Digital Becca

Every now and then, wherever I work, I have to brace myself for “could you advertise these jobs?” or “could you share this blog from the CEO?” These are both pretty routine things and shouldn’t involve setting aside half a day to argue with people on social media, but invariably they do.

Charity spending, lobbying, expanding, any action that implies progression in a cause which I hope we all believe is right and necessary consistently provokes a dispiritingly naive backlash from a vocal few.

This issue angers me not because I resent the irony of spending valuable charity time engaging in futile conversation, but because I believe in the bigger picture – I want us to beat cancer, to end mental health discrimination, cruelty to children and people drinking unsafe water. I don’t believe money spent or high level conversations had in order to achieve these goals are unnecessary or wasted, I believe they are in fact the only way we’ll get to where we need to be within our western capitalist structure.

This framework is something we cannot change and I find it unbearably frustrating when successful charities are damningly compared to a group of five people working for free in a tiny room above a shop, they are not more worthy of your time or more committed to an issue you care about because they don’t spend money on achieving it. Instead, they are unknown, they can’t make any difference in the ways that count because nobody knows they’re there, they don’t have any political pull, they can’t afford to hire the best people for the job, they can’t get anybody to donate to them, fundraise for them, strategise for them or spread their message of change.

If we need any more convincing on the roadmap to making a difference, we need only to turn to the person next to us and ask them to name a charity. Did the person next to you say Macmillan, Cancer Research UK, Greenpeace, Oxfam, UNICEF or Amnesty International? How many named Green Light, a tiny Cornish charity working with autistic children whose website is impossible to find because they’ve decided not to invest in a good enough web manger who knows how to address that?

Success costs money and it’s not money that’s wasted, the successful charities are the only ones who are changing the world. Everybody who works in the sector could earn more outside of it, but we’re here because we want the world to be a better place. I don’t feel my salary is profligate, I’m a manager at a big UK charity and I share a one bedroom flat with my partner and my cat. We’d like to own a house one day and maybe upgrade the cat to a baby, these are ordinary things but they feel very out of reach for us. And yet I have no interest in offering my skills to the private sector because I believe that what I’m doing and what I’m part of is making a difference to people’s lives. As long as that remains our motivation to keep growing and reaching then that’s exactly what we should do.