A new documentary titled Uncharitable could fundamentally change what businesses do to help make the world a better place.
Uncharitable comes at a time when solving social problems has never been more important. Young people around the world are playing an important role in advocating for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) including at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in New York today. There’s also been a steady increase in businesses, such as social enterprises and B Corps, that exist to make a profit and contribute to social change. In spite of these positive developments, the results aren’t nearly good enough. The polarized political context has created two sides to important issues such as climate change, abortion, and LGBTQ2I rights, the divide between rich and poor has never been more extreme and achieving the SDGs by 2030 is unlikely.
Uncharitable is based on the book, Uncharitable, by Dan Pallotta, and a 2013 TED Talk called The way we think about charity is dead wrong that has had almost 5.5 million views and continues to be viewed over 1,000 times a day. The movie, produced and directed by Stephen Gyllenhall, shows how the ability of charities to solve social problems is being undermined by the idea that organizations in this sector should have a supersized impact but be run on a shoestring budget.
I had a chance to speak with Dan about why charitable organizations are being held back from solving social problems and how corporations can contribute to making a world that works for everyone.
For business people who haven’t read your books or seen the TED Talk, what does it mean to be “uncharitable”?
We dream about a world where there isn’t persistent homelessness, there isn’t breast cancer anymore and we’re solving problems like these on a big scale. But non-profit organizations that can help solve these problems are kept in an economic prison by donors who believe that low overhead and low salaries are correlated to helping people when in fact, the opposite is true. To make a world that works for everyone, charitable organizations need people who have incredible, almost magical skills. Instead, non-profits have their hands tied behind their backs by donors who believe these organizations should only hire people who can afford the salary they are offering instead of hiring people based on what they can do to solve social problems.
Millions of people have watched your TED Talk and read your book, but non-profit organizations are still being targeted for misusing the contributions of donors. Why is this still a problem?
Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I think change takes a lot of repetition in a world where people are inundated with information. What encourages me is that I can give a talk at a college or a conference to people who don’t know who I am or know much about charity. An hour later, they’re coming up to me and saying, I never thought about it this way and I’m going to change the way that I think about my giving. Six weeks after my TED Talk, the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, GuideStar and Charity Navigator issued a joint press release saying donors should stop asking about overhead and start asking about impact.
What’s your view of the role of corporations in helping to solve problems?
Businesses can help us create a world that works for almost everybody. For example, look at what the refrigerated boxcar did to eliminate foodborne illness and dramatically reduce death. Or how Apple watches can measure blood oxygen or detect a fall. But business can only address issues for which it can develop a market and there’s no money market for an elderly person who just needs love from a social worker. If you want a world that works for everyone then the non-profit sector is critical to closing the gap. I think we all want those problems fully addressed, and only the non-profit sector can make sure that happens. But philanthropy needs to be amplified by the tools of capitalism and marketing on a big scale. So that you go into Times Square, and it feels like half social causes and half watches and furs. Or you watch the Super Bowl, and it’s 70% incredible ads about generosity and giving, and the wonderful organizations that are doing amazing things.
What’s your advice to business leaders about how their companies can benefit from helping to solve massive social problems?
Businesses can get a lot of bang for the buck for helping to solve social problems but they need to support charities differently. The problem is that the charitable departments in companies don’t deliver enough business or social value. We need more corporate leaders who think as big as Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook. For example, when we launched the three-day breast cancer walk, we needed $350,000 in risk capital to underwrite the negative cash flow in the first year. So we asked Avon for a $350,000 loan to create an event at that scale. We said If you finance the debt, you’ll get the money back out of the net proceeds, and we’ll give you title billing. They agreed and the event netted $4 million. Then they gave us $2 million to launch the event in four cities and we netted $25 million. That’s just one way that corporations could think innovatively about how to use capital to support change on a massive scale. The best thing corporations can do for society is to dream boldly and start thinking about charity in big terms where the company and the cause can both win in big ways.
What’s your view of how corporations should assess their investments in making the world a better place?
There’s a whole industry about measurement and evaluation and it’s a fraud. I think businesses should be asking about intention instead of results because solving social problems takes a long time. There are only three questions to ask a non-profit organization. What are your goals? Charities that don’t have goals that can be articulated throughout the organization don’t deserve funding. What progress are you making toward those goals? Groups that aren’t moving the needle aren’t doing good enough work. And how do you improve? I think there should be a lot more common sense instead of getting so cerebral about metrics and data. How did we measure the impact of the Apollo program? We said we were going to land on the moon by 1969 and we did it. Nobody would’ve built Disneyland based on the available data, there was no data about whether people would travel to California and pay that kind of money. We need to plant flags on social issues such as ending child hunger.
What’s your dream about how this new documentary will contribute to social change?
The TED Talk was great, the books have been great, but I felt like we needed a movie to persuade more people. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth put global warming on the map and we want this documentary to create a similar movement. There’s a QR code at the end of Uncharitable so people can help buy tickets for nonprofits and educational institutions to see the movie. If more people can see that It’s not a waste of money to pay people well and spend on overhead in the social change space, we’ll get faster to what we want, a world that works for everyone.
Uncharitable is opening in theaters beginning September 22.
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