Jeff Camden

As Alberta's economy sizzles and charitable giving increases, disparity continues to widen between those who have and those who don't

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.”   
— Dom Helder Camara

“There is no compassion to be found in promoting and perpetuating a culture of dependency.”   
— Calgary Herald editorial, November 30, 2007

Two years ago, a local business group launched an ad campaign portraying panhandlers as irresponsible addicts. “Your generosity is killing me,” blared the Calgary Downtown Association (CDA) ads, which depicted people shooting up with drugs bought with quarters and dimes given by passersby. The CDA encouraged people to donate to social agencies in the city instead of giving to panhandlers. “No one should feel guilty about working hard for their money and not wanting to give it away,” said the CDA, adding “there is no need for anyone to go without, unless it is by addiction or by choice.”

The CDA said its campaign allowed people to be “part of the solution, not part of the problem.” It also helped people feel good about giving to charity while avoiding the discomfort of directly responding to people in need. The CDA even provided a script Calgarians could use to excuse themselves when walking by panhandlers: “Acknowledge the person. Politely say ‘I gave at the office’ or ‘I already gave.’ Then, continue on your way.”

Calgarians have “already given” a lot. Between 2005 and 2006, charitable giving in Alberta shot up by 15.5 per cent — the biggest jump nationwide, according to Statistics Canada. Albertans give almost $1.3 billion to charity each year. But while people dish out millions of dollars to charities — many of which are poverty-related — disparity is widening between those who have and those who don’t. Food bank use is on the rise, and the number of people without a place to live is increasing exponentially in Calgary and other Alberta cities, growing a multimillion-dollar poverty industry that would have been inconceivable even 25 years ago. Charities have swelled to fill the void left by government budget cuts and abandoned social programs.

Each December, organizations like homeless shelters and food banks put out calls for donations, and Calgarians eagerly respond with an outpouring of contributions. Yet at the same time, the systemic problems that perpetuate poverty mostly go unchallenged. It’s acceptable for a person to write a cheque, drop it in the mail and continue on his or her way.

IT FEELS SO GOOD

Diana Schwenk, The Mustard Seed shelter’s development officer, works in a second-floor office overlooking Centre Street directly south of the Calgary Tower. Outside, it’s –17 C with wind chill. In the coming weeks, it will likely drop below –30 C. “At wintertime and at Christmas, people are thinking of the poor and the homeless,” says Schwenk. “Nobody wants to think of somebody outside in this temperature.” The Seed takes in roughly a third of its annual budget in the month of December alone. “That’s when we see a lot of people helping out.”

The Seed, a Christian-based charity established in 1984, is not only a permanent institution in Calgary, but an expanding one. This winter, the Seed is partnering with the city to operate a temporary shelter in the Foothills Industrial Park because existing city shelters don’t have enough space. The Seed also plans on building a 28-storey affordable housing tower immediately north of its main building. Temporarily housing people that can’t find a place to stay is a growth industry.

About 85 per cent of the Seed’s revenue comes from individual, corporate and church donors. “We want to meet the needs of those in the inner city, but we want to involve the community in doing that,” says Schwenk. “It’s neat to think that maybe I can do something that makes a difference, that really feels like the Christmas spirit.”

The Seed sells itself to potential donors and volunteers by telling them they can “make a difference.” Other charities have similar campaigns that emphasize the feeling of accomplishment and reward a donor or volunteer will experience. “The focus is always on how good it makes you, the giver, feel,” says Darren Lund, an education professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on social justice. “It’s appealing to our selfish desires, which is quite ironic. You should be doing it because it’s the right thing to do… but the pitch is more about how good you’ll feel when you do it.”

Every organization that relies on donations is conscious of the warm feeling donors get when they hand over a cheque. “When people give to something that’s really important to them and they understand the fact they’re helping, they feel really good about making a gift,” says Scott Decksheimer, a fundraising consultant in Calgary. “I’ve had some people say, ‘I feel selfish when I make my charitable gifts, because it feels so good to me. It’s almost selfish that I give money away.’ Kind of an interesting perspective to have.” However, Decksheimer says charitable giving is about more than just a feeling. He says it’s an expression of the donor’s values. “It’s just a means for people to connect at a deeper level with the values that they hold that are important to them,” he says.

Kim Kadatz, a professional fundraiser who’s worked for the United Way, the Mount Royal College Foundation and the University of Calgary, agrees donors aren’t only looking for a sentimental feeling. Social change, she says, is also on many donors’ minds — “especially when they’re giving larger contributions” to poverty-related charities. “They care about issues,” she says. “[They ask] ‘What is happening in poverty in this city? Are we just adding more accommodations, or are we getting these people back to work?’ So they become involved in a different level of discussion. It’s exciting.”

At the Mustard Seed, I ask Schwenk if people there talk much about social justice, which is defined by the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as “the notion that society should be organized in a way that allows equal opportunity for all its members.” “I think we do,” she says. “I don’t know if we use that terminology — ‘social justice’ — but we speak in terms of basic rights…. From a humanitarian standpoint and from our faith background as well, we believe that everybody deserves certain basic things.”

The Seed, however, doesn’t actively advocate for better social policies from government. “It’s not all the government. It’s not all the corporations. It’s not all the charity. It’s all of us together,” Schwenk says. She points to Premier Ed Stelmach’s recently announced 10-year plan to end homelessness as proof of the provincial government’s efforts to improve people’s living situations. “We see a real effort from government and other agencies to come together and come up with a solution.”

A HISTORICAL ANOMALY

When Baldwin Reichwein looks at today’s packed shelters and food banks, he sees a historical anomaly. “The role that charity is assuming is, I think, unique,” says Reichwein, 73, a retired Edmonton social policy researcher. “I don’t think we have seen anything quite like it in modern society.”

Prior to the 1990s, Alberta had reasonably strong social programs — especially in the late 1960s, when provincial social programs coupled with the now-abandoned federal Canada Assistance Plan ensured that programs were well funded. “Alberta, for a period of time, was viewed as the leader in social policies,” says Reichwein. “And that was with a very conservative [Social Credit] government.” Food banks didn’t even exist in Alberta, or any other place in Canada.

In 1981, the country’s first food bank opened in Edmonton. Food banks weren’t intended to replace or supplement government programs, Reichwein says, and they were originally pitched as a way for surplus food to be taken out of the market and used productively. “If they were not to compete with the normalized system, how come they have become the norm?” he says. “There’s a whole generation that’s grown up that’s never seen anything else but food banks.”

In 1993, the Klein government re-jigged provincial social programs, slashing funding to welfare and other benefits. That funding has never been restored, even in boom time. Also in the 1990s, the federal Liberals made deep cuts of their own, in keeping with a global trend toward stronger free-market policies and a diminished government role in social services. “We’re not just talking about Alberta or Canada in isolation,” says Reichwein. “We’re talking about western countries. It took quite some time to develop a system of social justice and social security programs. They’ve never been perfect. But I think what we’ve done in the last 15 years — they were thrown out of balance.”

When people fall through the cracks that were ripped wide open in the 1990s, charities are expected to catch them. But because there are hundreds of organizations with different and sometimes conflicting philosophies, their effectiveness is limited and fragmented. "Its goal is not to effect any lasting change,” says Lund. “The charity model allows us to leave all of our assumptions in place. It allows the status quo to continue, however it works. It actually reinforces the idea of those who have and those who don’t, and it doesn’t do anything to kind of look at the questions of why certain people seem either economically or socially disadvantaged.”

FROM CHARITY TO JUSTICE

The question of who really benefits from charity is a discomforting one — so much so that it’s seldom discussed in Calgary. Mainstream news organizations tend to throw support behind charitable causes in December instead of asking troubling questions about charity’s inflated role in society. Yet these questions are hardly new. “It has unfortunately been all too easy in the past for the man who is well fed to entertain the most laudable sentiments of love for his neighbour, while ignoring the fact that his brother is struggling to solve insoluble and tragic problems,” wrote Thomas Merton, the American peace activist monk who died in 1968. “Mere almsgiving is no longer adequate, especially if it is only a gesture which seems to dispense from all further and more efficacious social action…. The individual gesture, however commendable, will no longer suffice.”

Merton suggested that a truly loving response to human suffering should be “expanded and universalized on the same scale as the human problem that is to be met.” While this idea is more complex and undoubtedly harder to put into practise than simple acts of charity that can quickly ease one’s conscience, some local groups toil away at it in relative obscurity. The Arusha Centre, for example, educates people on social justice by holding public events like documentary screenings. It also partners with a local group that’s pushing for more affordable housing in Calgary. Arusha says it works towards “elimination of the root causes of oppression and exploitation both in society's structures and in social interactions” both globally and locally. “I actually don’t believe in food banks and housing the poor in warehouse situations,” says Sharon Stevens of Arusha — itself a registered charity. “I’d rather see money toward preventative measures.”

Many of these preventative measures involve rebuilding what has been dismantled because of free-market ideology. The federal government, for example, had an internationally renowned social housing program from 1973 through the 1980s. That program no longer exists. “We’ve seen evidence upon evidence that with proper programs, you can prevent poverty,” says Reichwein. “You can get people back to work. You can help them make a step up to become employable.” Predictions that the market would take care of everyone’s housing turned out to be miserably wrong — especially in Calgary — and the United Nations now calls Canada’s housing situation a “national emergency.”

Hence the booming shelters, with their long lineups of people with no other place to go — and, of course, donors and volunteers keen on making a difference. There’s no shortage of people in either group, and while every person I interviewed for this story agreed strongly that charitable giving is a positive thing, most said it’s not enough. “Offering money or gifts is a generous thing to do, but it doesn’t do the necessary work of really analyzing the different layers of the problem that you think you’re addressing,” says Lund. “There’s nothing wrong with giving gifts. That’s an absolutely good thing. But if you want to make lasting change, we have to look beyond that, and also ask ourselves: why do we do it?”