As the world reveals another form of pain and suffering, generous people take it as an issue that has to be urgently resolved. Correspondingly, grants and donation becomes the foremost medium to fund the cause and to possibly up bring a resolution. This certainly has been a long and prevailed trend in the field of social works and generosity till date. Behaviorally, a certain cause retains the volume of attention as per the degree of suffering involved in it. And thus, people and institutions find it reasonable to collects funds and grants in order to resolve the particular issue. Causes for poverty alleviation, hunger eradication, environment awareness & education development, Homelessness rescue and even locally unheard causes like HIV awareness & victim caring, Schizophrenia treatments and transplantations has been identified (which of course is) as an urgent and important act by the public. Relatively, there sustains potentiality of large amount of funds and accordingly, numerous institution competing to retrieve the grants (hopefully) to fund the causes. Now my question is, why has the portfolio of institutions structured in such a way that they would have to compete against each other for the same grant in order to fund the same cause? What sort of ego has to persist in this very job of generosity?
Competition amongst for-profit companies is fair enough because the intention is to fill my wallet not yours. However, the intension of the not-for-profit institutions striving for the same cause is to fill the common wallet either ways it comes from. Therefore, prevailing competition either has to denote inefficiency in the overall system or has to signify the situation of corruption (“filling my own wallet” kind of mentality).
I have put on to this topic because; I have visualized this issue in local and even in global cases. It is justifiable enough to see the local fund raisers to compete on finance, because the greed of uprising the institution can be reasonable. But, it is often pointless to reason behind the Billion dollar Philanthropic International institutions to compete for mega-funds from key people (particularly, Celebrities and corporate billionaires) and institutions (particularly, Multi-national Corporations and the big governments), when the purpose of the fund is actually the same. The intensity of the issue heightens when the fact remains that, the key sources of funds are often the same, sometimes also called as the easy funds. Unfortunately, the Latest World Bank reports summarizes that the quality of the fund mobilization of cause-based organization is in a dreadful situation or even going against philanthropic motives. And certainly there are reality examples stating the total wastage of the big INGOs and IGOs like United Nation and Human Rights.
For instance, the tons of food packages shipments for Haiti food relief project initiated by U.S. government as a part of “food for peace” program was conducted only to see the corrupted politicians taking hostility of the packages and black marketing them at lower price, thus dumping the local farmers and making them poorer. As a worst case, the fund mobilized by United Nation to Somalia as a part of ‘world peace’ program was rather routed to the militant tyranny of the country, which they used to buy guns in order to subjugate the people and the democracy itself. Such has been the fact of Fund mobilization, at time when the sophistication of philanthropic program is at its highest level. Aside all, it is evidential enough to prove that the relationship between the heating competition for fund raising and its effective mobilization is anything but positive.
Certainly, it is to point out that, the system of competition for fund raising in social work and philanthropic acts may not be the right track to follow. It is something that the smaller institutions should learn from the bigger ones. The main motive is the want on having the cause resolved in one ways or another. A proper philanthropic institution wouldn’t deem it necessary to compete for the funds that could be other ways retained by other institutions but be effectively mobilized for the same purpose. It is totally unlike the strategy of the profit making institutions to fiercely compete for the market share, though all of theirs motive is to satisfy the people.
It make not sound quite convincing for the introducing institution who may have to convince the funders to fund them out of many others through their effective mobility plans, in order to create one’s existence. For them I would like to recall an adage stating that one needs to take his time but hurry up in order to move forward. Conclusively, the moral of the story is that, everything is better-off at balanced state.
Analytical Perspective on Economics 