! project, I think your article is poorly researched and misinformed. GO! is not a charity and is not branded as a charity, therefore your main argument is null. Also, the organizations you cite as ‘legitimate’ are also considered problematic and controversial especially Oxfam and UNICEF. GO! is incredibly transparent about what we do if you had asked anyone who had participated in/lead/facilitated a project would openly tell you that GO! by nature is paternalistic, but we painstakingly inform students that we are there to learn from and help the organization we work with in any way possible for 10 college students from a privileged, american university. Participating in a GO! Project has been one of the most valuable experiences I have had at Fordham and GO! works with some incredible grassroots organizations that do make ‘genuine’ impacts in the communities we travel to. Moreover, as a member of the GO! Mexico team, the caption used by campus ministry was out of context and not chosen by anyone affiliated with our project and I was equally upset with the caption.
Mia • Apr 10, 2019 at 10:37 am
Have you ever been on a GO! trip? As a member of Go! Mexico and a friend of Campus Ministry, I know that a lot your opinion is based on inaccuracies and groupings of two separate departments and if really appreciate if you remove our name and stop diminishing the hard work and lovely time spent with the people in Tecuanipan. Also, I hope you realize that comparing a group of college students fundraising for their own personal travel expenses (which include donations toward the organizations they are helping and staying with) to UNICEF, a billion dollar charity organization with resources Fordham couldn’t and doesn’t attempt to mimic., is completely ridiculous. While GO! Is publicly called a service and immersion trip anyone who participates it works with GO!, including those who receive our “service”, know that we aren’t attempting to perform any charity. You’re speaking out of a place of ignorance and maybe doing some actual research may help you in the future.