A Case for Inaction: The Pitfalls of Good Intentions and the “Do Good” Industry

Prefete Duffaut, Navity. Via Haitian Art Society

In a world where action is touted as virtuous and where idleness is considered the devil’s playground, it may seem counterproductive to do nothing, but sometimes it’s the best option. No action is better than uninformed action. Because, while good intentions may be a motivation for helping others, they cannot exist as the sole engine for “doing good”.

It’s Ok Not to Act

There was a girl-boss moment in recent history, a moment where everyone had a summit or a conference or a convocation; personal development was on a quick ascent and thus the capitalization of such—events served as an opportunity to put subject matter experts on a stage and share ambiguous advice that would help the attendees, whether they paid for the event or not, feel as though they’ve walked away with unparalleled inspiration.

I loved it. 

As a hoarder of information, I went to all of them. I was there for the postcard sayings that meant everything and nothing all at once. “Keep going” was a reminder I sometimes needed, but it was often tone-deaf. I knew I had the intellect, the work ethic, and the other oft-touted characteristics society tells you are the sole arbiter of one’s success. They may or may not have talked about confounding variables like gender or race, but when they did, it was preachy. Substantive ways to address these barriers to access were never followed. 

Nevertheless, I took what I needed and left the rest.

Until the rest became harmful. 

I don’t remember which one it was, but I recall watching it comfortably from my bed. A speaker’s closing words were to the effect that everyone should do something to help others, because it was going to make a positive difference ultimately. 

“What’s the worst that can happen?” she said.

I genuinely wanted to scream through my laptop, “No!” I was listening almost passively up until that moment, and the echo of her, best case scenario, naivete or, worst case scenario, arrogance, still rings in my ears. It disrupted the illusion that minorities in power would be the salvation. I heard, Do what you want and walk away from the consequences. At least you can say you tried. There was magic in the girl-boss movement. Before the obvious contradictions were analyzed, this panel-led, privilege-filled era made itself clear to me: it might be doing more harm than good.

Going into someone’s community or country and using the population as an experiment under the guise of wanting to help is destructive. Acting first and thinking later is an act of laziness, not love. And claiming good intentions as the only justification for action is a convenient way to evade responsibility.

The Problem of Good Intentions 

Teach for America was founded in 1990, one year after the founder proposed the idea in her Princeton thesis. Its goal is to use teaching as a means to address underachievement in America. They position inexperienced teachers as saviors and place them in the highest-need schools for a two-year period. With no actual teaching experience, their desire to do good is supposed to be enough to address long-standing socioeconomic, racist, and additional systemic issues that caused the underachievement in the first place. In addition to the myriad systemic problems it creates, Teach for America continues to contribute to the erosion of education. Their intention was to do good. 

EdReports, a non-profit, was created to offer educator-led reviews of math, science, and reading curricula. Their reports were used exclusively to determine if literacy programs would be adopted in different states. The problem? Their process for determining effective reading programs was flawed, and programs that had significant growth in literacy were rejected from being on their list. Despite the weight with which their scores are used, EdReports doled out good reports to ineffective programs and bad reports to programs that had evidence of effectiveness. Their intention was to help.

Reading First, a cornerstone of President George Bush’s No Child Left Behind agenda, had a goal of finding research-based evidence to support struggling students by providing them with the best possible resources. Reading First officials and consultants were authors of reading programs, and while they delivered presentations to state officials, they simultaneously promoted their own programs. Their PowerPoints had examples of their own intellectual property. States, feeling pressured to agree or lose federal funding, ultimately chose what they were coerced into. It, in Bob Slavin’s words, was “a giant giveaway to publishers who were making millions of dollars on programs that hadn’t been tested or proven.” Congress killed the funding. Their intention was to effect change.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say. The consequences of one’s actions should be paramount to intended outcomes. Bleeding hearts leave behind a mess, a trail of one’s insides whose sole purpose is to counterintuitively play to the ego of the now deflated heart. Money gets spent. Actual people are harmed. And the divides get bigger.

The Problem is Bigger than Governments and Nonprofits

My family is from Haiti. In many circles, Haiti is nicknamed an NGO Republic. Its close ties to the development of the United States and its own corruption have put it in the position, time and time again, to require outside help–philanthropies that purport to do good, but whose skill sets seldom foot the bill and whose failures are then laid on the population itself. 

Post-earthquake Haiti saw two vastly different worlds in which affected persons were not included in the solution. The United Nations set up shop, excluded civil society leaders, and rendered general “do good” practices useless.

I got to speak with Kathie Klarreich, an author, researcher, and recipient of a Knight International Journalism Fellowship to train journalists in Haiti. She spent significant time investigating Haiti post-earthquake, and some of her findings delve into the duplicitous nature of doing good. 

“A lot of these parallel organizations were set up because they thought they could do it better. They created parallel organizations without having any cultural sensitivity.” She notes the amount of money spent on chauffeurs, hotels, and food. She questions, with authority, if they consulted the people on the ground at all. “There’s a whole bunch of steps to be useful.” I feel confident in completing her thought, “Yet, they weren’t taken.” Instead, an opportunity to live lavishly on the backs of Haitians continued.

Yet human history is everyone’s history. After the 2010 earthquake, I also felt compelled to do something. I saw my family’s country crumbling on an endless loop of media coverage. I still had relatives there. That year, I cried in a legal internship interview when they asked me if my family was affected. I was distraught. And, like a lot of the world, I wanted to help. My feelings led the charge. I thought the basic understanding of helping others was obvious. 

Moved by pain, we want to help—yet we must center the pain of others

Those feelings led to an international trip. I was part of the Caribbean Student Association and engaged with a budget uncommon for most 20-somethings. We usually hosted a Carnival event, but that year the administration shut it down. I proposed an altruistic trip, and that August, a number of Binghamton University students and I traveled to Saint Marc to help. We landscaped, led a day camp for neighborhood children, and visited an orphanage. When we returned to the United States, we made sure to donate a four-figure number. 

The trip even inspired one of the attendees to start another student organization: 20K for Haiti. During the first fundraiser, a fight broke out. The organization never reached its goal of $20,000; the club where the fight broke out held onto the funds. The money never made it to Haiti. 

I wish it had dawned on me that I wasn’t a landscaper. I wasn’t a caretaker, and our day camp was something fun for the local children, but it wasn’t going to be a mainstay in their lives. I was an extra body eager for action in situ, but I could have helped from Brooklyn. It would have been helpful to identify stores in Haiti that sold the products that we purchased in the United States and brought to Haiti. It would have been helpful to identify disaster relief professionals who worked in Haiti and lived in Haiti. It would have made more sense to create Haiti-centered solutions.

One of the perspectives Klarreich left me with was, “We live forward and understand life backward.” Hindsight allows us a more comprehensive view of our actions and their consequences. 

As Founder and Executive Director of Exchange for Change, a non-profit that offers writing classes for South Florida correctional institutions, Klarreich has one major approach: “Everything I do, I talk to my students before I do it. ‘Is this going to be useful for you?’”

The actions that follow good intentions need to be informed and tested for outcomes. They should include the population the solution purports to serve. One might mean well and be attracted to the lure of helping others, but uninformed and hasty choices lead to harmful or unintended consequences.

Sending barrels with clothing and food “back home” can cause capacity issues. Remittances are not a substitute for stable economies. Working with religious organizations that may ostracize those who don’t follow their religion is not Godly. And leaning on powerhouse aid organizations to do the work that governments should be doing isn’t a long-term strategy. 

In response to the concept of doing nothing, Klarreich states emphatically, “Do your homework. You’re not going into a vacuum.”

And, even in doing one’s homework–talking to the people whose lives will be most impacted by your good intentions, studying previous pitfalls, understanding historical context–there are still no guarantees. “It’s a delicate question because it’s not until later that you understand, so anything you do moving forward is going to be different than what you did in the past. Would you get to that same place if you hadn’t done that?” said Klarreich.

Myriad forces have interacted to create the world we currently live in. Oppression seems more prevalent than fairness. The approach of considering doing nothing seems crass. Though it doesn’t suggest ignorance of others’ plights. It doesn’t suggest contributing to another’s plight either. It’s important to be educated, to be aware of the world we participate in. But, similar to when there’s a loud room of people, the person who shouts “be quiet” isn’t helping. They’re adding to the noise. Sometimes it’s ok to be quiet so that the room can ultimately be… quiet.